Poppies in Translation

by Sujata Bhatt

Indonesia, South Africa, Estonia, Lithuania, Shetland, Nicaragua. Many worlds meet in these poems as nature dyes Sujata Bhatt’s many languages with its own hues. The real merges with the surreal and the allegorical; certainties are undone in an open-ended quest. A Chinese cook ignores a predatory snake, a heart surgeon lives most intensely between operations, Gregor Samsa’s sister proposes a different sort of metamorphosis, someone listens to the Holy Ghost sing, a woman hears her daughter’s voice in birdsong, and the poppies in translation mutate according to the languages and histories they inhabit, ultimately persisting in a space beyond language. At times, language itself is injured by history: Bhatt reimagines the haunted undertow of postwar Germany as experienced by Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Meanwhile, the poppies are ever-present.

Genres: Poetry

135 pages, Paperback

First published November 27, 2014

About the author

Sujata Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, India. She grew up in Pune (India) and in the United States. She received her MFA from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. To date, she has published six collections of poetry with Carcanet Press. She received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award for her first collection, Brunizem (1988). Subsequent collections include Monkey Shadows (PBS recommendation, 1991), The Stinking Rose (shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize, 1995), Point No Point (1997), Augatora (PBS Recommendation, 2000), and A Colour for Solitude (2002). She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1991 and the Italian Tratti Poetry Prize in 2000. She has translated Gujarati poetry into English for the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary Indian Women’s Poetry, and has translated poems by Gunter Grass and Gunter Kunert. Her translations from the German include Mickle Makes Muckle: poems, mini plays and short prose by Michael Augustin (Dedalus Press, 2007). She has been a Lansdowne Visiting Writer at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, a Visiting Fellow at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, and more recently was Poet-in-Residence at the Poetry Archive in London. Her work has been widely anthologised, broadcast on radio and television, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Currently, Sujata Bhatt lives in Germany with her husband and daughter.

Reviews

[alisha · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Sisyphus walks in every town.
Don't tell me
you thought there was only one - stuck in a myth.
Just look, he's everywhere.”


“A doctor tells me he feels like Sisyphus.
'Always back to square one,' he says.
And what about those who have nothing?
Do some people get used to being Sisyphus?“

[s · Rating 4 out of 5]

so much flavor here

[lezhypatia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would love to revisit this book because so many of the references went over my head

[ananya · Rating 2 out of 5]

why the hell are there so many dashes

[scarlettraces · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Lucia · Rating 4 out of 5]

"All night the frog sang to the nightingales and the nightingales sang to the fields. And the fields? Did the fields sigh with love?"
Hace mucho tiempo quería leer este libro, ha valido la pena

[Gargeya Vunnava · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good!
Can't wait to get a copy!!

[Cubierocks]

Faves:

Fragments for Lise

Poppies in Translation

Faux Fable, with Butterfly

Straight Through the Heart