Poetry
बैरागी काइँलाका कविताहरू
Not translated into English
Bairagi Kainla · 1974
Synopsis
The poems draw on Greek, African and Limbu mythologies to illuminate, through comparisons, the Nepalese society of their time; among them are Aawaran, Aaunlaharu chumera and Ek raat. Their language is dense and at times obscure, loaded with implication, to the point that the writer Abhi Subedi finds in them an organisation of the poem complex enough to have changed the way his contemporaries wrote, according to The Kathmandu Post.
Context
The book was published in 1974 by Sajha Prakashan and received the Sajha Prize; it is its author's first. Its poems come from the movement that he had launched in Darjeeling against social realism, then dominant in Nepali letters, and which claimed a postmodern outlook, according to a Kathmandu daily. Manjushree Thapa, who translated one poem into English, stresses their subtle connotations. Phoenix Books later reissued them in an expanded volume.
Who it is for
In Nepali, short and difficult poems, with no French or English translation of the collection. It is best to know that the Limbu are a people of the country's eastern hills.
Prizes and reception
Sajha Prize. The collection placed its author, together with two companions, among those through whom Nepali poetry entered modernity.