A Talk by Vivek Narayanan
The Poetics of Coming After
Friday, November 3, 2023 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
Horizon Hall, #6325
What does it mean to write a work that speaks to another work and to the suffering that has come before it? Or to grapple with an ancient epic that still exists today, whether as a wild multiplicity of texts or as a living and various oral tradition, as interior life, as resistance, or as violent authoritarian fantasy?
Vivek Narayanan is a faculty member in the English Department at George Mason University. His books of poems include Universal Beach, Life and Times of Mr S and, most recently, After (NYRB Poets, 2022). Narayanan will perform from and talk about the process of making his most recent book of poems, an experimental translation of an ancient Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, which draws from multiple disparate sources in addressing both the mythic past and present-day India. After is situated equally among long Indic traditions of rewriting and reinventing the epic, the century-old history of experimental translation in Indian poetry in English, and current debates around translation in a global moment of both possibility and insularity.
This event is also available for viewing via Zoom Meeting at https://gmu.zoom.us/j/94483777640?pwd=U TRwU0FWVTBUT1dONDAzeDdvR3BvZz09. Passcode: 096099
