A Life in Verse

After the buzz around the BBC’s adaptation of A Suitable Boy, a new collector’s series of Vikram Seth’s poetry puts the spotlight on the author’s poetic accomplishments. Published by Speaking Tiger, the seven volumes showcase the breadth of Seth’s genius and the recurrent patterns in his poems. In a rare exchange, Seth spoke with India today about his work.

- Sonal Shah

Q. The story of your having picked up Charles Johnston’s translation of Eugene Onegin is often cited as a seminal moment in your writing life. Have there been other such turning points?

A. There have been several such moments; I’ll mention just one. In my second year at university, where I was supposed to be studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics, I went to the Oriental Institute, thinking I’d slip unnoticed into a Japanese class. I went to the wrong floor, and ended up in a Chinese class. I was thrown out as an interloper a week or two later, but it gave me a taste for the language. At about the same time, a friend happened to lend me the Penguin Classics translation of the poems of Wang Wei, an 8th century Chinese poet. He wrote of nature, friendship and solitude in a way I had never come across before. These poems moved me deeply and I decided then and there to learn enough classical Chinese to read them in the original. And in fact, many years later, in the year after the Tiananmen massacre, mulling over the troubled times of famine and civil war that Wang Wei himself had lived through, I translated his poems for myself.

Q. Have your experiments with poems written in monosyllabic words been informed by your translation of Chinese poetry?

A. Yes. Classical Chinese poetry, written as it is in stand-alone ‘characters’, which are monosyllabic, has a particular feel to the ear. It also uses tones, which cannot be replicated in translation, as well as rhyme and parallelism, which can. Certain poems of my own, like ‘Soon’ or ‘Walk’ or the poems of ‘Shared Ground’, as well as certain prose passages in