Leeladhar Jagoori - What of the Earth Was Saved
Leeladhar Jagoori
What of the Earth Was Saved
Translated from Hindi by
MATT REECK
$20.00
Bilingual Edition
200 pages
May 16, 2024
ISBN 978-1-954218-20-8
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
BIOS
LEELADHAR JAGOORI (b. 1940) is one of the leading Hindi poets in India. For his poetry, he has won the top literary and cultural awards in India, including the Sahitya Akademi Hindi Prize (1997); the Padma Shri (2004), a lifetime achievement award; and the KK Birla Foundation’s Vyas Samman (2018), honoring excellence in the arts. He lives in Dehradun, Uttarakhand.
MATT REECK has received fellowships for translation from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and PEN. He won the 2020 Albertine Translation Prize for Zahia Rahmani’s “Muslim”: A Novel, and the 2022 Northwestern University Global Humanities Translation Prize for Abdelkébir Khatibi’s The Wound of the Proper Name. He translates from French, Hindi, Korean, and Urdu. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.
Leeladhar Jagoori
What of the Earth Was Saved
Translated from Hindi by
MATT REECK
The long overdue English-language debut of acclaimed Hindi poet Leeladhar Jagoori intertwines a lyrical ecopoetics with subtle political critique.
Though written at the tumultuous end of the Indian Emergency in the late 1970s, Jagoori’s What of the Earth Was Saved resonates with contemporary concerns over authoritarian rule and environmental crisis. Through an intimate portrayal of the mountain communities of Jagoori’s youth and a wide range of free-verse inventiveness, these provocative protest poems attend as much to human suffering as to the injustices at their root.
“In Matt Reeck's splendid translation, Jagoori's poetic fore-tasting continues to emit its fractured instant as it poetically elides its power into our current state that anarchically remains our fractured present.” —Will Alexander
“These are poems of connections. They jostle one thing so that it is next to another thing and then this other thing provokes yet an additional thing. At moments the connections are delights of fantasy and the poems feel surreal, otherworldly. At other moments, they are more down to earth: observations about family, the law and the thief, the flora and the fauna. But no matter what is connected, What of the Earth Was Saved is about the insight, and politicized delight, that comes when link after link builds into a chain.” —Juliana Spahr
“Imagine a bird emerging from the vein of a horse. Imagine that the "gateway to books" was a ruined threshold, a newly-formed zero. Imagine an envelope containing only blank paper. Imagine a hypocrite waiting for night so that they could be who they really are. Imagine another kind of person waiting for the morning. Imagine the power of an autocracy to enter even the lungs to check that they're clean. Imagine smoke rising from a green forest, an alphabet that evanesces before the ‘guidelines to life’ can be written. Leeladhar Jagoori writes liberation as a pre-emptive blow that doesn't land and will inevitably be punished: ‘nothing comes / from all my thinking.’ That clarity feels prophetic, as Matt Reeck, the translator, points out. Nevertheless, it's deeply moving to read Jagoori's poems as infrastructure: the attempt to build portals and pathways to a future as yet to be. Imagine that a hole is a door. Imagine the light streaming through this door or step through it into an alternative darkness. This is a future in which generosity is a collective mixture, where human life mingles with atmospheres and landscapes of all kinds: ‘and through our bodies / we will start to mix / with the sky.’ In this space, ‘rippling in the wind,’ words can go where they need to go, carried by deep currents, unsurveilled.” —Bhanu Kapil
“At the world's threshold, Leeladhar Jagoori makes us stand. His poems grant us a false safety to contemplate the ruins, before we are buried beneath them. He writes different genealogies, rehearses where we have gone wrong, regrounds us in our senses, so we may speak in colors, hours, seasons. In this delicate translation, Matt Reeck is introducing us to a timely and powerful voice. As fascism triumphs in India and across, this book reminds us of the generations of intellectuals who have been writing, fighting, and surviving while healing our collective imagination.” —Mona Kareem
“Jagoori’s poetry stands out. His voice, style, vision, and the world he lives in are distinct, making him stand out among all other [Hindi] poets.” —Namwar Singh
BIOS
LEELADHAR JAGOORI (b. 1940) is one of the leading Hindi poets in India. For his poetry, he has won the top literary and cultural awards in India, including the Sahitya Akademi Hindi Prize (1997); the Padma Shri (2004), a lifetime achievement award; and the KK Birla Foundation’s Vyas Samman (2018), honoring excellence in the arts. He lives in Dehradun, Uttarakhand.
MATT REECK has received fellowships for translation from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and PEN. He won the 2020 Albertine Translation Prize for Zahia Rahmani’s “Muslim”: A Novel, and the 2022 Northwestern University Global Humanities Translation Prize for Abdelkébir Khatibi’s The Wound of the Proper Name. He translates from French, Hindi, Korean, and Urdu. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.
PRESS
Leeladhar Jagoori interviewed by Alton Melvar M Dapanas for Asymptote
Bilingual Edition
200 pages
May 16, 2024
ISBN 978-1-954218-20-8
Distributed by Small Press Distribution (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
