Poetry
तरुण तपसी
Not translated into English
Lekhnath Paudyal · 1953
Synopsis
At dusk, a poet who has just lost his wife stops beneath the tree of a wayside resting place, beside a road. The spirit of the tree appears to him in the guise of a sage and tells him its life: its childhood among the animals, the kite left caught in its branches, the nest it sheltered, then adolescence and the hunting of birds. Readers see in it the life of a tree, from its fragile birth to the age when it gives its shade to all, through the seasons and trials.
Context
The poem appeared in 1953 from Sajha Prakashan; it has nineteen cantos written in a learned metre, the shikharini; its author presented it as a modern poem rather than as a classical epic. Behind the story of the tree, the allegory targets the ostentation, oppression, exploitation and greed of men, and the bird stands for the oppressed, as in an earlier poem by the same author. A Nepali playwright, who wrote the preface to a 1965 edition, saw in it a major stage in the literature of the country.
Who it is for
A long poem in learned Nepali. It exists neither in French nor in English; Nepalese schools have it read.
Prizes and reception
The poem brought its author public fame, as shown by the chariot drawn by his admirers in 1955; Sajha Prakashan still reissues it.
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