At Church with Larkin

Once I am sure there's nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

Another church: matting, seats, and stone,

And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut

For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff

Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;

And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,

Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off

My cycle-clips in awkward reverence...

So begins Philip Larkin’s “Church Going,” unquestionably my favorite of all his poems. No matter how often I read it, no matter what my state of mind, I never cease to be amazed by the wryness and precision of the language, and by the speaker’s bumbling discomfort as an atheist in the House of God.  “I step inside, letting the door thud shut,”  “…some brass and stuff/Up at the holy end..”, “…a tense, musty, unignorable silence,/Brewed God knows how long…”  Such brilliant, witty stuff.

As a skeptic I have always felt this way in churches, especially those in Europe, at once repelled by their somber pomp (by the nagging inadequacy it makes me feel) and struck dumb by their artifactual beauty, these intimations of Paradise in wood and stone and glass.  It is the sort of attraction-repulsion I feel standing at the edge of a cliff.   
            

Here then is the poem in its entirety.  Enjoy.    
                                                                 

Church Going

Once I am sure there's nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

Another church: matting, seats, and stone,

And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut

For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff

Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;

And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,

Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off

My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.

From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -

Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.

Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few

Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce

'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.

The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door

I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,

Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,

And always end much at a loss like this,

Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,

When churches will fall completely out of use

What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep

A few cathedrals chronically on show,

Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,

And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.

Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come

To make their children touch a particular stone;

Pick simples for a cancer; or on some

Advised night see walking a dead one?

Power of some sort will go on

In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;

But superstition, like belief, must die,

And what remains when disbelief has gone?

Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,

A purpose more obscure. I wonder who

Will be the last, the very last, to seek

This place for what it was; one of the crew

That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?

Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,

Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff

Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?

Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt

Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground

Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt

So long and equably what since is found

Only in separation - marriage, and birth,

And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built

This special shell? For, though I've no idea

What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

                                                       (1954)

Here—incomparable—is Larkin himself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp234p_fCM&feature=youtu.be

Philip Larkin was born in 1922 in Coventry, England. He attended St. John's College, Oxford. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945 and, though not particularly strong on its own, is notable insofar as certain passages foreshadow the unique sensibility and maturity that characterizes his later work. In 1946, Larkin discovered the poetry of Thomas Hardy and became a great admirer of his poetry, learning from Hardy how to make the commonplace and often dreary details of his life the basis for extremely tough, unsparing, and memorable poems. With his second volume of poetry, The Less Deceived (1955), Larkin became the preeminent poet of his generation, and a leading voice of what came to be called 'The Movement', a group of young English writers who rejected the prevailing fashion for neo-Romantic writing in the style of Yeats and Dylan Thomas. Like Hardy, Larkin focused on intense personal emotion but strictly avoided sentimentality or self-pity.

In 1964, he confirmed his reputation as a major poet with the publication of The Whitsun Weddings, and again in 1974 with High Windows: collections whose searing, often mocking, wit does not conceal the poet's dark vision and underlying obsession with universal themes of mortality, love, and solitude. Deeply anti-social, a great lover (and published critic) of American jazz, Larkin never married and lived an uneventful life as a librarian in the provincial city of Hull, where he died in 1985.*

*PoemHunter

Peter Adam Nash

“Minha Terra”: Ivo’s Brazil

Snakes’ Nest or A Tale Badly Told

But sometimes, it was as if the sea did not exist, and he lived among stones, in a nest of snakes.

“During a dictatorship, all narratives are poorly told…” writes Lêdo Ivo in reference to the rambling, unreliable narration of this short novel. Indeed, as University of New Mexico professor Jon Tolman explains in his helpful introduction, Snakes’ Nest is a set in Brazil in the 1940’s, during what was known as the “New State,” a semi-fascist experiment in caudillismo, a cult of personality around the charismatic leader, Getúlio Vargas, that lasted from 1930-1945.  At heart an allegory of good and evil, this “sunny nightmare” rises like a miasma from the streets of Maceió—from the bars and brothels and sugar depots that distinguish this seedy port city in  northeastern Brazil that even today is renowned for its rampant corruption and violence.  As described in a 2011 article in The Economist, “The road from Maceió, the capital of Alagoas state, to its airport passes luxury-car showrooms and shops selling outsize Jacuzzis. In the central reservation, indigent families live under plastic sheeting. Even by the standards of Brazil's north-east, Alagoas is scarred by poverty and extreme inequality. With 107 murders per 100,000 people, Maceió is also the most violent state capital in Brazil, just as, with 60 murders per 100,000, Alagoas is the country's most violent state. It is a place of sugar and cattle, where the sugarcane cutters settle scores with fists and knives and the well-connected escape punishment by using contract killers instead.”  

It is this latter world that serves as the setting for this collection of powerfully rendered vignettes about the workaday men and women of Maceió—the lawyers, gangsters, sailors, poets, prostitutes, and nuns—a story, a novel (though Ivo denied it the name) in which the narration flits like a hummingbird from character to character, from place to place, sipping here, drinking there, darting back and forth in time as if drunk on the nectar it finds. In an age when more and more American writers are forced by the market to answer to the same dull master, that is, plot over character, murder and mystery over language and symbol and theme, this novel comes as a positive relief. 

Ivo’s heterodox approach to storytelling, to fiction, should come as no surprise to anyone who knows of him, for he was a poet, first and foremost, a writer who flirted with Modernism before turning his back on it to embrace more classical, more traditional forms. One feels the poetry in his language and rhythms, in the weight and balance of his words, yet there is nothing fussy or self-conscious about his style. Even in English his phrasing has the blunt simplicity, the force and gravitas, of prophesy or scripture, as in this passage describing the moments—the minutes, the seconds—before one of his characters, a manager of a local airline agency, blows out his brains:

"It was raining—it was a rain of words.  The wind blew—it was a wind of words.  The world wasn’t made of skies, clouds, cities, sugarcane mills, ports, dams, yards, old cars, streets, power plants, houses, men.  It was made only and exclusively of words—and the people spoke in words. Even the paving stones of Maceió were made of words.  Alexandre Viana ate words, slept words, worked words.  And he felt more alone than ever, as if the very weapon that sketched itself before his eyes would turn into a word."

While Snakes’ Nest is set in the Maceió of Ivo’s childhood, what he calls “minha terra” or “my land,” it is important to note that the period in which the novel was written, that is, the early 1970’s, was actually a more politically repressive time for Brazilian artists and writers than that of the quasi-fascist caudillismo of Getúlio Vargas, evidence enough that such authoritarianism is perfectly at home in the rich Brazilian soil. 

What makes this significant, what makes it  especially poignant to me, is that I have only just now finished reading the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s book, Brazil: A Land of the Future, a gushing, 250 page hymn to the nation that had given him home and sanctuary as a Jew in flight from Hitler’s Europe. The picture he paints of early 1940’s Brazil and its future in the world is just short of utopian, an incredible feat, given Vargas’ staunchly corporatist, right-wing, anti-Marxist politics, a tyranny over thought and expression that included censorship and the harassment, torture, and execution of leftists.  Somehow, for all of Zweig’s perspicacity as a writer and exile, he had failed to see the forest for the trees. Blinded to the rise of fascism there, in Brazil (the selfsame period described by Ivo’s novel) by his desperate need to keep faith with the human race, to believe in the possibility of a paradise on earth, Zweig ends his introduction to this Panglossian tribute by writing: “For that reason, one of our best hopes for a future civilizing and pacification of a world that has been desolated by hate and madness is based upon the existence of Brazil.”  That Brazil was indeed a sort of paradise to Zweig is clear; what is also clear—a fact perhaps only acknowledged by Zweig himself on the eve of his suicide in 1942—is that, by the time he’d finished writing Brazil: A Land of the Future, the Serpent was already in. 

Here, to conclude, is one of Ivo’s better known poems:

The Sound of the Sea

Sunday afternoon, I return to the old Maceió cemetery
where my dead never stop dying
their consumptive and cancerous deaths
that penetrate the ebb tide stench and constellations
with coughs, groans, imprecations
and their dark mucus
and in silence I summon them to return to this life
where from childhood on they slowly lived
with the bitterness of long days fixed to their monotonous existence
and the fear of dying of those who witness the close of day
when, after rain, the ants are scattered
across the maternal ground of Alagoas and can no longer fly.
I say to my dead: Arise, come back to this unfinished day
that has need of you, of your persistent cough and your tired gestures
and your footsteps on Maceió’s crooked lanes. Return to those insipid dreams
and windows opening on to suffocating heat.

On Sunday afternoon, among mausoleums
that seem suspended by the wind
in the bluish air,
the silence of the dead tells me they won’t come back.
No use calling them. From the place where they are now, there’s no return.
Just names carved in stone. Just names. And the sound of the sea.

© Translation: 2010, Alexis Levitin

Lêdo Ivo (1924-2012) was a Brazilian journalist, poet, novelist, and essayist who was awarded the prestigious Brazilian Walpmap Prize in 1973.  Born in Maceió, Alagoas, Brazil, the son of Floriano and Euridice Placido de Araujo Ivo, he later married Maria Leda Sarmento de Medeiros and fathered three children.  Ivo’s first volume of poems — As Imaginações — granted him national recognition in 1944. His other works of include Ode and Elegy, Ode to Twilight, Birth of the Sonnet, Language, and The Common Soldier.  In addition to Snakes’ Nest, he write three other novels: Alliances, The Road without Adventure, and The Death of Brazil.  Snakes’ Nest is published by New Directions Books. 

Peter Adam Nash

The Art of Interpretation: “Lu zhai” or “Deer Park” by Wang Wei

19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei

by Eliot Weinberger & Octavio Paz

It was my wife, Annie, who introduced me to Eliot Weinberger through his superb collection of essays, Works on Paper—short, astute reflections on subjects ranging from India to Mateo Ricci to The Bomb.  It was also my wife who introduced me to the non-fiction of Octavio Paz, most notably his collection of essays, The Labyrinth of Solitude (with its brilliant disquisition on the extraordinarily versatile Spanish verb chingar) and his Convergences: Essay on Art and Literature.  It was therefore only natural that she, Annie, was the one to introduce me to a book that combined the strengths of both these men—as writers, translators, and critics—a work called 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei that focuses on the translation history of a single Chinese poem.

The poem ‘Lu zhai’ or ‘Deer Park’ by the wealthy Tang Dynasty Buddhist painter, calligrapher, and poet Wang Wei is one of the world’s most famous quatrains, taken from a series of twenty poems inspired by various sites along the Wang River in the Shanxi province of northeastern China. The poem, written as part of a massive horizontal landscape scroll (a genre Wei himself invented), and some 1200 years old, is now one of the most widely translated poems from the Chinese classical tradition.  It is generally believed that the title ‘Lu zhai’ is an allusion to the Deer Park in Sarnath, the site of the famous Bodhi Tree beneath which the Gautama Buddha preached his first sermon.

Everyone knows Wallace Steven’s poem “Thirteen Way of Looking at a Blackbird”.  Now consider 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, an attractively slim volume in which essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger and Mexican Nobel Laureate poet and essayist Octavio Paz have selected and critiqued a sampling—in English, Spanish, and French—of some of the most outstanding translations of this subtle, sophisticated, notoriously difficult poem.  As Weinberger remarks in his short introduction to the collection to emphasize the scale of this challenge, “Chinese prosody is largely concerned with the number of characters per line and the arrangement of tones—both of which are untranslatable.” Paz as well, in reflecting upon his own struggles to render the poem, notes: “The translation of this poem is particularly difficult, for the poem carries to an extreme the characteristics of Chinese poetry: universality, impersonality, absence of time, absence of subject.” 

Starting with W. J. B. Fletcher’s 1919 ‘The Form of the Deer’ and ending with Gary Snyder’s untitled version from 1978, this collection is extraordinary, not only for its focus on the translation of a single poem over time, with all the changes in poetic sensibility that that entails, but for Weinberger’s and Paz’s engaging, often Talmudic remarks regarding the subtleties of Chinese poetry, the strengths and weaknesses of the various renditions, and the art of translation in general, an art the particulars of which are certain to interest any student of language. While praising all of the translations by including them in the collection, the editors criticize some as attempts to “improve” upon the original, others as “poetic”(meaning Westernized, ironic), at least one as inaccurate, and still another as a typical example of Chinoiserie.   For Weinberger there are two types of translators at work in this collection: those who are scholars and read Chinese and those who are poets and don’t.  To his mind, each type has its strengths—the scholars their grasp of classical Chinese, the poets their mastery of English prosody and verse.  It is this combination that really gives life to these different, if consistently  illuminating renditions.

Surely one of the most engaging features of the book are the editors’ largely incidental reflections on the art of translation itself.  To Weinberger translation is nothing less than a spiritual exercise, and as such “…dependent on the dissolution of the translator’s ego: an absolute humility toward the text...” A good translator is but a conduit, a medium, through which the poem can speak. Of the essence of a poem, that part which survives translation, he insists, "The living matter functions somewhat like DNA, spinning out individual translations which are relatives, not clones, of the original. The relationship between original and translation is parent-child. And there are, inescapably, some translations that are overly attached to their originals, and others that are constantly rebelling.”  This is exactly what makes this collection of translations—and the editors’ tussle with them—such a pleasure to read.

Here is a brief sampling:

                    The Form of the Deer

So lone seem the hills; there is no one in sight there.

     But whence is the echo of voices I hear?

The rays of the sunset pierce slanting the forest,

            And in their reflection green mosses appear.

                                               - W.J.B. Fletcher, 1919

                           La Forêt

Dans la montagne tout est solitaire,

On entend de bien loin l'écho des voix humaines,

Le soleil qui pénètre au fond de la forêt

Reflete son éclat sur la mousee vert.

                                 -G. Margoulies, 1948

              Deer Forest Hermitage
Through the deep woods, the slanting sunlight
Casts motley patterns on the jade-green mosses.
No glimpse of man in this lonely mountain,
Yet faint voices drift on the air.
                             -Chang Yin-nan & Lewis C. Walmsley, 1958

         Deep in the Mountain Wilderness

Deep in the mountain wilderness

where nobody ever comes

Only once in a great while

Something like the sound of a far off voice.

The low rays of the sun

Slip through the dark forest,

And gleam again on the shadowy moss.

                               -Kenneth Rexroth, 1970

             En la Ermita del Parque de los Venados 

No se ve gente en este monte.

Sólo se oyen, lejos, voces.

Por hos ramajes lasluz rompe.

Tendida entre las yerba brilla verde.

                           -Octavio Paz, 1974

Empty mountains:

            no one to be seen.

Yet—hear—

            human sounds and echoes.

Returning sunlight

            enters the dark woods;

Again shining

            on the green moss, above.

                              -Gary Snyder, 1978

Eliot Weinberger was born in New York City in 1949.  He is the primary translator of Octavio Paz into English. His anthology American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders (1993) was a bestseller in Mexico, and his edition of Jorge Luis Borges's Selected Non-Fictions (1999) received the National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism. In 1992, he was given PEN's first Gregory Kolovakos Award for his work in promoting Hispanic literature in the United States, and in 2000 he was the first American literary writer to be awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the government of Mexico.

Eliot Weinberger's publications include the collection of essays Karmic Traces: 1993-1999 and a translation of Bei Dao's Unlock (with Iona Man-Cheong), both published by New Directions in 2000. He is the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry (2003).*

Octavio Paz.  Poet, essayist. Born on March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico. Paz was exposed to literature at an early age thanks to his grandfather's library. The son and grandson of political journalists, he followed the family tradition and became a writer, publishing his first volume of poetry, Luna silvestre, in 1933. Paz was also a skilled editor and helped found a literary magazine called Taller in 1938. He entered the diplomatic service in 1945 and was later appointed the Mexican ambassador to India, a position he held from 1962 to 1968. Paz resigned in protest over the Mexican government's handling of student demonstrations during the Olympic Games.
Adept at both poetry and prose, Paz moved back and forth between the two genres throughout his career. Poetry, such as Piedra de sol (1957), and critical and analytical works, such as El Laberinto de la soledad (1950) cemented his reputation as a master of language and a keen intellect. He produced more than 30 books and poetry collections in his lifetime. Paz received numerous awards for his work, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. He died on April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico.

* Bio.com

19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei is published by Asphodel Press 

www.asphodelpress.com/

Peter Adam Nash

Paz in India: An Inescapable Attraction

“The dream of Brahma, what we call reality, is a mirage, a nightmare. To wake is to discover the unreality of the world.”   Octavio Paz

The great Mexican poet and Nobel laureate, Octavio Paz, first arrived in India in late 1951 as a minor functionary in Mexico’s first diplomatic legation to the newly independent state.  He stayed six months.  It was not until 1962 that he returned, this time as a world-renowned poet and Mexican ambassador. He was to remain there, in India, for more than six years, travelling the length and breadth of the country, and engrossing himself in the study of Indian philosophy religion, culture, and art, a highly influential period of his life described by Paz himself as: “After being born, the most important thing that has happened to me.”

 

 “When he first went there,” writes Raleigh Trevelyan about Paz, in his 1997 review of A Tale of Two Gardens, “like so many newcomers, he had been overwhelmed and bewildered by the country's vastness and complexity; he had felt ‘dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea,’ but also an ‘inescapable attraction.’” Anyone who has ever travelled to India is sure to recognize these sensations. Paz himself, in his book In Light of India, describes his first day in India, in Bombay (now Mumbai):   

I put my things in the closet, bathed quickly, and put on a white shirt. I ran down the stairs and plunged into the streets. There, awaiting me, was an unimagined reality:

waves of heat; huge grey and red buildings, a Victorian
London growing among palm trees and banyans like a
recurrent nightmare, leprous walls, wide and beautiful
avenues, huge unfamiliar trees, stinking alleyways,

torrents of cars, people coming and going, skeletal
cows with no owners, beggars, creaking carts drawn by
enervated oxen, rivers of bicycles,

a survivor of the British Raj, in a meticulous and
threadbare white suit, with a black umbrella,

another beggar, four half-naked would-be saints
daubed with paint, red betel stains on the sidewalk,

horn battles between a taxi and a dusty bus, more
bicycles, more cows, another half-naked saint,

turning the corner, the apparition of a girl like a
half-opened flower,

gusts of stench, decomposing matter, whiffs of pure
and fresh perfumes,

stalls selling coconuts and slices of pineapple, ragged
vagrants with no job and no luck, a gang of adolescents
like an escaping herd of deer,

women in red, blue, yellow, deliriously colored saris,
some solar, some nocturnal, dark-haired women with
bracelets on their ankles and sandals made not for the
burning asphalt but for fields,

public gardens overwhelmed by the heat, monkeys in the
cornices of the buildings, shit and jasmine, homeless boys,

a banyan, image of the rain as the cactus is the
emblem of aridity, and, leaning against a wall, a stone
daubed with red paint, at its feet a few faded flowers: the
silhouette of the monkey god,

the laughter of a young girl, slender as a lily stalk, a
leper sitting under the statue of an eminent Parsi,

in the doorway of a shack, watching everyone with
indifference, an old man with a noble face,

a magnificent eucalyptus in the desolation of a garbage
dump, an enormous billboard in an empty lot with a
picture of a movie star: full moon over the sultan's terrace,

more decrepit walls, whitewashed walls covered with
political slogans written in red and black letters I
couldn't read,

the gold and black grillwork of a luxurious villa with
a contemptuous inscription: EASY MONEY; more grilles
even more luxurious, which allowed a glimpse of an
exuberant garden; on the door, an inscription in gold
on the black marble,

in the violently blue sky, in zigzags or in circles, the
flights of seagulls or vultures, crows, crows, crows...

The unreality of what Paz saw inspired him, in 1952, to write what was to be the first poem of this marvelous collection, a lengthy, sensual record of his experience in the teeming holy city of Muttra or Mathura, the birthplace of the god Krishna, as well as a meditation on the way the architecture of the past still haunts the present.  Comprised largely of short poems, most inspired by the towns, tombs, and temples to which he traveled, A Tale of Two Gardens includes Paz’s own translation of ten epigrams from the Sanskrit and ends with the long and beautiful poem from which the collection itself draws its name. 

After a visit to a little mohalla in Delhi, known today as Dargah Hazrat Nizamuddin, Paz wrote:

The Tomb of Amir Khusru

Trees heavy with birds hold

the afternoon up with their hands.

Arches and patios. A tank of water,

poison green, between red walls.

A corridor leads to the sanctuary:

beggars, flowers, leprosy, marble.

Tombs, two names, their stories:

Nizam Uddin, the wandering theologian,

Amir Khusru, the parrot’s tongue.

The saint and the poet.  A grim

star spouts from a cupola.

Slime sparkles in the pool.

Amir Khusru, parrot or mockingbird:

the two halves of each moment,

muddy sorrow, voice of light.

Syllables, wandering fires,

vagabond architectures:

each poem is time, and it burns.

* Translated by Eliot Weinberger

Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was born in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained suppression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. After that, Paz continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982. In 1990 he was awarded the Noble Prize for Literature.

At Tale of Two Gardens: Poems From India 1952-1995 is published by New Directions Books.

*NobelPrize.Org

Peter Adam Nash