ARUN KOLATKAR’S HISTORICAL IMAGINATION (1932-2004)

VINAY DHARWADKER

Reading Kolatkar’s English poetry Arun Kolatkar’s career as a bilingual poet in English and Marathi began around 1953, when he was twenty-two years old, and drew to a close with his death in 2004.1 For the greater part of these fifty years, he worked in five different genres: original poetry in Marathi; Marathi versions of his English verse; original poetry in English; English versions of his Marathi poetry; and English translations of the work of other Marathi poets, past and present. In the first two decades of his career, he published his poems and translations sporadically and in small quantities, with the Marathi material appearing in – or disappearing into – obscure magazines in Maharashtra, and the English material being featured in a few periodicals and anthologies with a limited national and international circulation. He published his poetry in book form for the first time at what proved to be the midpoint of his career: Jejuri, an extended poetic sequence in English, appeared in 1976, while Aruna kolhatakarachyā kavitā, practically a volume of collected early poems in Marathi, reached print in 1977.2 The growth of Kolatkar’s reputation in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a poet and translator was largely the product of coterie appreciation, based more on promise, personal admiration, and word of mouth than on publication and public debate. The first two books seemed to transform this dynamics of recognition in 1977, as Jejuri

1 Kolatkar’s official year of birth is 1932, but Dilip Chitre has recently corrected it to 1931, in “Remembering Arun Kolatkar”: http://dilipchitre.spaces.live.com (accessed 18 August 2007). 2 Arun Kolatkar, Jejuri, Bombay: Clearing House, 1976, and Aruna kolhatakarachyā kavitā, Mumbai: Pras Prakashan, 1977. Jejuri has so far gone through five editions by Pras Prakashan, Mumbai, in 1978, 1982, 1991, 2001, and 2004; one edition by Peppercorn, London, in 1978; and one edition by the New York Review of Books, New York, in 2005 (with an Introduction by Amit Chaudhuri). 152 Vinay Dharwadker won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and Aruna kolhatakarachyā kavitā received the Maharashtra state government’s annual H.S. Gokhale award for that year. Despite the broad acclaim, however, Jejuri retained the aura of a cult classic, and over the next twenty-five years Kolatkar reverted to the reticence and miscellaneous publication characteristic of the first quarter-century of his career. Between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, he referred to a large body of recent work in scattered interviews with poets and journalists, but published only about fifteen new poems in Marathi and a handful of new English poems, English versions of his early Marathi poems, and English translations of other Marathi poets.3 Then, in 2003-2004, when death due to a terminal illness seemed imminent, he suddenly published five collections of verse, repeating the pattern of 1976-77, but on a much bigger scale. Chirīmirī (2003), Bhijakī vahī (2003), and Drona (2004) brought together a substantial amount of previously unpublished poetry in Marathi, while Sarpa Satra (2004) and Kala Ghoda Poems (2004) did the same in English.4 These books created a fresh configuration of texts, and radically altered Kolatkar’s profile as a poet. For much of his time in the limelight, he was considered to be a poet who wrote and published sparingly: Jejuri, at 58 pages, and Aruna kolhatakarachyā kavitā, at 131 pages, added up to a mere 189 pages in print until 2003. The oeuvre that emerged in its final form by mid-2004 practically quintupled its size overnight, with the writing in Marathi now filling 714 pages, and that in English reaching an aggregate of 304 pages. Besides the surprise, that Kolatkar’s lifework amounted to 1020 pages in print – about twice as much as A.K. Ramanujan’s collected poems in English and Kannada taken together – the burst of publications at the end also emphasized two other unexpected patterns. His English output turned out to be comparable in size to the oeuvres of his Anglophone compatriots, who wrote in just one language (among them, Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes, both of whom also died in

3 Eunice de Souza, Talking Poems: Conversations with Poets, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, 17. Kolatkar’s uncollected poems and translations are in the boatride and other poems, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. 4 All five books were published by Pras Prakashan, Mumbai. For this essay I will be using the 2004 editions of Sarpa Satra and the Kala Ghoda Poems.