What of the Earth Was Saved

In “Inter-India Mail,” originally published just after the Indian Emergency, Hindi poet Leeladhar Jagoori (b. 1940) writes:

don’t put anything in this letter
not your thoughts
not your memories
don’t put anything in this letter

nothing about your friends
no sadness
no complaints
no promise to get together

The poem appears in Jagoori’s debut collection, What of the Earth Was Saved (originally published in 1977), now in translation by Matt Reeck. In its consideration of the surveillance state, the poem rings as true in contemporary India as it did in the 1970s. Many of Jagoori’s poems from that time speak to the present mood, with a focus on authoritarianism, ecological crisis, and the fear that the liberatory desire will be thwarted and punished.

nothing comes
from all my thinking
not those old hands
not glistening feverish necks
not a shimmering idea
not a pillar of fire

a bottomless black flood
takes away our things

But contemporaneity is hardly the text’s only distinction; where Jagoori’s poems veer toward the odd, they depend on the reader’s curiosity rather than their own relevance. At times, Reeck’s undoubtedly well-intentioned attempt to render the work accessible to English readers forgoes the opacity that these poems insist on, as is evident in this excerpt from “The Bird (I)”:

she never thought my name is Bird
[…]
she
who courses through the man’s veins
who sees the bird
trapped inside the horse
and wants to wrestle and fight
she never thought my name is Bird

There is an implied correlation in this translation between the speaker’s sense of being trapped and her desire to fight. Yet in the Hindi original that relationship is not nearly as clear, intentionally so.

Still, the uneasy universality that runs through much of Jagoori’s work is apparent in Reeck’s translation. In “I’m Not Alone,” the speaker, awaiting an impending assault, asks: “can a hole be a door / through which the darkness can pass?” before asserting, “now I’m not alone.”