Hello everyone, welcome to Susurrus. This is Nandini Krishnan and today is going to be a special podcast because we do have a guest. We are going to be in conversation with the poet and writer–novelist–Anupama Raju. So Anupama, thank you so much for joining us and welcome to Fountain Ink.

Thank you, Nandini. Thank you so much.

So you know you've got two collections of poetry out, Nine published in 2015 and Bitter Gourd which has just been launched, you've been having launches across cities and of course in between there was a C: A Novel. And I was wondering, do you remember the first poem that you ever wrote?

It's actually quite an embarrassing memory if you ask me.

But I do remember it vividly.

I must have been, I think I was 14 or 15, and I wrote it by hand, obviously.

This is well before the age of laptops and everything.

And I wrote it in my notebook, And it was a poem called "Tears".

Tears?

Tears.

It had that typical, it tried to capture the typical teenage angst, you know.

And I think I must have shown it to my cousin and probably one close friend of the family who was like a confidant for me back then.

So yeah, but the poem itself as far as literary standards go, was pretty pathetic.

And I have no idea where it is.

That was the poem.

You once told me you find poetry easier to write than fiction. That's actually the first time I've heard anyone say that. Could you elaborate?

Well, maybe because I started writing poetry and I turned to writing poetry pretty seriously in the early 2000s and that is when I had moved to Trivandrum as well, which is where I live. And I met Dr. Iyappa Panicker who many readers and critics may recognise and writers of course may recognise as one of the foremost modernist voices of India because not only did he translate prolifically but he also kind of pioneered modernist poetry both in Malayalam and in English and he was also a highly regarded literary critic.

So I had read his essays and you know mostly essays and not poetry so much as a student of literature and when I moved to Trivandrum which is where he lived too back then I got an opportunity to meet him and then he started encouraging me to write more frequently.

He also made me part of a poetry group and that's when I started writing more seriously, and poetry for me I've always found to be a natural form of expression compared to fiction.

The sparseness of words, the ability that poetry has to say a lot using very little words for instance and the way it pushes us to find the right metaphor, the way it encourages us to chase the right image.

I think it is a great mental, psychological and literary pursuit.

So poetry for me has always given that luxury.

While fiction on the other hand … and I've written only one novel so far, so I'm still in the process of discovering that … fiction, on the other hand gives you a little more of a liberal hand and you have a broader canvas. But you have to think of a plot, you have to think of characters, you have to think of unity of story and a story that really kind of captures the reader's attention.

So it's a very ambitious and a very tedious task, at least for me, that is how I have found it.

So poetry, I think I would always have a leaning towards poetry and no matter how many novels I end up writing, I would always be writing poetry.

So that is how I see the two forms.

You actually mentioned several aspects of your poetry that have really struck me, such as imagery and the sparseness of words particularly. And I was wondering is that, is there a process of sort of redrafting poems or do you just let them marinate in your head and then put them down? Because you'd also said that usually it takes about a couple of hours of work and then you know you're done with the first draft. So how much, what do I say, how much of the poem is done with the first draft typically?

With the first draft I would say about 30-40% and the rest of the work happens during re-visits and re-drafting and the editing process.

So that would take a few months and I keep going back to it.

But sometimes you're lucky and it just happens in the first draft and you feel, okay, this poem is kind of complete and I'm happy with the way it is turned out.

But that's not something that happens often.

So usually I revisit it, I write something down, I complete the first draft and then and I go back to it after a few days, then I feel something is out of place or something has to go, a word has to change or an image has to go, then I do that.

So that's what happens.

And your fiction–by which I mean your prose–also has the resonance of poetry and in the case of C: A Novel there were of course several poems within the novel itself. So could you tell me a little bit about your craft as far as the novel is concerned? Because you mentioned just now that you have to sort of think of a plot and everything. Would you say you're a spontaneous writer or do you plan chapters and formats ahead?

No, I'm very bad at planning in fact.

I'm more of a spontaneous writer definitely.

And yeah, I let the idea sit and kind of marinate in my head, but the actual writing process is more spontaneous.

And even when I was writing C, though I had a general plot in mind, I had a general idea, a lot of it happened organically, a lot of it happened spontaneously, the developing of the idea.

So very rarely did I sit down and draw out an outline and then decide okay this is how I'm gonna go about it.

I did not do that with the novel.

Same thing happens with poetry. I don't decide beforehand this is how it should happen.

So I'm definitely a spontaneous writer.

That's in fact my I am I think that is how I am as an individual as well.

I'm quite spontaneous and quite instinctive.

I go by impulse I go by what I feel at the moment that's that that drives my writing as well.

So you come from a family of musicians, three generations of stalwart singers in the Malayalam and Tamil film industry. So I'm guessing you sing as well?

Yes, I do.

In what ways do you think that musicality, sort of the genetic musicality and the fact that you yourself are a singer, how does that, in what ways does that inform your poetry?

Right.

So evidently music is a very important part of my life and music is in my blood.

And I sing, I even learnt music, you know, I've learnt Hindustani classical, vocal music.

So even though I don't sing professionally, I think when it comes to my writing, especially poetry, that the rhythm matters a lot so that is where the music comes in the spoken form of it so once I write a poem I read it aloud to just to kind of get a sense of how it sounds and just to see if there is a music to it and what can bring in the music, so the breaking of the lines, the choice of the words and how the poem begins and ends.

For instance, I use repetition as a technique often and I sometimes repeat words, I sometimes repeat sentences, I repeat lines and I think all these are part of this quest for rhythm and music in my verse.

Perhaps that is how it informs my writing.

And I'm guessing a lot of the poets whom you read as you were growing up are now friends, but who were your favorite poets growing up?

Yeah, they're my friends, but I'm not very young, you know.

So there aren't vast age differences between the poets I admired as a novice writer and who are now my friends.

So many of them were my mentors.

I was very fortunate to get some fantastic mentors as I was writing, you know, even the publishing of my first book of poetry happened thanks to my mentors who have now become great friends of mine and my supporters.

So I'm always thankful to Arundhati–Arundhati Subramanian–Ranjit Hoskote and Jerry Pinto.

So they kind of discovered my voice so to speak and it is because of them that I was able to bring out my first book of poems Nine from Speaking Tiger in association with the Jehangir Sabavala Trust.

So I'm very fortunate and over the years they've just become wonderful friends as well.

You know, they've come home, they know my cat, that kind of thing.

So yeah, but as I was growing up, I guess in let's say in my late teens or early 20s, it was the powerful voices of Indian poetry who really struck me.

I mean, I always had favorites like, you know, Sylvia Plath who I think influenced generations of women all over the world.

I was shocked into…  kind of, you know, into silence, into silent admiration and a certain fierce passion which was lying dormant in me came alive when I discovered her verse.

It was the same kind of response I had to Kamala Das for instance and I absolutely admired A K Ramanujan and then people like Adil Jussawala who again is a poet I admire greatly.

So I was very happy to discover and read and enjoy Indian poetry, the generations of Indian poets, Jeet (Thayil), all of them, that entire generation and of course people like Ranjit, Arundhati, Jerry, whose poetry I also used to review even before I got to know them because I used to write for the Hindu Literary Review and I was fortunate to review some of their work as well.

So this is the kind of poetry I used to admire.

I still admire many of their works.

I admire poets like Maya Angelou, you know, even now.

They're all there at my desk.

So I keep returning to them from time to time.

You spoke earlier about the rhythm in your poetry and that is something I have noticed, how you use repetition, it's almost like loops of words, you know, it's all like one uses strains of music or a particular line. But you also have got very strong visual elements in your poetry and you have experimented with visual poems as well. So where did that come from? Did it take you a while to build up the confidence or did that also come naturally to you?

Actually quite the reverse.

In fact in my early phase of writing is when I used to do a lot of those experiments.

You know, experiments with form, the idea of trying something visual, even though it's not really concrete poetry … but like in Nine for instance you would see a poem called Love which ends with the word “drips”. And the poem is kind of shaped like an inverse triangle. It is kind of there to seem like something is kind of reducing and at the end of it all you have is a drop.

So that was the way I shaped that poem.

And that is one definite visual element I can think of which was very deliberate.

Even in C', my novel which is written in prose and poetry, there is a visual element that comes in where there's a sentence, there is a word which goes like steps, you know, like a flight of stairs. And it was meant to convey a fall, it was meant to convey a low, a kind of depth that the protagonist was falling into.

So I like to do these experiments but not for the sake of it, only if it absolutely makes sense and only if I feel that it kind of adds character to what I'm writing but otherwise I don't have too many of those elements.

Your poetry in general is extremely personal and you know it's not just your poetry… I would say of fiction as well …  and it has this quality of looking brutally at oneself, as the narrator, perhaps as the poetic persona or perhaps even as the speaker herself and they're very honest poems and obviously you know poetry is persona l… so when one puts a poem out there, so much of who one is is also out in the world and when did you feel ready to put them out in the world because I know that you had started writing poetry long before the poems were published even in journals. So when did you feel ready to put your work out in the world?

I think this happened with a certain maturity in terms of age as well, even though I was writing … I started writing seriously in my mid to late 20s and my first published poem was I think, you know, I was probably 27 or 28.

And that was in The Little Magazine, which was this wonderful publication.

And I think I just felt that there was something in that poem which had to capture and which had to be shared with the rest of the world.

It was based on a family story—like a legend which I wanted to put out there.

So it was personal but it was also not intensely personal and that issue of The Little Magazine was on the theme of ghosts.

And this poem was about, you know, the poem was called "The House of Dreams" and that's my first published poem.

That poem was about a house that did not exist anymore except that the memories were like ghosts, you know, haunting everybody, especially me.

So I felt that, I mean, I was not responding to any theme in particular. I had just sent it into the magazine and I was very surprised, very pleasantly surprised to see it being published by The Little Magazine. They included it in their ghost issue which later made sense to me.

And my first book appeared when I was 40.

So I waited a while. I was not in a hurry to bring out the book.

You know, a lot of people, a lot of my contemporary writers, a lot of them were bringing out books and even though there was this longing inside me to see a book out there, I kind of took my time. I thought, I shouldn't hurry.

Let the poems be written, let them age, let them mature. I'll take my time with the manuscript. And that manuscript was 10 years in making. Finally, it came out in 2015. I thought, okay, let things happen at the right time.

I've never been in a hurry to bring out books, you know. So even my second book took five years to write. I started writing it in 2017, and it came out in 2022. So not even five years more than that. So no, five years.

Only Bitter Gourd, in fact, there's not much of a gap between my last and Bitter Gourd.  About two years or one and a half years later, the book was out. That's because I was always writing the poems and I was collecting them. But still there were a lot of poems I left out of the manuscript.

Okay.

Yeah, so I guess I thought that, you know, once the poems are out, I want to be proud of every book, every poem that is there in the book. So that is the reason I took time.

There is another aspect to your writing. You also are a translator from Malayalam to English. So, can you tell me a little bit about because you grew up outside Kerala, you grew up in Madras and what is your relationship with the language, the Malayalam language, and what drew you to translation and when you take on–because obviously you also have your own work, your own creative work to attend to…what is it which motivates you to take on a particular translation, how do you choose?

So yes, I grew up in Madras, born and raised there, so I never studied Malayalam. I always spoke it very well and over the years I kind of taught myself to read the language but I can't write it. The reason I turned to translation was I wanted to understand this particular language better. It was the language of my family, it's the language of my roots, the language of my so-called culture.

But I never really considered it my mother tongue, so to speak. Because, you know, my language of expression is English. My language of dream, my language of anger, my language of rage, desire, dream, hope.

Everything is English. So, you know, I wanted to kind of negotiate the reality of my roots and see if I could discover more through Malayalam.

And that is the reason I thought I should maybe understand this process. And the first step I took into that field was through my M. Phil. thesis. I did my M. Phil. from Madras, on three novels of M T Vasudevan Nair so that was a very structured way I stepped into that whole area. So translation was starting to become a huge area of interest for scholars, for translators, for publishing houses. This was in the mid-90s and Katha used to bring out these wonderful books.

So that is how I started getting interested in translation. And then later I thought, why don't I try my hand at it? And I came to know Paul Zacharia, who as you know is one of the foremost contemporary writers in Kerala,  his works are well known all over the world through translation and he lives in Toronto too.

So I thought why don't I give it a shot and I translated a short story of his and he was happy with it too and that got published and then over the years I started translating more and more of his stories because you know we have a certain friendship, a certain understanding of each other's style and that is how that happened.

I haven't really branched out into translating more of other writers but it's been mostly working with Paul Zacharia but I've also translated Anitha Thampi who is another well-known Malayalam poet.

I've translated her poems for Poetry at Sangam. And yeah, so this is the reason I wanted to understand the language better. I thought I would discover it through translation and that is how that happened. And, finally, what are you working on at this moment?

Well I'm working on my next novel and it's taking its time and it's a very slow process.I've written a chapter or two, but I'm going to be rewriting it very soon because I'm not very happy with the way it's turning out. So there's a lot of revision required.

So I'm sure I'm going to be starting all over again. But it's okay. I want to write some write something that I'll be proud of, you know.

And yeah, so that's the next novel. Okay, so we look forward to that. Thank you so much for joining us for our podcast and we wish you all the very best.

Thank you so much, Nandini.

Really appreciate it and I'm really glad you're doing this because we need more forums, we need more readers, we need more listeners for literature. So, thank you.