After

by Vivek Narayanan

Overview

Valmiki's Ramayana provides the inspiration for this vibrant collection of poems, each of which acts as a persuasive encounter between English poetry and Indian myth.

After is a collection of poems inspired by Valmiki’s Ramayana, one of Asia’s foundational epic poems and a story cycle of incalculable historical importance. But After does not just come after the Ramayana. On each successive page, Vivek Narayanan brings the resources of contemporary English poetry to bear on the Sanskrit epic. In a work that warrants comparison with Christopher Logue’s and Alice Oswald’s reshapings of Homer, and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Narayanan allows the ancient voice of the poem to engage with modern experience, initiating a transformative conversation across time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681376462
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	07/19/2022
Pages:	624
Sales rank:	1,109,908
Product dimensions:	5.76(w) x 8.22(h) x 1.33(d)

About the Author

Vivek Narayanan is one of the best-known Indian poets writing in English. His books of poetry include Universal Beach and Life and Times of Mr S. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. A full-length collection of his poems in Swedish translation was published in 2015 by the legendary Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand. He currently teaches creative writing at George Mason University and is a member of the editorial board at Poetry Daily, where he helps to select poems and writes short essays about world poetry.

Table of Contents

Preface 1

Book 1 City and Forest

To Valmiki 7

i

Valmiki Discovers the Shloka Meter 11

"Fawned in your bramble…" 13

Ganga 14

Shiva 16

Song for the Horse Sacrifice 18

Rishyashringa 19

Here 20

Rama 22

Rama's Servants 23

Tataka 25

Tataka 27

Tataka, the Yakshi 28

Ahalya 29

Ahalya 30

ii

Ayodhya 33

Rama, the Husband 34

For the Crowning of Rama 35

Manthaara, the Hunchback 36

Kaikeyi 35

Lakshmana 39

"Like an injection…" 40

Dasaratha 41

Dasaratha 44

Bharata's Arrival 45

Bharata 46

The State 47

Ayodhyakanda, Canto CXIV 48

Jabali 49

iii

"Dawn it is / too early…" 53

Alternate Titles, Alternate Epics 54

"These the sandals…" 55

"Does it matter…" 56

Chitrakuta 57

The Jeweled Deer 59

The Jeweled Deer 60

Lakshmana 61

Surpanakha 62

Aaranyani 64

Sita's Arguments 65

Sita 67

The Jeweled Deer 68

Nasik 73

Havana 74

Ravana 75

What Ravana Said / What Sita Said 76

Sita and Raavan Rajguru 77

"The long howl…" 79

Rama to the Mountain, Its Reply 80

Gone 81

Theological Reading 82

Winter 83

"Yojanas from here…" 84

Jatayu the Vulture 85

Book 2 Dreams and Nightmares

"You've come to me unarmed…" 89

i Kishkinda

To Crimson 93

To Amar Chitra Katha 95

The Arrow 99

The Arrow 101

Sample Direction: East 112

Un Trou 117

Sampati 143

Simians, Plural 148

Sugriva's Roar 150

God Praise the Nematodes 151

The Mountain 152

ii Lanka

From "Trijata's Dream," Ron Padgett 157

Alliterative Kennings 158

Hanuman Among the Satellites 159

Lanka 161

Ravana's Rooms (Take One) 164

Ravana's Rooms (Take Two) 173

Ravana's Rooms (Take Three: In the Buddha's Unforgiving Sight) 177

Sita / Hanuman 183

The Password: 1 194

Shloka / Shoka 195

Notes on the Burning of Lanka 198

Fernand Cormon's La Mort de Havana (1875) 218

Book 3 War

i

Not Sita, but a Phantom 225

The Void 229

They Saw No Longer the Battlefield 232

Coming Back 233

To Shrikant Verma 235

Relatives 237

Kumbakarna Sound System 238

Mainda & Dwivida 248

Know Your Enemy (KYE) 249

Note on Large Numbers 253

Some Omens 254

Some Omens 255

From the Sukraniti 256

The Bridge 257

ii

Note on "Poem Without Beginning or End" 261

Poem Without Beginning or End 263

Book 4 After

Dhvanyaloka 2.1 415

"All the answers are told…" 416

"One morning you heard…" 417

i

Rama and Sita, Just After the War 421

Ayodhya 424

Ganga: n Views 426

1 Not at Gaumukh 426

2 The Winter Closing of the Temple at Gangotri 431

3 In Between 439

4 Kashi 442

5 Kalighat to Kumartuli 445

Ila 448

Ahalya 449

Shveta 450

The Nobility of the Rakshasas 452

Ravana's Earlier Career 454

Silk Smitha as Surpanakha 455

Hanuman vs. Rahu 457

Dandakaranya 458

Pushpaka Transport 460

ii On Certain Illuminated Pages of Abdul Rahim's Ramayana

1 Ambarish Sacrifices Sunashepa 474

2 Rishyashringa 101 475

3 The Divine Messenger 476

4 The Labourers 477

5 Sita Sustained by Celestial Food 478

6 Kumbhakarna's Sleep 478

7 Hanuman's Uncertainty Among the Magic Plants 479

8 Not Sita, but a Phantom 480

iii

Ram's Arm 485

Shambuka 486

At Ramtek 487

Valmiki's Students 489

A Knock on the Door 490

Sarayu, from Line to Circle 493

Collective 495

iv

"Railway platform in its mingled and recurrent selves…" 499

Ramnagar 500

In Memoriam Mohammed Akhlaq 501

Nagercoil 504

To Shaheen Bagh, In Absentia 507

Ayodhya 509

A Ramayana on the Delhi Ridge (2) 521

A Ramayana on the Delhi Ridge (1) 531

v

Some Notes on Race in the Ramayana 537

At Valmiki Sadan 538

Sentences Toward Another Translation Manifesto 539

Alpasamkhyi 541

The Final Asana 544

vi

After 545

Acknowledgments 585

Notes and Sources 587

Image Credits 609

Editorial Reviews

A beautifully produced book, the illustrations blend with the narrative. . . . he has produced a work that will find an enduring place in the bookshelf. It is a true labour of love.” —Manohar Shetty

“Wildly ambitious book. . . . After is a grand literary experiment. . . .Across 600-plus challenging and deeply rewarding pages, Narayanan teases out subcutaneous layers of meaning, psychological depth and cultural commentary from Valmiki’s epic.” —Aditya Mani Jha, Frontline

“It is a story cycle with old and new lives existing in parallel. Vivek Narayanan’s genius wrestles with all these lives to create a masterpiece pulsing with blood, whose origins reveal the remarkable interconnectedness of our cultural DNA as humans. . . .it stands as a cosmopolitan yet rooted, act of inspiration.” —Leeya Mehta, Plume

"In the centenary year of The Waste Land and Ulysses, the book that has absorbed and excited me most is one that extends the tradition of projecting epic into the cinema of modernity. Vivek Narayanan’s After (NYRB Poets), the inspired labour of a decade, derives more than 500 pages of new poems in English from the Sanskrit of Valmiki’s Ramayana. Working a free verse line as fine and tight as wire, Narayanan taps narrative for lyric electricity, all the while keeping the scaffolding of the story cycle – and the city of scholarship that surrounds it – in view with his generous notes."  —Jeremy Noel-Todd, "Favorite Books of the Year," TLS

"A collection of leaping, fierce poems that move in several directions, leaving the reader besieged and dazzled in equal measure" —Tishani Doshi, Poetry Review

"I was drawn in by rhythms and images that allowed this work to take flight" —Layla Benitez-James, Harriet (Poetry Foundation blog)

"Vivek Narayanan, one of the most distinguished Indian poets of today, has with this remarkable book drawn upon an Indian heroic song of the late Bronze Age, Rāmāyana, and transferred the ancient virtues and poetic being of that epic to the twenty-first century. . . . this poem of Narayanan has great political force for a modern and activist readership, both Asian and Western. . . . [a] tour de force, radicalizing our apprehension of beauty." —Kevin McGrath, Harvard Review

“A fantastic adventure story and a threnody on the sadness of power, the Ramayana has been multiplying across languages and formal boundaries for more than two millennia. And now it has taken a new shape in Vivek Narayanan’s formidable English: Rama, Sita, Lakshmana, Ravana flash across these floodlit pages. Ancient and contemporary India fracture and recompose in this timeless epic of sorrow, violence, betrayal, and longing, as if the poet Valmiki foresaw, centuries ago, that he would chant again in Narayanan’s voice.” —Rosanna Warren

“After is as multitudinous as the Sanskrit Ramayana, the text it is after (in both senses of the word), the text it follows (in both senses of the word). It is a conception in English of Valmiki’s great poem, a reflection of it, a concretion of it, a refraction of it, both an acceptance and a passionate refusal of it, a sometimes tender, sometimes violent embrace, a resurrection, an imprisonment, a liberation of it, and, always, an act of profoundly learned, current, and imaginative reverence. The only thing more amazing than Narayanan’s ambition is his realization of that ambition.” —Vijay Seshadri

From the Publisher