Zulfikar Ghose
an excerpt: for full interview click on his name
A line from an Urdu poem may make me respond in a deeper way because I grew up in an Urdu context, but I would assert that a line from an English poem would affect me as deeply, perhaps much more deeply because with English poetry I also know the intellectual background which I do not with Urdu. Proust is perhaps more to the point when he says, " reality takes shape in the memory alone." And memory is constituted not only of the accumulation of the images of experience but also of the accumulation of nuances, tones and private meanings of words that give one a sense of one's self. One's you-ness, if you like. What a horrible word, you-ness.
and this hints at why he shuns nationalistic attachments and consequently perhaps he is not as well admired in desi circles…
From my childhood, I've been forced into exile, a condition become so permanent that I can never have a homecoming; I've no nationalistic attachments to any country, and indeed have very little to do with the world at all. One of my favorite images in literary biography is of Raymond Roussel arriving at some exotic port like Hong Kong during a voyage around the world in an ocean liner, taking one look from the porthole of his stateroom and returning to his desk, quite content that he had seen all there was to see of the mysterious East. What a wonderful madman he was! An ideal writer, really, one who created an extraordinary language exclusively out of his imagination.
A line from an Urdu poem may make me respond in a deeper way because I grew up in an Urdu context, but I would assert that a line from an English poem would affect me as deeply, perhaps much more deeply because with English poetry I also know the intellectual background which I do not with Urdu. Proust is perhaps more to the point when he says, " reality takes shape in the memory alone." And memory is constituted not only of the accumulation of the images of experience but also of the accumulation of nuances, tones and private meanings of words that give one a sense of one's self. One's you-ness, if you like. What a horrible word, you-ness.
and this hints at why he shuns nationalistic attachments and consequently perhaps he is not as well admired in desi circles…
From my childhood, I've been forced into exile, a condition become so permanent that I can never have a homecoming; I've no nationalistic attachments to any country, and indeed have very little to do with the world at all. One of my favorite images in literary biography is of Raymond Roussel arriving at some exotic port like Hong Kong during a voyage around the world in an ocean liner, taking one look from the porthole of his stateroom and returning to his desk, quite content that he had seen all there was to see of the mysterious East. What a wonderful madman he was! An ideal writer, really, one who created an extraordinary language exclusively out of his imagination.
posted by temporal at 9/03/2005
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