ARUN KOLATKAR’S HISTORICAL IMAGINATION (1932-2004)

Abstract

Reading Kolatkar's English poetryArun Kolatkar's career as a bilingual poet in English and Marathi began around 1953, when he was twenty-two years old, and drew to a close with his death in 2004.1 For the greater part of these fifty years, he worked in five different genres: original poetry in Marathi; Marathi versions of his English verse; original poetry in English; English versions of his Marathi poetry; and English translations of the work of other Marathi poets, past and present. In the first two decades of his career, he published his poems and translations sporadically and in small quantities, with the Marathi material appearing in - or disappearing into - obscure magazines in Maharashtra, and the English material being featured in a few periodicals and anthologies with a limited national and international circulation. He published his poetry in book form for the first time at what proved to be the midpoint of his career: Jejuri, an extended poetic sequence in English, appeared in 1976, while Arma kolhatakarachya kavita, practically a volume of collected early poems in Marathi, reached print in 1977.2The growth of Kolatkar's reputation in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a poet and translator was largely the product of coterie appreciation, based more on promise, personal admiration, and word of mouth than on publication and public debate. The first two books seemed to transform this dynamics of recognition in 1977, as Jejuri won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and Arma kolhatakarachya kavita received the Maharashtra state government's annual H.S. Gokhale award for that year. Despite the broad acclaim, however, Jejuri retained the aura of a cult classic, and over the next twenty-five years Kolatkar reverted to the reticence and miscellaneous publication characteristic of the first quarter-century of his career. Between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, he referred to a large body of recent work in scattered interviews with poets and journalists, but published only about fifteen new poems in Marathi and a handful of new English poems, English versions of his early Marathi poems, and English translations of other Marathi poets.3Then, in 2003-2004, when death due to a terminal illness seemed imminent, he suddenly published five collections of verse, repeating the pattern of 1976-77, but on a much bigger scale. Chinmin (2003), Bhija/a vahi (2003), and Drona (2004) brought together a substantial amount of previously unpublished poetry in Marathi, while Sarpa Satra (2004) and Kala Ghoda Poems (2004) did the same in English.4 These books created a fresh configuration of texts, and radically altered Kolatkar's profile as a poet. For much of his time in the limelight, he was considered to be a poet who wrote and published sparingly: Jejuri, at 58 pages, and Arma kolhatakarachya kavita, at 131 pages, added up to a mere 189 pages in print until 2003. The oeuvre that emerged in its final form by mid-2004 practically quintupled its size overnight, with the writing in Marathi now filling 714 pages, and that in English reaching an aggregate of 304 pages. Besides the surprise, that Kolatkar's lifework amounted to 1020 pages in print - about twice as much as A.K. Ramanujan's collected poems in English and Kannada taken together - the burst of publications at the end also emphasized two other unexpected patterns. His English output turned out to be comparable in size to the oeuvres of his Anglophone compatriots, who wrote in just one language (among them, Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes, both of whom also died in 2004); and the extent of his oeuvre in Marathi proved to be almost two-and-a-half times that of his output in English.Kolatkar's bilingualism, the proportion of his Marathi writing to his English writing, and the overall magnitude of his lifework inescapably complicate the process of reading his poetry in English, underscoring the importance of two complementary critical objectives. One is to map Kolatkar's English oeuvre as a whole, paying proportionate attention to the formal, thematic, and modal organization of Jejuri, Sarpa Satra, and Kala Ghoda Poems. …