Book Reviews

AN ARIA OF ECSTASY: K. Srinivasa Sastry. Yugadi Publishers. 303, Amulya Apartments, Tarnaka, Hyderabad, India. Price Rs. 50/- 42 pages.

This is a book of poetic thought. The death of the dear son of the poet makes him plunge into an aria of ecstasy. In the process the poet tries to match thing, feeling and word in an abstract manner. For apparent reckoning the thought sequence covers three generations, the grandfather, the father (the poet) and his son as also the four YUGAS. The family (of the poet) is the focal point but the mind of the poet envelops the universal, the family of man, ever since creation. The agony of the poet leads him on to the continuum embracing time, space and infinity. The poetic journey concludes in ecstasy, bringing the poet to his son who became a part of eternity.

To the poet agony and ecstacy are one and the same, a whiff of fleeting experience. Life is a juxtaposition of opposites, a mixture of different hues and shades of joy and sorrow, at once positive and negative, at once full and void, solid and hollow. In this mystery called life, the self is the thing wherein lies the clue to grasp its meaning. Thoughts fly through space into eternity but have to come to their moorings, the self. Man realises the unknown through self.

The poet claims the influence of his grandfather and his samskritism, of Eliot and Bhagavatgeetha on his thought process. Though Dr. Sastry tends to be abstract and metaphysical, the central theme is never lost sight of. For like minds, Dr. Sastry’s An Aria of Ecstasy makes a regenerating and exciting reading.

- D. Ranga Rao

SUNDARAM LEARNS by Kodavantiganti Kutumba Rao, English translation from Telugu by VVB Rama Rao, Rabindra Bhavan, 35, Feroze Shah Road, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi. PP. 230. Rs. 100.

The Telugu novel Chaduvu by K. Kutumba Rao was acclaimed as a classic even when it was serialised in Andhra Jyothi during early 1950s. Of all twenty novels written by him Chaduvu is the longest and distinguished one. All his novels undoubtedly reflect social life, realism and an yearning for change. Chaduvu though centres round Sundaram and deals with his life, his education and his blossoming as an individual till he is a matured youth at the age of twenty five. The main thrust of the novel is education, social history of that period and people’s involvement in freedom struggle. The whole movement is viewed from ordinary middle class people’s point of view living in a remote village getting a whiff of technological change, social change and participatory freedom movement. It is no glorified story but a true reflection of ground realities.

Almost all Telugu readers are familiar with this novel and are charmed by the natural and innocent way a child learns from his mother and his peers, how widens his contracts and goes into the wide world freeing himself from the apron strings of his mother. Thus the title given to Chaduvu which means studies or education or learning as “Sundaram Learns” is appropriate that Sundaram starts learning alphabets but graduates to learn art of living.

Shaitya Akademi has performed a rightful duty in bringing out this Telugu classic in English for wider readership. It is no easy task to recreate this novel which is rooted in ethnic Telugu society and soil into a new language and idiom which tends to evade the grasp. Yet the translator Dr. V.V.B. Rama Rao triumphs over matter and captures the spirit.

A long and analytical introduction by Ketu Viswanatha Reddy, a well-known writer, is an added attraction. The explanatory notes at the end are indeed helpful and elucidating. This period novel naturally and beautifully captures the spirit of the time and retains its old world charm.
-Dr. J. Bhagyalakshmi

SHRINE: (POEMS OF SOCIAL CONCERNS)     BY STEPHEN GILL: WORLD UNIVERSITY PRESS. 1999, USA Dr. Stephen Gill’s collection Shrine is a volume of complex and skillful poetry, with a good ear married to some fine ideas. The luxuriant textures and rhythms of Gill’s work point to a conviction that language is a repository of images charged with mystery and pos­sibility. Rather than by argument or narrative, his poems move by linkages, assembled emotions reso­nance, historical awareness and formal innovation. Many of the poems in the volume are essentially about those moments, fissures, and fractures which may be said to define the essence of living fully within the range of human consciousness, both ra­tionally and emotionally:

This house is closed
do not step inside --­
the terrorists have raised
an army of reptiles
(My House of Peace)

In many of these poems I felt myself becom­ing immersed in the poet’s emotions; as in the po­ems Mother of An Aids-ridden son. A Heroin Ad­dict and the deceptively fine concluding poem Au­tobiography. The modulating unease about how precarious life can be punctuates the description. The modulation of moods is highly effective. The poems are strong too in describing remarkable events. Which exhibit a series of sliding emotional shades, some of which challenge our view of how to see things as they are.

Shrine is significant not because it contains an impressive array of forms, but because of what the poet does with them. In the traditional manner, the poet’s lines are mostly rhythmical, but some­times they are excited, and at other times they are in the choppy nervousness of the persona:

It was
on the crossroad of desires
where I met Me
Looking into my eyes,
he shook my hand
at that cold moment
and then dissolved slowly
like evening
in a crowd of strange faces
(A Handshake)

This is a handsome book, which is eminently readable and will undoubtedly attract many readers.
-Patricia Prime

VIGNETTES OF TELUG LITERA­TURE: DR. SONTI VENKATA SURYA NARAYANA RAO, Jyeshta Literary Trust Visakhapatnam 535 022 PP. XII + 178 Rs. 200/-

Literary publications, especially in the genres of literary criticism and historiography, have fallen on evil days. With crass commercialism and mar­ket forces hindering even good creative writing, critical writing and historiography have been the worst hit. Attempting to write literary history requires adequate exposure to literature and literary forms and a sense of the dynamic underlying the growth and evolution of critical tools also. There has been increasing realisation in Telugu literary academics that criticism and historiography are much-neglected fields. There is not much literary criticism beyond reviews of just published books and never usually printed Ph.D. theses.

Telugu literature is singularly fortunate in having a highly accomplished food chemistry scientist coming from a family of accomplished literateurs taking up a self- imposed task to write and publish Vignettes of Telugu Literature - A Concise History of The Telugu Millennium. Dr. Rao writes in his preface:

Like Kinglake in his introduction to Eothen, I may state, the ensuing volume is not a systematic and chronological account of Telugu classical literature meant for the classroom or the pundits. As Anatole France defined literary criticism, it is only a record of “the adventures of the mind among masterpieces” (for me) for over sixty years. In the words of two great poets “much have I travelled in the realms of gold” and found Telugu literary firmament “thick inlaid with patens” of that bright metal.

The epigraph is from Derek Stanford’s observation after attending a poetry session at the Book House, National Book League (Wandsworth) in the Spring of 1981:

Never before, throughout the long years during which I have attended poetry readings, have I heard language so musicalized as it was on the lips of Dr. Puripanda. I was reminded of that beautiful Barcarolle song of the lover on the waterway’s of Venice-in Offenbach’s opera. The Tales of Hoffman

The night-wind sighs
The vessel glides
Across the calm lagoon

And I understood with what justification the Telugu Language has been compared with Italian. Never have I heard recitation, which in its plangent allure sounded more like the bel canto of Italy: poetry’s nearest approximation to it.

The book is planned in three parts. Part I has twenty-three chapters in it surveying various genres and categories like epics, puranas neeti shastras, satakas, narrative poetry, pancha kavyas, philosophical works, prose writing, drama, adventure, yakshaganas, folksongs, scientific and technical works, song and musical literature, modern literature etc., Part II Unique Features of Telugu Literature deals with special and distinctive compositions like Chatu poetry. Chatu is a Sanskrit word meaning a pleasant remark. This form of poetry is something like witty rebuke in the lighter vein composed or uttered extempore at the spur of the moment. Perhaps in no other language either Indian or European is there a form of poetry comparable to this. Telugu literature has several other unique features as for example in multiple kavyas. These are unique gymnastics in poetic accomplishment: a kavya in verse with double, triple or even multiple layer each layer yielding meaning with reference to a different epic or purana. Raghava Yadava Pandaveeyam can be construed a tale referring either to the Ramayana, the Mahabharata or the History of the Yadavas.

Poetry in Telugu is a performing art too. There are ashtavadhanas, satavadhanas and sahasravadhanas performed by accomplished poets who can compose, recite, remember, play a game etc., thus being tested by a group of eight, hundred or thousand poetry and culture lovers all at a single sitting giving great joy to the audience. Not long ago, there was a dwi sahasravadhana with two thousand people bringing out the mettle of the avadhani, the performer. In Telugu there is the genre of Encyclopaedia also. Then there is another tradition of poetic duos called twin poets who would spin poems in a jiffy on any given subject, topic or incident much to the amusement and enlighten­ment of the audience. Telugu has absorbed Sanskrit in a very big way and most of the Sanskrit vocabulary is internalised in Telugu. As distinct from this there is achcha Telugu, which uses only distinct Telugu vocabulary giving rise to a language called ‘pure’, Sanskrit-free Telugu. And then there are compositions, both prose and poetry, in this. Part III deals with the intrinsic traits if Telugu literature where works on aesthetics, theories of poetry, prosody, grammar books, lexicography, contribution to Sanskrit literature and anthologies of literature classical and modern. In chapter 8 are given selected specimens of Telugu classical poetry and cultural heritage in English transliteration with meaning and comment along with the phonetic notation explained at the beginning of the book

Dr. Rao’s contribution lies, most importantly, in the unique presentation of his material too. Here is a brave new pathfinder presenting to non-Telugus the polychromatic glories of Telugu language and literature. In a limited compass the book does justice to reflect the splendour that Telugu as a language is. In the multilingual Indian literary context books of this nature and content from different languages would serve a great purpose of promoting intellectual integration.

-Dr. V.V.B. Rama Rao, New Delhi