Winter 2010
The winter edition of Mānoa is entitled Wild Hearts: Literature, Ecology, and Inclusion, and features writing from Japan, China, South Asia, Australia, and North America, including pieces translated especially for Mānoa.
Among the contributions are fiction by Barry Lopez, Leo Litwak, and Andrew Lam; a performance piece by South Asian playwright Manjula Padmanabhan; journal entries by Donald Richie, the preeminent American expert on Japanese cinema (and longtime expatriate); poetry by Yang Zi, of the PRC, and Arthur Sze, of New Mexico; translations of bhakti poetry by Andrew Schelling; an interview with Aaron Woolfolk, director and writer of The Harimaya Bridge, by Honolulu artist Calvin Collins; and four natural history essays by Robert Bringhurst, Thom van Dooren, Deborah Bird Rose, and Anna Tsing.
An essay about the late avant-garde poet Ryuichi Tamura (1923–1998) written by poet Kazuko Shiraishi—and translated for Wild Hearts by poet Yumiko Tsumura—immerses readers in the life and thought of Tamura. Originally published in a collection called Landscape of Poetry: Portraits of the Poets, Shiraishi’s essay helps us understand the mind and soul of Tamura from the perspective of an equally accomplished fellow writer:
You can approach Ryuichi Tamura’s poetry from many angles, like a fisherman scanning the sea for a place to drop his line . . . before you discuss his poems, you must take his words into your mouth, taste each of them—and have the ability to savor the pleasure and the pain in them.
Your five senses must be fully alive. If you try to discuss his poetry only with intellectual concepts, without the ability to gather them in with your senses, Ryuichi Tamura’s poems will slip from the palms of your hands and fly away like wisps of gray hair.
Manjula Padmanabhan’s performance piece, Hidden Fires and Other Monologues, attempts to render the senselessness and absurdity of human violence and destruction, but ends on a hopeful note—an invocation:
In the names of ourselves, in the powers invested in us as citizens of a free nation, I make this invocation. In the names of those who have already died, I make this invocation.…
Let us be done with violence. Let those who have indulged in violence be named and punished. Let those who have died in violence be named and remembered.
Wild Hearts also features Japanese woodblock prints by artists of the Edo period (1615–1865) and Meiji era (1868–1912), courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The prints depict elaborate tattoos seen on mythical and historical heroes, kabuki theatre actors, samurai, a bandit, and a courtesan and her lover. The works included are by master artists Kitagawa Utamaro, Toyota Hokkei, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Utagawa Kunisada, and Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Additional artwork is by Nick Edards, Lip Kee, Minakata Kumagusu, and Jacob Lange.
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Summer 2010
The summer issue of MANOA features the verse play Andha Yug, written in Hindi by renowned novelist, poet, and playwright Dharamvir Bharati and translated into English by Alok Bhalla. The translation was originally published in hardcover by Oxford University Press, New Delhi, in 2005, and has been difficult to obtain in North America.
One of the most significant plays of post-Independence India, Bharati’s Andha Yug takes place on the last day of the Great Mahabharata War. The once-beautiful city of Hastinapur is burning, the battlefield beyond the walls is piled with corpses, and the few survivors huddle together in grief and rage, blaming the destruction on their adversaries, divine capriciousness—anyone or anything except their own moral choices. Andha Yug explores our capacity for moral action, reconciliation, and goodness in times of atrocity and reveals what happens when individuals succumb to the cruelty and cynicism of a blind, dispirited age.
Hindi writer Dharamvir Bharati (1926–1997) was one of India’s best loved and most honored writers of the twentieth century. His novels Gunahon Ka Devata (The God of Sins) and Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda (The Seventh Horse of the Son) are classics of Hindi literature. A prolific writer of poems, essays, and plays, he was awarded the Maharashtra Gaurav, the Vyas Samman for Literature, and the Padma Shri for Literature and Education, India’s fourth-highest civilian honor.
Alok Bhalla has been Visiting Professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi; the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad; and Hebrew University, Jerusalem. An eminent scholar and member of the executive council of the Sahitya Akademi (Indian Institute of Advanced Study), he has authored, edited, or translated more than twenty books, including works by prominent Pakistani and Indian authors.
Recently, he was interviewed by Jay Fidell, of ThinkTech Hawaii, for the series Asia in Review. Bhalla spoke on the topic of understanding politics through literature.
Says MANOA editor Frank Stewart, “Bhalla has done for Bharati what the great English translators of recent years—Lattimore, Fitzgerald, and Fagles—accomplished for Homer’s Greek epics: a rendering in measured yet forceful English poetry of the ecstatic temptation of both good and evil, and the sacred ground between them.”
I suddenly understood
as if in a flash of revelation
that when a man
surrenders his selfhood
and challenges history
he can change the course
of the stars.The lines of fate
are not carved in stone.
They can be drawn and redrawn
at every moment of time
by the will of man.—excerpt from Andha Yug
MANOA’s new paperback edition includes color images of folios from the 1598 Mughal manuscript Razmnama (Book of War), a Persian translation of the Mahabharata, one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. To the left is a thumbnail of the Andha Yug cover, created for MANOA by Barbara Pope Book Design. The image is Karna Slays the Kaikeya Prince Vishoka, a painting ascribed to Khemana. Housed in the Free Library of Philadelphia, the 1598 Razmnama manuscript was commissioned by Emperor Akbar, considered the greatest of the Mughal rulers.
The images in Andha Yug are reprinted by permission of the Free Library and are accompanied by an essay by Yael Rice, a Philadelphia Museum of Art curator.
ANDHA YUG: THE AGE OF DARKNESS
MANOA 22:1
To purchase individual copies or subscriptions, please visit the University of Hawai‘i Press ordering page.
