Backlisted - I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Dĕd

Episode Date: August 31, 2020

I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Dĕd, translated by Ranjit Hoskote, is the subject of this episode of Backlisted. Joining John and Andy to discuss this modern rendering of the poetry (or 'vakhs') of the 14th-century Kashmiri saint and mystic poet Lal Dĕd (Mother Lalla), also known as Lalla or Lalleshwari, is the writer, dancer and poet Tishani Doshi. In addition John has been reading Hurricane Season, the acclaimed novel by the Mexican author Fernanda Melchor, while Andy discusses Summer by Ali Smith, the final instalment of her seasonal quartet.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)5'40 - Restaging the Past by UCL Press7'12 - Summer by Ali Smith14'00 - Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor20'28 - I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Dĕd by Lalleshwari* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. We had a series of interesting scenic days out. Yes. We went to one of the few advantages of a global pandemic is you can go to places in August, provided you book in advance,

and there isn't anyone there because it's not an advantage for them. But we went, for instance, we went to Great Dixter in Sussex, Christopher Lloyd's garden. Amazing. In full bloom with about 10 other people there. It was absolutely beautiful. It's spectacular, isn't it? And we went to Farley's house near Lewis,

which is where Roland Penrose and Lee Miller lived. The house itself isn't open, but the gardens and the gallery space is open. Shoshani, where are you? So I'm in Vicenza in the Veneto, northern Italy. And you've been in Umbria? I've been in Umbria and just drove up today. Italy is strange because August is a big holiday month. It's just Ferragosto, so a lot of families on the move.

We did a day trip in Tcany to see some friends in san gimiano it was packed so uh that whole thing of the tourists are not coming i'm not sure because i think they are coming in august and maybe it's not to the scale at which it usually is but it's it's busy because i think italians are on the move Italy. But yeah, now I'm back in Vicenza. I can see the little Dolomites outside the window. And it's different. Lovely. Lovely.

Yeah. So you don't know when you're going to get back to Tamil Nadu? No, I'd like to go in maybe October, end of October. But the cases are still rising in India. And the flights have been restricted so far so I think it's best if I stay put and monitor the situation I worry about your dogs there's someone there to look after them as long as the dogs I worry about them too though yeah have you got a hotline have you got someone on FaceTime showing you your dogs no she doesn't

have a smartphone, but my parents have been able to go and friends have started to go because they've also been closing down districts. So from the city to get out there, it hasn't been easy, but now they've been able to go. So I've had firsthand reports and photographs. They're healthy and alive. Always a good way for a dog to be. Always a good way for a dog to be. Absolutely. Right. Hello and welcome to Backlisted,

the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in 14th century Kashmir, a land of lakes, rivers, snow-capped mountains and lush gardens full of jasmine, saffron and narcissus. We're waiting by the side of a river for a ferry to arrive. We hear a woman chanting, we have wine, meat and cake fit for the gods. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today, as you will have heard, is the poet, novelist and dancer Toshani

Doshi. Hello. Hi there. Hi. Her most recent books are Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods which was published in the UK in 2017 by Bloodaxe Books and which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and a novel Small Days and Nights which John you talked about on this podcast on episode 91. Daniel Defoe. It's a strange place for it to crop up, but that's where it was. Small Days and Nights, which was published by Bloomsbury and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Sharni worked for 15 years as the lead dancer

with the Chandra Lekha group in Madras, India, a contemporary dance company using Indian forms. Born to a Welsh mother and a Gujarati father, she now lives mostly on a beach in Tamil Nadu, but spends a fair bit of time wandering. She is a visiting professor of creative writing at New York University in Abu Dhabi and has a new book of poems out with Blood Axe in spring next year. That right? Yep. Spring 2021, A God at the Door. Have you finished it? Yes, I have. I'm still adding a few poems here and there, but it's mostly done. Yeah. Okay. And a very good title sort of

feels very, very, very appropriate for the for what we're about to talk about. The book that Tishani's chosen is I, Lala, The Poems of Lalded, a collection of poems by the 14th century female mystic known variously as Lala, Lalded, Laleshwari or Lal Arifa. And specifically in the modern translation by the Indian poet Ranjit Oskote, published as a Penguin Classic in 2013. This edition collects 146 of Lala's short, vivid, spiritually intense poems, which as Andy rather wisely pointed out earlier this week, are quick to read, but take a lifetime or more to fully understand. Lifetimes.

Anyway, before we travel back in time and space, I'm going to ask Andy the inevitable question. What have you been reading this week? Right. So the first thing I want to talk about is a book called Restaging the Past, Historical Pageants, Culture and Society in Modern Britain, and that's published by UCL Press. And the two reasons I want to mention that are one, anyone who follows this podcast this year will know I've been reading about pageants. I'm fascinated by the 30s and 40s phenomenon in Britain of the pageant. And as if by magic, last week, somebody sent me a link to this book, Restaging the Past. And the second reason I want to talk about it, I haven't even read it yet. It's free.

You can buy a copy as a hardback or a paperback. But if you want the PDF, the people who've written the book made a deal with UCL Press that in keeping with the spirit of pageants, you can download it for nothing. It's 300 pages long. of pageants you can download it for nothing it's 300 pages long it contains essays called things like historical pageants before the first world war and history community and local identity in the 1951 festival of britain great if that sounds like your sort of thing and goodness knows it Sounds like mine. Go straight to historical pageants dot AC dot UK. And that has a million and a half words on the subject of historical pageants in the UK in the 20th century. So this is a free book you haven't read that's available from the Internet, which will obviously we'll put the link on the on the website as well. We will. So that's what you haven't been reading this week.

That's what I haven't been reading this week. I have been reading in what has become a backlisted tradition, the new novel by Ali Smith, which is called Summer, the fourth part of her seasonal quartet. I talked about Autumn on episode 24 in October 2016, which was devoted to Robert Aikman. For some reason, I didn't talk about winter. And I also talked about spring last year,

April last year on episode 90, which was devoted to Great Expectations. So it feels right that I should say something about summer i'm just going to read as i think i did on the previous occasion i'm going to read the opening of the book and as we've said on this podcast before the wonderful thing about these books has been ali smith's attempt to make them as contemporary as she can and the willingness of everyone at her publisher to enable that and uh if well well, you listen to Batlist, you probably are a bit of a publishing and book nerd.

You will thoroughly enjoy a piece by Alice Vincent on Penguin's website, which is an oral history of how they published these books, talking to Ali Smith and her editor Simon Prosser, but everyone else who worked on them, marketing department, publicity department, the cover designer, the person who had to get permission to use the Hockney prints that they've put on the cover, the sales team who had to go out and sell them with no real material to work on. If you are fascinated about how they made this happen so stylishly and so confidently and so critically successfully and so commercially successfully, I found it completely fascinating.

This has been my favorite publishing project of the last few years. So this is how this book begins. And as Ali Smith has done in previous volumes, it's sort of like, almost like her talking to you before you start reading the book. Everybody said, so? As in, so what? As in, shoulder shrug, or what do you expect me to do about it? Or, I don't really give a fuck, or actually I approve of it, it's fine by me. Okay, not everybody said it it I'm speaking colloquially like in that phrase everybody's doing it what I mean is it was a clear marker just then of that particular time a kind of litmus this dismissive note it got fashionable around then to act like

you didn't care it got fashionable to to insist the people who did care or said they cared were either hopeless losers or were just showing off. It's like a lifetime ago. But it isn't. It's literally only a few months since a time when people who lived in this country all their lives or most of their lives started to get arrested and threatened with deportation or deported. So? And when a government shut down its own parliament because it couldn't get the result it wanted. So? When so many people voted people into power who looked them straight in the eye and lied to them. So? When a continent burned and another melted. So? When people in power across the world started picking off groups of people by religion, ethnicity, sexuality, intellectual or political descent. So? But no. True. Not everybody said it.

Not by a country mile. Millions of people didn't say it. Millions and millions all across the country and all across the world saw the lying and the mistreations of people didn't say it. Millions and millions all across the country and all across the world saw the lying and the mistreatments of people on the planet and were vocal about it on marches, in protests, by writing, by voting, by talking, by activism, on the radio, on TV, via social media, tweet after tweet, page after page, to which people who knew the power of saying so said on the radio, on TV, via social media, tweet after tweet, page after page. So? I mean, I could spend my whole life listing things about and talking about and demonstrating with sources and graphs and examples and statistics what history has made it clear happens when we're indifferent and what the consequences are of the political

cultivation of indifference which whoever wants to disavow will dismiss in an instant with their own punchy little so so instead here's something i once. It's an image from a film made in the UK roughly 70 years ago, not long after the end of the Second World War. The film was made in London by a young artist who arrived in the city from Italy when London was one of the many places having to rebuild themselves in those years nearly a lifetime ago, after the tens of millions of people of all ages all across the world had died before their time. It's an image of a man carrying two suitcases. He's a slight man, a young man, a distracted and tentative kind of a man, dapper in a hat and jacket, light on his feet but at the same time burdened. It's clear he'd be burdened even if he wasn't carrying two suitcases. He is grey, slim,

preoccupied, terribly keen and he is silhouetted against the sky because he's balanced on a very narrow brick ledge which runs around the edge of a high building along the length of which he's doing a joyous and frantic dance with the beaten up rooftops of London behind him? No, more precisely, those roofs are way below him. How can he be going so fast and not fall off the edge of the building? How can what he's doing be so wild and still so graceful, so urgent and blithe both at once? How can he be swinging those cases around in the air like that and still keep his balance? How can he be moving at such speed next to the sheer drop? Why is he risking everything? There'd be no point in showing you a still or a photo of this. It's very much a moving image.

For several seconds he does a crazed but merry high wire dance above the city going far too fast along the zigzagging path of a ledge that's the width of a single brick. So, and that's the start of the book. And the so ends there with a colon, as if to say, here's my answer to the question i've just posed ali smith dancing on a narrow ledge uh wonderful it's wonderful it's absolutely wonderful i cannot wait to have the opportunity when things have calmed down to read all four books again john what have you been reading this week i've've been reading a absolutely, I think, brilliant kind of gripping turbocharged novel by a young Mexican writer called Fernanda Melcor. The book's called

Hurricane Season, set in contemporary Mexico in Veracruz. It's set in a village, an imaginary village. It's really hard to describe this book without making it sound unbelievably grim. It's about femicide. You know, there is sort of 10 women per day murdered in Mexico. 98% of those murders are never solved. What Melkor has done, it's an incredibly angry book,

but it's so brilliantly written. And I have to say, magnificently translated by Sophie Hughes. It's published by Fitzcarraldo. And Sophie Hughes' translation, slangy translation, is wonderful. It's divided into eight chapters, each of which is a kind of Rashomon-like attempt to show the murder of an old woman known as the Witch. The Witch lives in this really kind of grimy, disgusting house where she performs abortions, she sells drugs, she has sex with younger men, she has a sort of a coterie of gay men who go and spend time with her. And the book is really about the young people,

some men, some women. There's a 13-year-old girl who's pregnant by her stepfather. There's a young guy who's her husband or wants to marry her anyway. Each of their stories is told through their own perspective in a kind of torrent of language. I read it, you know, kind of huge gulps because you really do want to know what happens.

You do want to solve the mystery of how the witch at the beginning of the book is found floating in a disgusting stream. Her corpse is found, you know, with black snakes kind of eating away at her face. It's pretty grim. It's a book about misogyny. It's a book about how young people's dreams

are corrupted by large corporations. It's a book about love all the way through. It's shot through with passages of incredible beauty and tenderness and loveliness. The characters in it, this is a long way from the kind of narco sort of carnival that you get a lot of presentations of contemporary Mexico. This is real.

This is poor people's real lives. The thing I kept thinking of was Akatoni, the great Pasolini film, that sort of an attempt to show real people's lives in a real way. M. John Harrison, Mike Harrison reviewed it, and he said something that really chimed with me. He said, you kind of end it feeling elated, even though you've had all of this terrible stuff.

It was based on a real murder. It's based on a real murder of a real woman. She's done what only a novelist can do, or maybe a poet can do, and looked into the heart of what's going on. I saw Chris Power, our former guest, Chris Power, can do or maybe a poet can do and looked into the heart of what's going on i saw chris power um our former guest chris power who was raving about it as well um it's like driving off a cliff this book without a handbrake on it i'm going to read you just a little bit just to give you the flavor this is from towards the end i mean that i can't you can't really break into the narrative

flow but it gives you a bit of the feeling of the book. And I'll spare you some of the worst. I mean, if you want grimy details about the way men's minds work, the way men relate to pornography, there's so much detail in this book, probably more than anything I've read. But thanks. They say the place is hot, that it won't be long before they send in the marines to restore order in the region. They say the heat's driven the locals crazy, that it's not normal, May and not a single drop of rain, and that the hurricane season's coming hard and it must be bad vibes, jinxes, causing all that bleakness. Decapitated bodies, maimed bodies, rolled up, bagged up bodies, dumped on the roadside or in hastily dug graves on the outskirts of town. Men killed in shootouts and car crashes and revenge killings between rival clans,

rapes, suicides, crimes of passion as the journalists call them. They say that's why the women are on edge, especially in La Matosa. They say that come evening they gather on their porches to smoke filterless cigarettes and cradle their youngest babes in their arms, blowing their peppery breath over these tender crowns to shoo away the mosquitoes. Basking in what little breeze reaches them from the river, when at last the town settles into silence and you can just about make out the music coming from the highway brothels in the distance. it coming from the highway brothels in the distance, the rumble of the trucks as they make their way to the oil fields, the baying of dogs calling each other like wolves from one side of the plane to the other, the time of the evening when the women sit around telling stories with one eye on the sky, looking out for that strange white bird that perches on the tallest tree and watches them with a look that seems to want to tell them something. That they mustn't go

inside the witch's house, probably. That they mustn't walk past or peek through the yawning holes that now mark its walls. A look warning them not to let their children go looking for that treasure, not to dream of going down there with their friends to rummage through those tumble-down rooms or to see who's got the balls to enter the rooms upstairs at the back and touch the stain left by the witch's corpse on the filthy mattress. To tell their children how others have run screaming from that place, faint from the stench that lingers inside, terror-stricken by the vision of a shadow that peels itself off the walls and chases you out of there. To respect the dead silence of that house, the pain of the miserable souls who once lived there. That's what the women in town say. There is no treasure in there, no gold or silver or diamonds or anything more than a searing pain that refuses to go away.

yeah brilliant um i mean as i say weird but i really really really enjoyed it it's in shops now it's published by fitzcarraldo it's published by fitzcarraldo it was uh on the international booker uh shortlist yeah for the international booker prize and she's i mean she's going to write other great books really really exciting to discover now it's commercials why did you choose this particular book so the first thing was that i wanted to give the two of you a real challenge i saw challenge accepted i saw the books that you've talked about, and I thought this would be something very much out of your normal range. And also, it happens to be the book that I am reading. And when people ask you, you know, the book that changed your life, I always feel like the book that's changing your life is the book that you're reading at the moment. And so for me, this is a book that's sort of been keeping me company for the last few months. And I just thought, you know, here's a woman who existed 700 years ago, we know

very little about her. The first time her name comes into print is in 1920. So these poems of hers have stuck around in different forms and shapes, and they remain. Also, she's a woman. So that was interesting to me and important to me in a way, because I feel that so much, I mean, so many voices of women have been suppressed historically. So drawing them out. And finally, you know, she's a Kashmiri mystic. And I feel, in a a sense what's going on now in Kashmir and then has been going on has been um you know so difficult I think for for so many Indians and for Kashmiris themselves and um Lala represents a kind of wonderful synthesis and syncretism, which seems to have been lost now in our whole country. And so in a way, she's offering something hopeful, you know. So I think that's why I chose her because I feel

strongly that poetry has transformative powers and that poets can speak to us from across time. And I definitely felt when I was reading these in lockdown in Abu Dhabi that she was speaking directly in my ear, you know. And so that's why I thought, why not get the two of you who come from very different backgrounds to see what you felt about these poems and about her. I found that really interesting because, of course, one of the things about this i realized when i was reading up about it is she's from kashmir and you know her poetry

represents what kashmir was for many centuries doesn't it it's a it was a pluralist it's a pluralist it isn't one particular form of spirituality that's being expressed. It's a kind of pluralist poetry coming out of a pluralist region, right? Yeah, I mean, she was Hindu, she was a seeker, she practiced Tantric Shaivism, she knew the Yogacara, she knew Mahayana Buddhism, she used elements of Sufism, and she's claimed by everybody, you know. And I think that's also interesting, how different religious groups and constitutions say that she's ours. So she speaks to a wide variety of people.

It's some of the earliest work in the Kashmiri language, which is interesting. But she kind of invents a poetic form at the same time, the Vak, which roughly translates as sort of saying. They're almost haiku-like in their kind of intensity. And as I think I said at the beginning, there's a canon of Vaks that get attributed to her. And it's pretty certain that not all of them were were probably written by one historical person and and one of the i think brilliant things that uh ranjit hotsoke does in his book is he talks about it as being like open software that this that she creates a form that

people are able over various centuries to add to which kind of is a completely different way of thinking about this is just one person's historical experience. Absolutely. It's a way of looking at the world. Yeah, and Hoskoti talks about how it goes from oral to scribal to written and how it's not about Laldeb who composed these poems, but the Laldedev who emerges from these poems so the idea that this is a group uh act over centuries that you know people are adding their own bits and and so in a way the individual is not so important individual authorship you know we are attributing this to this mystic poet but it's certainly like it's a kind of palimpsest you know of time of ideas of personalities so I just think it's it's

very interesting given the cultural moment that we're living in where we place so much of the idea on the individual and authorship and you know this is my idea or your idea yeah yeah yeah yeah I was thinking different tradition but it reminded me a little bit a couple of years ago I I read the whole of the book of psalms in one go and was reading it and you realize that there's probably not going to be single authorship either but there is a thing about what feels like an individual lyric experience of suffering of exile of pain of difficulty everybody can find their way of relating to it and that's what I've sort of felt here is that although these are much more I really love them they're really flavorsome and strong and a bit less whingy than i think the

songs wow the guy the guys who wrote the songs are sobbing into their palm leaves now well they're certainly they're certainly shorter yeah so shani before you read us a couple of examples maybe had you just read this version for the first time? Can you remember when you first became aware of this poetry, this philosophy? I can't actually. I had met Ranjit when we did a Dylan Thomas kind of poetry thing some years ago in Wales. And he was telling me about this project. I think it's been a huge 20 year project for him. And I'd read

some of these books isolated, but this was the first time that I read them in entirety. And I think sometimes it's that thing with the book that you've had sitting on your shelf that you haven't read, read, read. And then suddenly you need it for some reason and you intuitively pick that book that you need to read. I don't think anyone should hear any of these poems in the voice of me or John Mitchinson first. So I've got some here. Look, there's a bit of paper. I wrote down the ones that really spoke to me right there.

So I've got these good to go, but I think we want to hear from you first. So please share a couple with us. Okay. me right there so i've got these good to go but i think we want to hear from you first so please okay share a couple with us okay so i'll read valk 52 i trapped my breath in the bellows of my throat a lamp blazed up inside showed me who i really was i crossed the darkness holding fast to that lamp scattering its light seeds around me as I went. And this is number 14. I wore myself out looking for myself. No one could have worked harder to break the code. the code. I lost myself in myself and found a wine cellar. Nectar, I tell you, there were jars and jars of the good stuff and no one to drink it. Could I just say, on my bit of paper,

number 14 was the first one there, so you've gazumped me on number 14. Could you tell us a bit about why those two spoke to you particularly? Well, the first one about breaths, and I wanted to read a poem of my own, which relates in a completely different way. But it's obviously about a kind of awakening or clearing of the path or finding one's way in the world and understanding that somehow this has to do with knowing of oneself. So it's really about this inward journey. I wore myself out looking for myself, you know, and how that idea of if you want to think of any sense of divinity is actually not in a temple or a church or in some place that you go to think of any sense of divinity, is actually not in a temple or a church

or in some place that you go to, but you carry it within yourself, inside yourself. And I love that it's something sensual like wine, that it's nectar. It's full of joy, this to me, in a way that I think sometimes when we look at religious interpretation, they just take the joy factor out, the celebration.

And I think these poems and a lot of the other ones that I chose are about that, you know, that sense of joyfulness of self and searching. She likes a swerve. That's what I like. And number 14 has that going on there. So it starts, I wore myself out looking for myself. What a beautiful and brilliant line that is, right? It's so great, isn't it? No one could have worked harder to break the code. That really reminded me of a line by Jean Rees, a novelist I really love.

I know I don't succeed, but look how hard I try. Yeah. The great, you know, wonderful, wonderful line. Yeah. I lost myself in myself and found a wine cellar. Now you said, I see the wine cellar image there. I'm drinking a glass of wine here. There's the imbibing, you know, it's not just nectar.

It's going to obscure consciousness. It's not going to reveal consciousness. Nectar, I tell you, there were jars and jars of the good stuff. And here's the swerve and no one to drink it. That's so wonderful, right? There's the pause before the end of the VAC where she allows you to stop and think and say well what does that what does that mean what there's so much space in four lines in so many of these for the reader to find what they want to find i found it really like john says you, thank you for pushing us into a different area,

for taking us out of our comfort zones. Because this is the kind of writing that you have to read differently. Right, Mitch? Yeah, I think. And I think while there are kind of all the time, I was struck by a couple of times I was thinking, my God, this is like a Bob Dylan song. It's just a list.

She does wonderful lists. But much shorter. And it's just the directness as well. I love this one. Don't think I did all this to get famous. I never cared for the good things of life i always ate sensibly i knew hunger well and sorrow and god it's just there's such simplicity in that and sort of and you have to say wisdom hard-won wisdom always in this stuff. Yes, I'd like it to be noted that I read, again, I owe you a debt of thanks because I read this book more times than any book I've ever had to read for that.

Me too. I found the Bob Dylan one. Oh, let's hear it. Come on. I saw a sage starving to death. No, I won't do it in the Bob Dylan voice. What? I saw a sage starving to death. No, I won't do it at the Bob Dylan voice. I saw a sage starving to death, a leaf floating to earth on a winter breeze.

I saw a fool beating his crook. And now I'm waiting for someone to cut the love cord that keeps me tied to this crazy world. I know you're going to read some of your own poetry and we would absolutely love to hear that I think that certainly if it's a response or it was inspired by either of the of the Vax we've just heard

that would be great I'll read a short poem called Cosmos. Yes. It's coming together. It's all coming together. Yeah. And these were sort of six short poems that I wrote for Granta recently,

and it was exploring the idea of membranes. And so it starts with the cell, and it moves out to larger and larger containers, you know, nation, collective, and then it ends with the cosmos. So this is Cosmos. Each night I take my boat out to you, asleep under the oaks. I thought I saw a lotus creep out of your navel, which means you got my cable. which means you got my cable. Remember when we were young and the end was a black hole at the edge of forever,

a million light years away. Now we're in the thick of it. See how it swallows everything, a jungle leopard feasting through our bloodline of mongrels. Have you noticed, lying there as you do in moonlight, how a hurricane viewed from outer space looks like a wisp of cotton candy, or how the seagull nebula resembles a section of rosy duodenum? Down in the market, a man speaks of finding anger in his left armpit. Another talks of space debris drifting into the river Lethe. No one can tell me why we paint demons on our houses except it has to do with entries and exits. The monsters are never

far away. I want to believe the earth is a single breathing organism. I want to keep going with this bronze body of mine turning and turning the gears. You left no note, so I must assume you woke in the middle of a dream and took shelter in the forest. Maybe you're already in the beauty of that other world, growing planetary rings and gardens of foxglove. You know this skin is a thin partition, citrus and bergamot sealed in. It is always ourselves we're most afraid of. Take this vellum and pin it to your bodice. Let it say we were here. Was that poem written, it's got such a flavour of L was it did it did it grow out of your reading of it or was is it is it just that you're in the same in the same strange headspace i think it's in the same strange

headspace because i think i probably wrote it earlier but it's um it comes out actually of an idea that i i i learned as a dancer which um which is what chandra leekha, my teacher, taught me. This sort of saying that your body is your universe and within it, it contains rivers and mountains and everything that's in the world is within the body. And so if you can harness that, then you can access the larger world, you know? And so there's always been, I think in multiple traditions in India,

this idea of the body as microcosm of the universe. So this sense of you carrying around a mini universe within you. So that's why the sense of perspective of what the hurricane looks like from outer space or the bit of duodenum, you know, in the body this changing of the the lens of the microscope and and sort of the tunneling out and the tunneling in and i think why lala really appeals to me is because for her the body is exactly this site of experimentation or divinity but also play and questioning and also where she's sort of discarding it in a way that it's left for jungle crows or, you know, so this sense of body as vehicle, but also while you have it, treating it with a sense of, I don't know if divinity is the right word,

but the fact that this is your vehicle to access things or to move through the world, you know? vehicle to access things or or to move through the world you know i've got number 41 here which seems relevant to that um fool you won't find your way out by praying from a book yeah that seems appropriate to back i knew you'd pick this one fool you won't find your way out by praying from a book. The perfume on a carcass won't give you a clue. Focus on the self. That's the best advice you can get.

take the original texts and render them what in as in a in a way that feels colloquial not like verse they don't feel like verse do they it's impossible for me to say because i can't read the original but and i don't know how much formality there is in the original but these feel to me like like not not translations, but colloquial translations. Is that colloquialism something that you find in the original, do you think? I don't know, because I haven't read other translations. But I think definitely reading his sort of preface, that sense of the fact that she might have said these things in response to a question or to somebody asking you know someone asks a question she answers so it's not like someone sitting down and crafting a poem and

getting everything you know i mean it's it is yeah it is oral and and for many years it it was in the form of sayings or or you know almost proverbs and little poems you know these utterances what he says would it have been sung would these have been i know they have been set to music i was interested in that in that sort of oral tradition where the recitation and kind of and song some of them do seem to have a music to them i would imagine so and so i think what he says is that he wanted to resist that poeticizing when people say that which i think you know that sense of making it overly flowery or what maybe some of the earlier translators or orientalizing it or you know to go away from that and to bring it as much into the now as possible i've got an

example here which is very which is very instructive. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to read the most contemporary version by Hoskote. And he's put it fourth in the sequence. So I just read you his version first. I'm towing my boat across the ocean with a thread. Will he hear me and help me across? Or am I seeping away like water from a half-baked cup wander my poor soul you're not going home anytime soon

okay so that's the contemporary it's very mixed it's very appropriate for today now here from a hundred years ago is the first translation published in english by george grierson george grierson who was responsible for commissioning the the the both the publication and the fixing and the translation of these verses so so this is what that sounded like 100 years ago. Will he safely over carry me? Water in a cup of unbaked clay, whirling and wasting my dizzy soul, slowly is filling to melt away. Oh, how fain would I reach my goal? I mean, the thing is, I can see Mitch doing a face palm.

Fain, just fain. I mean, the thing is, I can see Mitch doing a face palm on my monitor. It's just vain. But actually, as I read it out loud, I think that's not totally kitsch. No. It sounds kitsch to our ears, right? Well. Tishani, what do you think? I mean, I'm not saying, you know, marks out of 10. That's not what I mean.

But what's interesting is presenting it in a totally different register to yeah to how we might expect to hear it now i kind of zoned out this sort of you know reciting in school kind of thing and and and i just think why this these translations are so exciting is because we are talking about language, right, with poetry. And the language has to speak to you. It has to speak to you directly. And I think so in this sense, there is an advantage to it having been oral or, you know, I love the fact that Grierson himself, he got them from somebody who had memorized all these. You know, the idea that you memorize poetry

you hold it in your body that's that's such a beautiful thought but then you know by putting it down and fixing it we're fixing it to that time when you would say feign to thee and blah blah blah huskote says that it's a ponderous idiom that is what he says. Part Edwin Arnold, part Lee Hunt with a dash of Tennyson. But also within that, there's an element, as he says, of cultural pleading, right? Which is you're trying to present the work slightly over-solicitously as worthy of your attention by dressing it up in this pseudo-respectable language and even versifying it.

You know, making it rhyme, as far as we know, is not the point of the thing. But he also does another thing, I think, in Hoskoti's translation, which I like, and he says he's trying to get the jagged epiphanic power of her poetry and to restore the colloquial pulse of her voice. But he's also trying to retrieve the poetry from what he calls the metaphysical glosses, which is that thing that happens that people get interested in the ideas. They want to know what's the philosophy, as though the philosophy and the poetry are sort of different things and it's like a code to crack.

But I don't think you need to know much about the historical background to find these poems moving and meaningful. and meaningful and and and i mean i think it adds to that once you do but i think they they have but in this translation in particular i think they have a kind of authenticity which is really i i found that um some landed and some didn't yeah which is what you would expect that's okay and you know the book reads you famously so the person i am when I read them without having read the substantive historical matter is different to the person I am after I've read that. So that some of the verses really struck me. Like I've got number 48 here. I have that one too. Yeah. Yeah, right. Everyone listening to this has their own podcast. So they'll appreciate this. I also have it. But it's brilliant.

We've all chosen it. Tishani, why don't you read it? Yeah. But I haven't written it down like you have. So hold on, I have to find it. 48. Here we go. I didn't believe in it for a moment. But I gulped down the wine of my own voice. it for a moment, but I gulped down the wine of my own voice. And then I wrestled with the darkness inside me, knocked it down, clawed at it, ripped it to shreds. I thought this was brilliant. I mean, John and Nikki will tell you, those are the contortions I go through to try and make this podcast every single day. That's somebody speaking to you from hundreds of years ago. They got you nailed, Andy. Absolutely right. I don't believe in it for a moment. I gulped down the wine of my own voice.

Yeah. This particular poem, the wine of your own voice and the wrestling with the darkness and the knocking it and clawing it and ripping it, it's anybody who's ever doubted their own work it's anybody who's ever you know reread a piece that they've written and and thought oh this is crap no you know and i've got to start again i've missed it i um it's basically it's all right it's it's it's why it's why we all wrote it down. Self-doubt. Hey! That idea, too, I really like what you said about the to and fro. Again, another Christian tradition, you know, that when people ask Christ a question, he often answers with other questions.

Yes. Or sometimes. But there's one, 44, a bit earlier, where she writes, You won't find the truth by crossing your legs and holding your breath. Daydreams won't take you through the gateway of release. You can stir as much salt as you like in water. It won't become the sea. Again, that's that great swerve at the end.

I love that line. I love her directness. She's saying that the whole, and that's a theme, isn't it? And throughout that religious extremism, you know, punishing your body. You know, I prayed so hard my tongue got stuck to my palate. That kind of punishing your body is that's not the way, you know, that's not going to get you to to to cosmic consciousness. You know, cosmic consciousness. Again, I like to say that, Tishana,

you wanted to take us out of our comfort zone. But at the same time, you've done this. You've showed the weirdness of you choosing this particular thing, right? John and I were saying this. This is so peculiar. Like we've just, we've been like this year on Backlisted. We had a few months off. And then since we've come back, it's like been a,

it's been a spiritual crash course. 2020, we've like we've done a series of books or we found a series of things that seem to speak to one another. And I think we were probably both bringing that and the listeners will be bringing that to this particular text. So we were talking earlier about William James and William James had been informed by our reading prior to that of J.D. Salinger. And I actually saw a lot of Salinger in this because Salinger, as we discussed on this podcast, is a spiritual pluralist. You know, he's somebody – there's a – He's a seeker.

I don't have it in front of me, but there's a – He's a seeker and a social rebel. Seeker and a social rebel. There's also Vak, which is very close to the ending of Zooey from Franny and Zooey, which is related to the idea of, it's talking about the, it isn't over till the fat lady sings. And he says, but what you've got to understand is you're the fat lady. So is that other person.

And so is that other person. You know, God is in, God is in everything. And he calls that Christ within that story. But even his deciding to call it Christ is a very counterintuitive swerve there at the end. Yeah. Because Salinger, as we know, was interested in Hinduism and in Buddhism and whatever he felt would work for him. So if you'd asked us to read, guess what i'm trying to say and what i find incredibly energizing actually as a reader and worth hanging on to is you were talking about

every book changes you if you'd asked us to read this a year ago three months ago it wouldn't have meant the same thing to me then as it does reading it now and and uh i definitely feel i don't know what you feel john but i feel very uh i feel all people always say this about books and reading but the the i feel um enriched by the by the experience of having read those previous books in a lead-up to reading reading this right also going back to the lockdown point i think we've been trying to we've been struggling with what does it mean to be on our own far more than i think that's because there's so much distraction normally. I think most of us have had more time on our own and left with our own perfumed carcass was one of the phrases that, you know, with our own bodies and our own thoughts and our own selves. That experience

has been, some people found it very difficult, some people have found it revelatory. But I think that the reading, reading feeds into all all that and as you say that you're also you know part of the thing is how am I to be in the world and also how do I find my way out of it I suppose it's the big questions this book is is continually posing that those big questions but does it in a way as I said which which feels very unfamiliar and yet very familiar at the same time. It's unfamiliar because it's a tradition that I've never read in before. And it's familiar because the questions are the same. Tishani, could you share another of your poems? Yes, I'm happy to. This is a little bit changing the tone somewhat, but I think it might work for the end of the podcast.

It's called The Comeback of Speedos. I like it. Bless you. I've read this one. It's a brilliant poem. It's very new. And I wrote it actually in response to an article that The Observer had run about how speedos are making a comeback as a fashion statement.

But as you might know, in Italy, they've never gone away. So the poem is in the shape of a speedo. I'll just show it to you there. Oh, yeah, okay. It makes a speedo. And so this was a little bit wanting to write in a very short poem to pack in a lot like these bucks, but it's obviously totally different in tone. But anyway, I think it's still inspired.

The comeback of speedos. I'll keep this brief. I remember the shock of Mr. G's tiger striped trunks at the Madras Gymkhana Club. Nothing to conceal, everything to declare, like a Mills and Boone hero. Shiver of ball and sack, acres of hairy scrub. of hairy scrub. We could not imagine such freedom for ourselves to slice through chlorinated depths with a little basket of dim sum on display. We were girls. To open our legs was treason. We held our breaths. So that idea of breath holding you know the idea of yoga and the first book i read was about the bellows and when i wrote the poem i thought oh we were girls we held our

breath that sense of is it sort of not an empowering last line and then actually no because with that comes this exhalation which which is the awakening, the freedom, the exploration of one's own body. Why not inhabit a speedo like Mr. G's Tiger Strike Trunks for all of us? That's beautiful. Beautiful. Brilliant.

Brilliant. Do you know, before we go, I'd just like to, you know, as people know, I'm asked, how do you read so much? A lot. And VAC number 111 will be my answer to that from now on. That's a good one. So imagine someone's just asked me. Andy, I just don't get it. How do you read so much? Well, Nicky, what the books taught me, I've practised. What they didn't teach me, I've taught myself. I've gone into the forest and wrestled with the lion,

and I didn't get this far by teaching one thing and doing another. Yes! Yeah. We should do a fave. I've got a fave here, which I love too, which is, when the scriptures melt away, the chance remain. When the chance melt away, the mind remains. When the mind melts away, what's left?

A void mingles with the void. A void mingles with the void. It's great. Cos coming coming from the country that gave you zero yes the void the void the void everything nothing yeah thank you so much for for choosing this book and and sharing this with us and sharing this with listeners i also want to just quickly mention ranji has gotay has a new book out from arc of his own called the atlas of lost beliefs uh which came out in april i never would have read had it not been for preparing for this episode yeah should we pull this to a close? Yep.

Yeah. I think I hear the unstruck sound ringing out in the background, so we must pause. A huge thank you to Tishani for introducing us to this rich and relevant work, to Nikki Birch for harnessing our mind horses into something that resembles a gentle trot, and to Unbound for promising us

the password to the supreme place you can currently download i lala the poems of lal dad it's available for kindle it seems to be quite hard to get hold of uh hard copies at the moment but stick with it john and i both have found copies and they're out there. And I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's really, really worth your, you know. They're brilliant poems. We don't step outside our comfort zone so you don't have to. We do it so it forces you to.

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