Poetry lessons from Charles Darwin

This is the 39-year Katyal’s fourth poetry collection, following Like Blood On the Bitten Tongue (2020), How Many Countries Does the Indus Cross (2019) and Night Charge Extra (2015). He has also written The Doubleness of Sexuality: Same-Sex Desire in Modern India (2017), a queer theory text that combines literary analysis with elements of historiography, sociology and activism.

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Katyal’s poems tend to favour classic themes: love, loss, longing and occasionally, belonging. But like the Austrian poet Erich Fried’s work, the love poem is also a formal vessel for Katyal, through which he can talk about anything under the sun, really. In God Hasn’t Abandoned You, “trust is hung on walls/like old calendars". In Ordinary Things, he wryly describes a photographer’s practiced flattery: “Like when teachers say ‘interesting’/to a colleague’s remark,/he offered only non-committal compliments". Poems like Day Eleven of Learning Italian and Reading Rilke’s ‘Love Song’ in German are informed by his work as a translator, while the titular verse is one of those love poems destined to be widely anthologized. Edited excerpts from an online interview.

One of my favorite poems in this collection is Darwin, which describes an experiment carried out by the scientist, when he made three of his children stare at the sun to study what he called ‘grief-muscles’ on their faces. Talk to me about Darwin the scientist and the literary figure.

I wished to see ‘grief’ from many disciplinary lenses. I went wherever that word took me. One of the places it took me was to chapter seven of Darwin’s The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals, the one which dealt with “low spirits, anxiety, grief, dejection, [and] despair." I was interested in what those who are not poets said about grief. Increasingly, I found our paths and aims crossed more often than I would have imagined. An evolutionary biologist was just as much trying to wrap his head around grief as I was. Doing strange experiments to understand it, its effects on us and its physical shapes. His tools and methods were different and poets were more ready to acknowledge an impasse in their findings than Darwin was, but we were navigating the same field. This moving through different disciplines was also one of the means through which the risk of self-indulgence was aimed to be avoided in a book that so closely tracks a moment of grief.

You’re also a prolific translator. In this book, there are poems built around Hindi/Urdu/Punjabi words. These feel almost like guided tours of a translator’s mind as you’re probing and peeling away at the layers of meaning conveyed by these words. How do your translations and poetry interact with each other?

Increasingly, these two have become indistinguishable. One does the work of the other, constantly. Often, I have found that the slippage between the languages is itself the apposite subject of poetry. That words are such storehouses of resonances that they could be endlessly unpacked. It could happen when you are translating a Mir couplet, it could happen when, learning Italian, you again realize with a jolt the pre-history of English in other European languages, it could happen when you are deliberately watching Bigg Boss Marathi to learn the language, or Love Island to realise the sort of English you never knew, or it could happen when you are trying to understand the significance of certain words a parent or an aunt in Lucknow used to say often. These have increasingly become moments of learning for me.

Is it fair to say that longing is a dominant ‘rasa’ in many of your poems? What changes do you observe in yourself and your work down the years? Did you long differently in, say, your twenties? Or has the emotion remained pristine while the expressions depicting it have evolved?

There was a rush earlier which has turned into a slowness. There was an alacrity to the longing which has turned (hopefully) into something more burnished. There was an impatience which hopes to look more like understanding now. No pristine emotion under the changing language. If the language is changing, the emotion is transforming too. We understand ourselves through language and if our words for the feeling change, we must feel differently. And this longing is as much for a person as for a kind of world we want to live in. It is both possible and impossible. The impossible is to hope for love without hurt. The possible is to wish for a world without bigotry, whether it comes with the face of religion, with the arm of caste, with the skin of race, or with the heart of gender.

There’s a poem here: ‘On a Flight From Bengaluru to Delhi While a Cricket Match is Being Played 37,000 Feet Below Between India and Pakistan’. What I found remarkable is that you present India and Pakistan almost as an ‘off again, on again’ couple, entities that need each other’s validation as well as mutual scorn.

Other poets have done it before me. Think of Imtiaz Dharker’s Battle-Line, where you can’t quite distinguish between the soldiers on a battlefield and the lovers on a bed. Where both become the tenor and the vehicle for each other. Here, in this poem, I was once again surprised by the intensity that marks us when we speak of Pakistan. Where dudebros sitting next to me on the flight suddenly turned into little schoolyard children, excited on a good day, bullies on a bad. The poem is an effort to understand how this affect that runs through us has a history. How once we recognise that history, once we again reckon with it, we may become better neighbours to each other.

You had a newspaper poetry column, ‘Poetic License’. Did you ever feel like the time-crunch was affecting the quality of your work?

To be honest, I enjoyed the rush of it. I enjoyed the constant conversation with the world around me and to share that with others. I thought of it as practice. It’s just that many were witnesses to that practice. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you bungle. Riyaaz is like that. You make mistakes. But you also reach unthought-of corners. In this case, the world had a window to my riyaaz. It’s fine. Poetry, like prose, had a journalistic function. Even until the 18th century in Europe, it was written as things went to press, it wasn’t always lyric, and, in Indian languages, it continues to have a far more immersive and instrumental role in politics than the longue durée of thought and revision allows. But I hear you. I know what you mean.

Aditya Mani Jha is a writer based in Delhi.

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