Keshavsut michael

4 A Nation’s Bard: Savarkar the Poet

Abstract

This chapter evaluates Vinayak Damodar Savarkar's poetry in two parts. It begins by surveying a small representative sample of his poetry, published and unpublished, translated and untranslated, well-known in his native Maharashtra and obscure. The chapter then looks at Savarkar's recasting of one of the most beloved of Marathi ballads, from a genre called povāḍā. The genre itself is performative, didactic, historical, and elegiac, and the chapter examines how Savarkar nationalizes (and Brahminizes) one of the region's best-known and well-loved povāḍās, making it not just a local myth, but potentially a national one that resonates with the ideal Hindu nation he is building. Where the original by a bard named Tulshidas stars Chhatrapati Shivaji's general Tanaji Malusare, Savarkar's version emphasizes the ruler. While this could seem like simple poetic license rather than structural shift, the chapter argues that it indexes a larger transformation in which Savarkar releases his poems into the sacralized milieu of an eme

1920 in poetry

Overview of the events of 1920 in poetry

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

— Wilfred Owen, concluding lines of "Dulce et Decorum est", written 1917, published posthumously this year

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).

Some say the world will end in fire,Some say in ice.From what I've tasted of desireI hold with those who favor fire.But if it had to perish twice,I think I know enough of hateTo know that for destruction iceIs also greatAnd would suffice.--first published in December in Harper's Magazine

Events

  • May – Irish poet W. B. Yeats concludes a lecture tour (begun in the fall of 1919) in the United States and crosses the Atlantic to settle in

     
     Volume 16, No. 2 
    April 2012

     

    Front Page

    he first phase of American literature in Marathi translation begins with the entry of American Missionaries establishing the American Marathi Mission in Bombay in 1813, starting the first press in Maharashtra, running English and Marathi schools and producing and publishing Marathi tracts and textbooks through translation. American literature took some time to emerge, but when it did at the turn of the century, it appeared in various forms such as faithful translations, free renderings, adaptations and abridgements during the second phase from 1901 to 1950.
    Translation contributed to the Independence movement by importing revolutionary political ideas from America.
    The colonial encounter developed a new literary polysystem in Marathi, the language of the native people of Maharashtra (one of the states of India) comprising three new models of translation during the nineteenth century: 1) the missionary (objective: proselytising); 2) the pedagogical (objective: enlightenment) and

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