VIVEK NARAYANAN was born in India to Tamil-speaking parents and grew up in Zambia. He did undergraduate and graduate work in the United States, taught at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, and moved back to India in 2000. His first book, Universal Beach, was published in Mumbai in 2006 (Harbour Line) and released in a second US edition (Ingirum Books) in 2011. His second book of poems, Life and Times of Mr S, was published in New Delhi by HarperCollins in 2012. He is co-editor of the India-based journal and literary publisher, Almost Island.
The Jewelled Deer, excerpted here, is, in its early stages, a sequence spun out from specific passages in Valmiki’s Ramayana. This is the earliest Sanskrit version, a text quite different from the more devotional story that most Indians have in their heads. I am working mainly from two scholarly, annotated prose translations, and also drawing on a reading of the many different waves of Sanskrit poetry. In the Sanskrit tradition, Valmiki is referred to as the Aadikavi (‘first, or foundational poet’); yet the Ramayana today is most often understood more as story, or worse, as history. One of my aims is to try to reanimate the Ramayana as poem; there is not a single viable verse translation currently extant in English.
My method for this is open and evolving. The grammatical/linguistic, metrical, psychological and aesthetic distance between the trigger text and our understanding of poetry in English today may well be too great to allow for anything remotely like a straightforwardly ‘faithful’ translation, except as academic exercise. This is a potentially exciting problem, providing that the contemporary poet still writes herself through the features, textures and narrative contradictions of the original rather than simply bypassing them altogether.
At the moment, by focusing on specific passages and fragments, I can partly set the larger narrative aside (interested readers would already know it, or get it in unreliable flashes or look it up elsewhere) and aim for a more kaleidoscopic, intensified effect; also one that sometimes makes use of contradictions to run against the thrust of the original. Working in fragments allows me to draw on a variety of approaches and be open to the full range of formal resources available in English today.