Fwd: Almost Island Dialogues 2: March 6-9, 2008
kavita bhanot
ALMOST ISLAND: DIALOGUES 2
MARCH 6TH TO 9TH 2008: INDIA INTERNATIONAL CENTRE, DELHI
Almost Island is a new online literary magazine based in India, but international in scope. We have been trying to slowly unfold and discover a specific kind of intervention in the Indian context: we conceive of and believe in poetry and prose on an equal footing, are interested in and open to (but certainly not simplistically beholden to) the idea of global literary avant-gardes and, more generally, literature of a philosophical nature. We are not afraid of difficulty, complexity, or seriousness, and we're certainly not afraid of the effects and legacy of more than a century of literary modernism!
Part of this agenda is also to foster a higher and more intense level of literary engagement at the local level by bringing major voices from around the world in contact with Indian writers. The idea here is not so much to be absorbed into the making of literary celebrity, or to make a festival of India's supposed arrival on the world stage, but to listen closely and to find ways to think through literature as practicing writers and not as academics, without, on the other hand, "dumbing down".
This year the conference will extend from the evening of 6th March 2008 to the evening of 9th March 2008, at the India International Centre (IIC), Delhi. There will be readings each evening, including a rudraveena concert by Bahauddin Dagar on the night of 6th March. During the day, there will be extended discussions and talks.
The evening readings, from Thursday 6th to Sunday 9th March are open to all. The day sessions are also open to all interested participants, but *please note that we can only provide lunch for a limited number of participants who have pre-registered*.
Please find a detailed programme below: 1) bios of panelists / readers; 2) schedule of evening readings; and 3) details of the day sessions.
*1. PANELISTS AND READERS: ALMOST ISLAND DIALOGUES 2*
Bei Dao* is considered the most notable of the "misty poets", a group pf Chinese poets who opposed the restrictions of the Cultural Revolution; his oblique verses were memorized by students and chanted at Tiananmen Square, and as a result he went into in exile from China from 1989 to 2006, when he was allowed to return to Hong Kong, where he is currently based. Despite his fame and the political circumstances of his life, he has continued to write a poetry that is both formally experimental and insistently difficult, responding to politics in hidden ways, influenced by the work of Paul Celan. He is also the editor in chief of the influential Chinese literary journal, Jintian. He has won numerous awards and has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
*Nabaneeta Dev Sen* is one of Bengal's leading writers. She is the author of over fifteen novels, three books of poetry, children's books, plays and translations. Her two recent novels are *Dwiragaman* and *Ramdhan Mittir Lane*. Her most recent collection of poetry is *Shreshtha Kabita*. In 2000 she was awarded the Padma Shri for her contribution to Literature. She has been for many years, a Professor of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University in Kolkata.
*Claudio Magris* is the author of the novels *A Different Sea* and *Inferences from a Sabre*, along with scholarly works on Austrian and Central European literature. In the English speaking world, he is known principally as the author of two books, *Danube* (a journey from the source to the mouth of the river) and *Microcosms*, densely allusive literary journeys that seem to take the genre of "travelogue" into a class of their own. Magris teaches German literature at the University in Trieste and has been for many years a columnist for the Italian daily Corriere Della Sera. He has been awarded several prizes, among them the Strega Prize and the Erasmus Prize, and has also been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
*Allan Sealy* is the author of several acclaimed novels including *The Trotter Nama*, *The Everest Hotel*, *The Brainfever Bird* and *Red*. He was awarded the Commonwealth Prize for *The Trotter Nama* and is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award.
*George Szirtes* is one of England's leading poets as well as the translator of several works from the Hungarian, including novels by Sandor Marai and Lazlo Krasznakorkai. He has over fifteen collections of poetry, the most recent being *An English Apocalypse* and *Reel*, which won the T.S. Eliot prize, Britain's highest honour for a single book of poetry, in 2005. He currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.
*Udayan Vajpeyi* is a poet, short story writer and essayist. Among his books are *Sudeshna*, a book of short stories, two collections of poetry, *Kuch Vakya* and *Paagal Ganitajna ki Kavitayen*, and *Abhed Akash*, a book of conversations with Mani Kaul. He has also translated the work of Paz, Borges and Brodsky into Hindi. Mr. Vajpeyi has also written texts for films directed by Sudhansu Misra and Kumar Shahani. He is a recipient of the Krishan Baldev Vaid award and is a medical doctor by training.
Vivek Narayanan's first book of poems, *Universal Beach*, appeared in 2006. He is an associate editor at the Boston-based international poetry annual, *Fulcrum*, and is consulting editor of *Almost Island*. He is based in Delhi, and works at Sarai-CSDS.
*Sharmistha Mohanty* is the author of two novels, *Book One* and *New Life*. Her translation of Rabindranath Tagore's fiction, *Broken Nest and Other Stories* is due out later this year from Westland Books. She is the editor of *Almost Island*.
2. SCHEDULE OF EVENING READINGS: ALMOST ISLAND DIALOGUES 2
March 6th-9th, 6:30 p.m.
Venue: *India International Centre Annexe Lawns*
*March 6th – 6.30 pm*
Udayan Vajpeyi
Bei Dao
And closing with a dhrupad performance by Bahauddin Dagar on the rudra-veena.
*March 7th – 6.30 pm*
Allan Sealy
Nabaneeta Dev Sen
*March 8th – 6.30 p.m.*
Vivek Narayanan
George Szirtes
*March 9th – 6.30 p.m.*
Sharmistha Mohanty
Claudio Magris
*3. PROGRAMME FOR DISCUSSIONS DURING THE DAY*
The discussions at these dialogues emerge from our own concerns at Almost Island. We are committed to writing that is continually seeking new paths. More specifically, these discussions emerge from the writers who come together for these dialogues---their work, their thoughts. We welcome an audience that is keen to listen and to interact, question, disagree.
*MARCH 7, 2008*
VENUE: Conference Room I, above the library, India International Centre
SESSION 1: 10.00 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Panelists: Bei Dao, George Szirtes, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Udayan Vajpeyi, Vivek Narayanan
Bei Dao says, "Many poets separate their experience from the language they use in poetry, but in the case of some, like Paul Celan, there is a fusion, a convergence of experience and experimental language." Can this separation, and this fusion, be explored?
George Szirtes says, "Speaking personally, I suspect the poet's key experience is of the simultaneous treacherousness, fragility and beauty of language, of the narrow divide between signification and meaninglessness or distortion of meaning. This is related to the question of community. How far is the language of the community to be trusted? What if the community doesn't trust you? What kind of language are you left with outside the community?"
Can we look at these questions through the tools of the craft---syntax, diction, metaphor?
And, says Nabaneeta Dev Sen, "What about the silences, what the poet does not wish to say?
SESSION 2: 2.30 – 5.00 p.m.
A conversation with Bei Dao
with Sharmistha Mohanty and Vivek Narayanan)
*MARCH 8, 2008*:
VENUE: Conference Room I, above the library, India International Centre
SESSION 3: 10.00 a.m. – 1 p.m.
A talk by Claudio Magris on the search for form in his work, in conversation with Sharmistha Mohanty.
SESSION 4: 2.30 – 5 p.m.
Conference Room I, above the library, India International Centre
Panelists: Sharmistha Mohanty, Claudio Magris, Allan Sealy, Nabaneeta Dev Sen
"What then is the place of fact in the writer's imagination? By fact I mean factual knowledge—whether of history, or geology, or natural processes--information now so widely available to us about the world. I do not mean historical novels here, or novels based on obvious realities like a war, or a natural disaster, I do not mean works of representation. I mean works of prose where the writer uses different kinds of facts, related or unrelated, and unifies them in her own vision, creating a new experience, a new insight.
"The writer of literature does not use fact as sociological observation, and stand back. Her self is committed and she builds from the emotions and ambiguities and mysteries that the fact itself generates. The late W. G. Sebald was a great practitioner of this mode of writing.
"How then does fact work as an element that builds emotion and insight, how does it push the imagination further?"
--Sharmistha Mohanty
*MARCH 9, 2008*
VENUE: FOUNTAIN LAWNS, IIC
SESSION 5: 10.00 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Panelists: Allan Sealy, Udayan Vajpeyi, George Szirtes, Vivek Narayanan
"I'm interested in the idea of looking vs. reading, that is, gathering one's material from the world as opposed to gathering it from books. This is only partly the contemporary / historical divide; it's also a fact / fiction fight, with the imagination and truth as referees."
—Allan Sealy
"As I understand it, Allan's statement points to a long and varied tradition in literature that (even as it draws on its own past for sustenance) specifically refuses or qualifies "book learning" and insists instead on the primacy of direct perception and—perhaps?—the truth of experience as well. It's a tradition of "witness" (I think) that could be drawn through the bhakti poets and William Blake, or from Thoreau through to Gandhi, or indeed, from Darwin. (I set aside the debate over empiricism / vision for the moment.) Of course on one end of the scale, this is the naïve belief of many a young writer who might take it as an excuse not to read; but for an experienced writer (who is by definition well read) it represents a very different challenge. Allan's emphasis on "looking" underlines the fact that it is an active and focused engagement rather than something to be taken for granted. This, in a way, could be understood as literature's special insistence even in our age, its gift to the disciplines. In a sense, and in a sense only, this is the opposite of the "fact" drawn from "sources", and it is found not just in fiction but in lyric as well. It relates equally to the relationship between experience and language that will come up in our first panel.
"However, it can be harder, today, to make a case for "gathering material from the world" (or from the self in the world) as a separate, oppositional activity. Even if we look beyond postmodernist theories that profoundly question the very possibility of unmediated perception and / or experience, we are still stuck with the incredible glut of books and data that we cannot turn our eyes away from, the very fading away of the material world as information itself becomes a kind of material. In a current sequence of poems, Mr. Subramanian, I find myself exploring this mediated reality and somehow stubbornly, despite everything, find myself looking for and returning to the truth of experience and of direct perception. What kind of sense does the "truth of experience" (and of witness) make today?"
--Vivek Narayanan
SESSION 6: 2.30 – 5.00 P.M.
An open session in which the audience and the panelists can return to thoughts that have emerged over the course of the conference.