Poetry Recital by Octavio Paz & Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala' at Instituto Cervantes, 48, Hanuman Road, Connaught Place (CP) > 6pm on 22nd April 2014

 Time : 6:00 pm

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : Instituto Cervantes, 48, Hanuman Road, Connaught Place (CP), New Delhi - 110001
Venue Info : Events | About | Map
Metro : Nearest Metro Station - 'Rajiv Chowk' (Yellow Line and Blue Line)
Area : Connaught Place (CP)

Event Description : Poetry Recital: Octavio Paz y Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala'.

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata. Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.  

About his work: Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture. A prolific author and poet, Paz published scores of works during his lifetime, many of which have been translated into other languages. His poetry has been translated into English by Samuel Beckett, Charles Tomlinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser and Mark Strand. His early poetry was influenced by Marxism, surrealism, and existentialism, as well as religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. His poem, "Piedra de sol" ("Sunstone"), written in 1957, was praised as a "magnificent" example of surrealist poetry in the presentation speech of his Nobel Prize. His later poetry dealt with love and eroticism, the nature of time, and Buddhism. He also wrote poetry about his other passion, 
modern painting, dedicating poems to the work of Balthus, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tàpies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta. As an essayist Paz wrote on topics such as Mexican politics and economics, Aztec art, anthropology, and sexuality. His book-length essay, The Labyrinth of Solitude (Spanish: El laberinto de la soledad), delves into the minds of his countrymen, describing them as hidden behind masks of solitude. Due to their history, their identity is lost between a pre-Columbian and a Spanish culture, negating either. A key work in understanding Mexican culture, it greatly influenced other Mexican writers, such as Carlos Fuentes. Ilan Stavans wrote that he was "the quintessential surveyor, a Dante's Virgil, a Renaissance man". Paz wrote the play "La hija de Rappaccini" in 1956. Paz adapted the play from an 1844 short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne that was also entitled "Rappaccini's Daughter". He combined Hawthorne's story with sources from the Indian poet Vishakadatta and influences from Japanese Noh theatre, Spanish autos sacramentales, and the poetry of William Butler Yeats. His works include the poetry collections ¿Águila o sol? (1951), La Estación Violenta, (1956), Piedra de Sol (1957), and in English translation the most prominent include two volumes that include most of Paz in English: Early Poems: 1935–1955 (tr. 1974), and Collected Poems, 1957–1987 (1987). Many of these volumes have been edited and translated by Eliot Weinberger, who is Paz's principal translator into American English. 

Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala', one of the most significant poets of modern Hindi, was born on February 21, 1896, in a Brahmin family of Midnapore in Bengal (originally from Unnao,Uttar Pradesh). He was also a famous poet of Hindi Kavi Sammelan. Though a student of Bengali, Nirala took keen interest in Sanskrit from the very beginning. In time, through his natural intelligence and acquired knowledge, he became an authority on various languages – Bengali, English, Sanskrit, and Hindi. Nirala's life, barring short periods, was one long sequence of misfortunes and tragedies. His father, Pandit Ramsahaya Tripathi, was a government servant and was a tyrannical person. His mother died when he was very young. Nirala was educated in 
the Bengali medium. However, after passing the matriculation exam, he continued his education at home by reading Sanskrit and English literature. Thereon he shifted to Lucknow and then to Village Gadhakola of District Unnao, to which his father originally belonged. Growing up, he took inspiration from personalities like Ramakrishna Paramhans, Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore. After his marriage at a young age, Nirala learnt Hindi at the insistence of is wife, Manohara Devi. Soon, he started writing poems in Hindi, instead of Bengali. After a bad childhood, Nirala had few good years with his wife. But this phase was short-lived as his wife died when he was 20, and later his daughter (who was a widow) also expired. He also went through a financial crunch. During that phase, he worked for many publishers, worked as proof-reader and also edited Samanvaya. Most of his life was somewhat in the Bohemian tradition. 

Since he was more or less a rebel, both in form and content, acceptance did not come easily. What he got in plenty was ridicule and derision. All this may have played a role in making him a victim of schizophrenia in his later life. He wrote strongly against social injustice and exploitation in society. Nirala died in Allahabad on October 15, 1961. The world of Hindi literature is remarkable for ideological and aesthetic divisions. But today, the same reviled Nirala is one of the very few people in Hindi literature who are admired and respected by almost all, across all divisions. 

About his work: Nirala pioneered the Chhayavaad movement along with Jaishankar Prasad, Sumitranandan Pant and Mahadevi Varma. Nirala's Parimal and Anaamika are considered as the original Chhayavaadi Hindi literature. He was unrecognized during his life. His style of poetry, revolutionary for his time, often was unpublished due to its unconventional nature. He voiced his protest against exploitation through his verses. He amalgamated Vedanta, nationalism, mysticism, and love for nature and progressive humanist ideals in his works. The sources of his themes include history, religion, nature, Puranas and contemporary social and political questions. He initiated the use of blank verse in his poems. He introduced aesthetic sense, love of nature, personal viewpoint and freedom of form and content in writing which went on to become the chief tenets of Chhayawad. His multifaceted genius, which ushered in a new style of poetry, acquired him a pseudonym, Nirala (unique). His poem Saroj Smriti is one of the greatest, showing his emotions and sentiments for his daughter. Nirala is also credited with bringing in free verse in the modern Hindi prose. His thinking was influenced by Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa and Swami Vivekananda and in the literary field by Michael Mudhusudan Dutt and Rabindranath Tagore.

Related Links : Books | Places for Books | Poetry