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INTERIOR DECORATION:
POEMS BY 54 WOMEN FROM 10 LANGUAGES
Ammu Joseph, Vasanth Kannabiran, Ritu Menon and Volga (Eds.)
Rs 350 Pb 2010
81-88965-62-6
(All rights available)
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Many of India's best known women poets, and some of its less familiar ones are featured in this landmark volume of 54 women poets from ten languages. It presents a feast of poetry in translations, remarkable for their fidelity and poetic rendering.
An experience of womanhood may be the locus of this anthology, but modes of expression vary by circumstance. Some women locate freedom in the sky, while others talk of being a witch, or dance, or food, the pain of husbands, the love of children, a lover's touch, and the value of mothers, work, and writing. Their voices speak of joy or anger, frustration or satisfaction, regret or ironic resignation. As women and as poets, they offer advice, consolation, perspective—and startling insight.
A colossus like Kamala Das or Gauri Deshpande finds an echo in Mandakranta Sen, or Malika Amar Sheikh even, unexpectedly, in Mamang Dai. Amrita Bharati's intensely solitary interior landscape is counterpointed by the searing imagery of Salma; Savithri Rajeevan's oblique subversion with Jameela Nishat's overt dissent. Myth, fable, contemporary reality, fantasy and folklore are the sinew and substance of poems that range from discrimination to the exhilaration of discovering the power of the word.
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