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Arvind Krishna Mehrotra: Selected Poems and Translations
A one-of-a-kind collection of work by one of India's best contemporary poets.
Gathering the work of a lifetime, spanning four books of poetry, and including thirty-four new poems, this is the first comprehensive collection of the work of one of India's most influential English language poets to be published in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's poetry has long been known for its mixing of the commonplace and the strange, the autobiographical and the fabulous, in which the insignificant details of everyday life—whether contemporary or historical—bring larger patterns into focus.
Mehrotra's celebrated translations from Indian languages (Prakrit, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali) take up a third of Collected Poems. Selections from The Absent Traveller and Songs of Kabir are followed by those of Nirala, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Mangalesh Dabral, Pavankumar Jain and Shakti Chattopadhyay. Together they tell the story of Indian poetry over two millennia."
Gathering the work of a lifetime, spanning four books of poetry, and including thirty-four new poems, this is the first comprehensive collection of the work of one of India's most influential English language poets to be published in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's poetry has long been known for its mixing of the commonplace and the strange, the autobiographical and the fabulous, in which the insignificant details of everyday life—whether contemporary or historical—bring larger patterns into focus.
Mehrotra's celebrated translations from Indian languages (Prakrit, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali) take up a third of Collected Poems. Selections from The Absent Traveller and Songs of Kabir are followed by those of Nirala, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Mangalesh Dabral, Pavankumar Jain and Shakti Chattopadhyay. Together they tell the story of Indian poetry over two millennia."
- GenresPoetry
264 pages, Paperback
Published November 12, 2019
1 person is currently reading
50 people want to read
About the author
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
37 books21 followersArvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in Lahore in 1947. He has published six collections of poetry in English and two of translation — a volume of Prakrit love poems, The Absent Traveller, recently reissued in Penguin Classics, and Songs of Kabir (NYRB Classics). His Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992) has been very influential. He has edited several books, including History of Indian Literature in English (Columbia University Press, 2003) and Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar (Bloodaxe Books, 2010). His collection of essays Partial Recall: Essays on Literature and Literary History was published by Permanent Black in 2012. A second book of essays, Translating the Indian Past (Permanent Black), appeared in 2019.
Mehrotra was nominated for the post of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 2009. He came second behind Ruth Padel, who later resigned over allegations of a smear campaign against Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott (who had himself earlier withdrawn from the election process).
Mehrotra has translated more than 200 literary works from ancient Prakrit language, and from Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati.
Mehrotra was nominated for the post of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 2009. He came second behind Ruth Padel, who later resigned over allegations of a smear campaign against Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott (who had himself earlier withdrawn from the election process).
Mehrotra has translated more than 200 literary works from ancient Prakrit language, and from Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 4, 2023
Great, poet with some snappy lines. He's more of a stylist than an emoter, but when he hits it he really hits it. I really love when he describes ageing in his poems. There's a lot to like in here if you're a fan of Billy Collins or Ted Hughes. Dig in.
November 9, 2025
I think this book, and the whole tradition of Indian poetry written in English, deserve a wider readership. Here's a review I just wrote about Mehrotra:
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Selected Poems and Translations
selected by Vidyan Ravinthiran
introduction by Amit Chaudhuri
New York Review Books
November 12, 2019
264 pages.
Reviewed by Keith Taylor
Early in this generous selection of work by one of the leading contemporary poets writing in English in India, Mehrotra’s poem “Ballad of the Black Feringhee” provides an interpretative frame for much of what will come. The poem has an epigraph from American poet Carl Rakosi, “I would rather sing folk songs against injustice/and sound like ash cans in the early morning/or bark like a wolf/from the open doorway of a red-hot freight/than sit like Chopin on my exquisite ass.” The poem, which is dated 1974, ends
India your police stations are little Siberias
India when they come for me I’ll put on a clean shirt
India their bullets won’t settle on me like flies
India I want to wrap you in an old newspaper and carry you from door to door
India there’s no need to hide your large teeth
India what a big nose you have
India remember the pile of ash on Mandelstam’s left shoulder
India don’t destroy yourself in slow motion
Not only is the poem very clearly and self consciously recalling Allen Ginsberg’s “America,” but the references to the Soviet Union bring the poem into an international context. Yet the images that shape most of the lines are resolutely Indian.
Later in the collection, many of the poems become much shorter. With shorter lines and distinct images, the poems work like some poems by William Carlos Williams or Gary Snyder, in spite or occurring in an Indian landscape and atmosphere. Amit Chaudhuri, in a long introduction that does an excellent job placing Mehrotra in the line of Indian poets writing in English and in explaining the cultural position of this poetry, describes these poems as “succinct summations of nothing more than being present somewhere at a certain time.”
Here’s a short poem in it’s entirety. It is entitled “Munnar,” an area popular with tourists in the southern state of Kerala:
Its wings still heavy
with the scent of
the vanilla-leaf it spent
its last night with,
the moth’s
being pushed along
the bay window
by a lone ant.
The poem is built on the belief that not only is that kind of detailed perception enough, it is also important. The image is clear, even if many readers from the dominant English speaking countries might have to imagine “the scent of the vanilla-leaf.”
Although most of these poems turn on images or incidents from the Indian landscape, much of Mehrotra’s work is a critique of Indian politics or cultural prejudices.
For instance, in the translations at the end of the book, the editor has included a generous selection of this poet’s translations from the 15th century mystical poet Kabir, who wrote his songs in a kind of street Hindi that was recognized by all of his contemporaries. Although Kabir was born in the holiest of Indian cities, Varanasi, he completely rejected the orthodoxies of both Hinduism and Islam. That seems particularly relevant given the current state of Indian politics.
Some versions of Kabir by Robert Bly, widely available in the United States in the 1970s, were constructed out of earlier translations and cribs to the Hindi originals. Bly was criticized for the wild anachronisms he put in the poems in an effort to make them sound contemporary. Mehrotra, who has Hindi as one of his languages, is willing to go even farther at drawing in references that connect the 15th century poet to our world.
His translations have epigraphs from Horace and Leadbelly, as well as to Indian spiritual figures that Kabir may or may not have known. Here’s one untitled song:
To tonsured monks and dreadlocked Rastas,
To idol worshippers and idol smashers,
To fasting Jains and feasting Shaivites,
To Vedic pundits and Faber poets,
The weaver Kabir sends one message:
The noose of death hangs over all.
Only Rama’s name can save you.
Say it NOW.
Those Rastas and Faber poets might seem like concessions to American and British readers, but they are actually simply indicators of the wide range of reference available to contemporary Indian writers working in English. It would seem more forced and much odder, although not impossible, for an American or English poet to write of Shaivites and pundits who are anything other than television commentators.
Mehrotra is a major poet expanding the possibilities of poetry in English. New York Review Books has done a necessary job providing this excellent introduction.
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Selected Poems and Translations
selected by Vidyan Ravinthiran
introduction by Amit Chaudhuri
New York Review Books
November 12, 2019
264 pages.
Reviewed by Keith Taylor
Early in this generous selection of work by one of the leading contemporary poets writing in English in India, Mehrotra’s poem “Ballad of the Black Feringhee” provides an interpretative frame for much of what will come. The poem has an epigraph from American poet Carl Rakosi, “I would rather sing folk songs against injustice/and sound like ash cans in the early morning/or bark like a wolf/from the open doorway of a red-hot freight/than sit like Chopin on my exquisite ass.” The poem, which is dated 1974, ends
India your police stations are little Siberias
India when they come for me I’ll put on a clean shirt
India their bullets won’t settle on me like flies
India I want to wrap you in an old newspaper and carry you from door to door
India there’s no need to hide your large teeth
India what a big nose you have
India remember the pile of ash on Mandelstam’s left shoulder
India don’t destroy yourself in slow motion
Not only is the poem very clearly and self consciously recalling Allen Ginsberg’s “America,” but the references to the Soviet Union bring the poem into an international context. Yet the images that shape most of the lines are resolutely Indian.
Later in the collection, many of the poems become much shorter. With shorter lines and distinct images, the poems work like some poems by William Carlos Williams or Gary Snyder, in spite or occurring in an Indian landscape and atmosphere. Amit Chaudhuri, in a long introduction that does an excellent job placing Mehrotra in the line of Indian poets writing in English and in explaining the cultural position of this poetry, describes these poems as “succinct summations of nothing more than being present somewhere at a certain time.”
Here’s a short poem in it’s entirety. It is entitled “Munnar,” an area popular with tourists in the southern state of Kerala:
Its wings still heavy
with the scent of
the vanilla-leaf it spent
its last night with,
the moth’s
being pushed along
the bay window
by a lone ant.
The poem is built on the belief that not only is that kind of detailed perception enough, it is also important. The image is clear, even if many readers from the dominant English speaking countries might have to imagine “the scent of the vanilla-leaf.”
Although most of these poems turn on images or incidents from the Indian landscape, much of Mehrotra’s work is a critique of Indian politics or cultural prejudices.
For instance, in the translations at the end of the book, the editor has included a generous selection of this poet’s translations from the 15th century mystical poet Kabir, who wrote his songs in a kind of street Hindi that was recognized by all of his contemporaries. Although Kabir was born in the holiest of Indian cities, Varanasi, he completely rejected the orthodoxies of both Hinduism and Islam. That seems particularly relevant given the current state of Indian politics.
Some versions of Kabir by Robert Bly, widely available in the United States in the 1970s, were constructed out of earlier translations and cribs to the Hindi originals. Bly was criticized for the wild anachronisms he put in the poems in an effort to make them sound contemporary. Mehrotra, who has Hindi as one of his languages, is willing to go even farther at drawing in references that connect the 15th century poet to our world.
His translations have epigraphs from Horace and Leadbelly, as well as to Indian spiritual figures that Kabir may or may not have known. Here’s one untitled song:
To tonsured monks and dreadlocked Rastas,
To idol worshippers and idol smashers,
To fasting Jains and feasting Shaivites,
To Vedic pundits and Faber poets,
The weaver Kabir sends one message:
The noose of death hangs over all.
Only Rama’s name can save you.
Say it NOW.
Those Rastas and Faber poets might seem like concessions to American and British readers, but they are actually simply indicators of the wide range of reference available to contemporary Indian writers working in English. It would seem more forced and much odder, although not impossible, for an American or English poet to write of Shaivites and pundits who are anything other than television commentators.
Mehrotra is a major poet expanding the possibilities of poetry in English. New York Review Books has done a necessary job providing this excellent introduction.
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews