The Almost Island Manuscript Contest

Everyone who reads this blog knows what a fantastic journal Almost Island is. Not only do they have great work online, they have also produced three of the most wonderful works in book form that I have seen in the last five years - Adil Jussawalla's Trying to Say Goodbye, Rahul Soni's translations of Shrikant Verma's Magadh and Sharmishtha Mohanty's little-reviewed, but beautiful Five Movements in Praise.

I've just got this mail from Almost Island, announcing their first ever Manuscript Contest, and I thought I'd put the entire contents of the mail, guidelines and all, up here for the benefit of my readers.

If you have something that is experimental, cross-genre, that you especially feel you can't place with regular publishers, this is your chance. 

Here goes:

Almost Island invites submissions to its first manuscript competition. Books of poetry, experimental prose and cross-genre works, in English or in English translation, by citizens or residents of South Asian countries are eligible. (A book is defined here for convenience as a minimum of 55 A4 pages.) 

The winner of the competition will be published by Almost Island Books, an Indian imprint with international distribution. The second and third placed manuscripts will be considered for publication in the journal. Preference will be given to works that are distinctive, assured and path-breaking. 

Till date Almost Island has published three books: the poet Adil Jussawalla's third collection, Trying To Say Goodbye, his first after a gap of thirty-five years; Five Movements in Praise, a work of fiction by Sharmistha Mohanty, and a translation of Shrikant Verma's Magadh by Rahul Soni. Read more about the books here: http://almostisland.com/books.php

Almost Island is an attempt to fill a particular lacuna: to champion great work, with relevance for Indian and international contexts, that may have been sidelined because it is too experimental, quirky, "difficult", strange or "serious". Obviously, to say this is not to impose any narrow aesthetic or tone -- we will look closely at anything that is original and distinctive.

Final judges for this year will be Adil Jussawalla and Eliot Weinberger, in conjunction with Almost Island editors Sharmistha Mohanty, Vivek Narayanan and Rahul Soni.

About the Judges

Adil Jussawalla has four collections of poems: Land's End, Missing Person, and the more recent Trying to Say Goodbye, and The Right Kind of Dog. A collection of prose, Maps for a Mortal Moon, selected and introduced by Jerry Pinto, appeared in 2014. Jussawalla has also edited, New Writing in India (1974), a snapshot of Indian writing in the sixties, across languages, which is still widely and closely read today. He was one of the founder members of the influential poets' publishing co-operative Clearing House, which brought out eight books of poems between 1976 and 1984. His poems have been translated into several Indian and European languages. He lives in Mumbai.

Eliot Weinberger's books of essays include Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, and Oranges & Peanuts for Sale. His political writings are collected in What I Heard About Iraq -- called by the Guardian the one antiwar "classic" of the Iraq war -- and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is the translator of the poetry of Bei Dao, the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, and the general editor of a new series, Calligrams: Writings from and on China, jointly published by Chinese University of Hong Kong Press and New York Review Books. Other anthologies he has edited include World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions and American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators & Outsiders. Among his many translations of Latin American poetry and prose are The Poems of Octavio Paz, Paz's In Light of India, Vicente Huidobro's Altazor, and Jorge Luis Borges' Seven Nights and Selected Non-Fictions. His work has been translated into over thirty languages, and appears often in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He was born in New York City, where he still lives, and has been a frequent visitor to India since the late 1970s.

Deadline

The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2015.

The winner (and shortlist) will be announced on July 1, 2015.

Eligibility

Open to citizens and long-term (at least five years) residents of South Asian countries (i.e. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan).

Guidelines

1. Entries must be original work in English. Translations are also acceptable if they have not appeared in English before.

2. Manuscripts must be substantially unpublished. If individual poems or portions of the manuscript have been published before, or are forthcoming in journals, the first page of the manuscript must contain a detailed and accurate listing of which pages have already been published before, or are forthcoming, and where.

3. Only one entry per person is permitted.

4. No simultaneous submissions, please. We plan to make all decisions public by July 1, 2015

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5. Winners of the competition must be open to a possible editorial process with the editors of Almost Island before they are published. Almost Island reserves the right to not publish the winning entry until it is deemed ready.

6. There is no contest fee.

How to Apply

Submit the full manuscript of poetry or prose by email to almostisland.contest@gmail.com

Please take note that our submissions window will open on December 15, 2014 and close on March 1, 2015.

Make sure to follow these instructions:

(i) The subject line of the email should be as follows:

[SUBMISSION] Your Name - Manuscript Title

(ii) The body of the email should contain: the title, number of pages, author's or translator's name, physical address, email address and phone number.

(iii) Attachment 1: Each submission should be accompanied by a self-signed and scanned attestation that the author or translator is a citizen, or a resident of a South Asian country for five years or more (please specify which, how many years, etc). Shortlisted writers will later be asked for concrete proof of eligibility.

(iv) Attachment 2: The manuscript should be one single document in PDF format.

(v) The main body of the manuscript should not contain the author's name or any identifying marks, etc.

(vi) Poetry entries must be single-spaced in a standard 12-point font unless otherwise necessary.

(vii) Prose entries must be double-spaced in a standard 12-point font unless otherwise necessary.

Submissions that do not follow these instructions will be rejected.

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Almost Island reserves the right to disqualify or reject any entry that we determine, in our sole and absolute discretion, does not meet all the above criteria. 

Almost Island reserves the right to declare no winner for the contest if the judges find no entry strong enough for publication.

The judges' decisions are final and binding.

Further queries and questions can be sent to almostisland.edit@gmail.com
 

Shrikant Verma's Magadh

My review of Shrikant Verma's Magadh, in a new translation by Rahul Soni, appeared yesterday in The Sunday Guardian.
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Magadh

Srikant Verma, translated by Rahul Soni

Almost Island. Pp.157. Rs. 399.

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The Hindi poet Srikant Verma wrote Magadh over two years: 1979 and 1984. For this work he was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award posthumously in 1987.

A cursory search on Google throws up several translations of the work, not just into English but also into Bengali and Gujarati. Rahul Soni’s translation, therefore, is not the first one. A journal that Soni himself co-edits, Pratilipi, has translations of two poems from Magadh by the poet Vijay Dharwadkar.

Comparing that translation with Soni’s it becomes clear that there is something unique about the project that Soni has undertaken over the last half decade: in his translator’s note, Soni describes his process as a movement from ‘free renderings’ to ‘a stricter more faithful method’ in order to ‘mirror its simple, crystalline vocabulary’.

The vocabulary and syntax is the first striking thing about Magadh. A child could read these poems more easily than they could any lesson set them in their second language course. But this simplicity is just a distraction. Verma, like the Vetal that the speaker of the ‘Invocation’ claims to be, is a master of misdirection. The poems may appear to be simple but they hide serious conundrums behind the paradoxes, repetitions and rhymes, between the deliberate statement-and-restatement and the rhetorical questions that Verma employs.

In many of the poems in Magadh, people are leaving or returning to cities. They are giving up their right to call one city their own while they live in another. They experience a divided sense of self and loyalty when they move between cities. And roads to and from cities seem to have a life and a destiny all their own. The pivotal question of the collection is, ‘Horseman/ where does this road go?’ but the traveller often cannot stay for an answer, cannot accept the one he is given or cannot interpret it to his satisfaction.

Read together, read as a whole, the accumulated effect of these poems put the reader in a state of deep confusion that can only be called existential. What do the names of these ancient cities matter to us, who cannot easily identify Magadh, Kosala or Ujjaini on a map? The speaker in the poem ‘Hastinapur’ speaks our mind for us when he says, ‘Consider/ a person/ left all alone – / why should he care when the Mahabharata was fought?’

In Magadh, the speakers – though they are sometimes guides or travellers – are often insiders or people loyal to those in power. In one poem, the speaker says, ‘Kosal is a republic in my imagination/ The people of Kosal are not happy/ because Kosal is a republic only in the imagination’. The tiny, subtle shift from one person’s imagined republic to a general, abstract idea of a republic that has not materialised, is a clever one.

As an insider himself – Srikant Verma began his political career with the Congress (I) first as spokesman, then as the General Secretary and finally was elected to the Rajya Sabha – Verma knows the value of mythologising the political and of making it ahistorical and for all time. A person left alone may not care when the Mahabharata was fought, but as no one knew better than Verma, a person is rarely left all alone and must therefore care about Hastinapur, Magadh, Kalinga – about all these other cities to which there are no roads.

Verma saw politics from close quarters and his experience of it is expressed in often disquieting ways in these poems. In ‘Interference’, the lines ‘peace must remain in Magadh’, ‘Order must remain in Magadh’ and ‘What will people say’, create a sense of unease that recall an earlier poem, ‘Wailing from the Inner Chambers’, that ends with these lines:

When

everyone

behaves

themselves,

when

everyone

thinks before

they speak,

why these tirades?

Find out.

Suddenly, the words’ find out’ take on a more sinister tone, its intent less benevolent and concerned and more punitive. It is hard not to remember that some of these poems were composed in the years following the Emergency.

Which brings me to the only quibble I have with this translation: I would have welcomed a little more context with regard to the composition of these poems. The Foreword by Ashok Vajpeyi discusses Verma’s involvement in politics and Soni himself mentions, but leaves unexplained, the intriguing fact that these poems were composed five years apart: some in 1979 but most in 1984.

Why did Verma let these poems be for all those years? What made him return to the earlier poems and give them their current shape with newer poems? An historical account of how Magadh came to be would have satisfied my curiosity with regard to the two dates 1979 and 1984. It is clear that the Emergency has something to do with the tone of some of the poems, but when in ’84 were the other poems written? Before Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination or after? Or both before and after?

Without this necessary context, the poems remain caught in a mythical mayajaal, whereas it seems to me that Verma’s poems are directed as sharply towards the present as they are to the distant past.

In all other ways, this translation is impeccable. Soni’s immersion in the text has resulted in a pared down, burnished rendition of Verma’s cycle of poems. His care with line breaks, his use of words chosen not just for meaning but sound, argue for a kind of rigour that is very welcome. Soni’s Note on the translation is a gem of precision and clarity, and completely free of any displays of pomposity.

As with Adil Jussawalla’s collection, Trying to Say Goodbye, also brought out by Almost Island, much care has been taken over the design of the book. The poems in Hindi and the translations on the facing page move together, nearly perfectly line by line. Going by the quality of paper and size of book, it would seem that Almost Island is going for a specific ‘look’ for their poetry collections and that – if it means that there will be more poetry in the months to come – can only be good news.
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In other news, I had recently reviewed two of Anand Thakore's books - Elephant Bathing and Mughal Sequence - for Biblio. It's not one of the free articles, so if you want to read it, you'd have to buy it and I don't even know why I'm telling you this, but just thought I'd put it out there.
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Also, this continued absence from the net is very addictive and I just can't seem to drag myself back. What to do? (I say it as if it's a bad thing).

 

Almost Island, late 2012

Having just noticed that Almost Island has a new issue up, I feel the year has got off to a very good start. Anu almost-apology you might detect in the editorial should be set aside because there may not be many things, but what things there are, are a feast in themselves.

Adil Jussawalla in a 45 page conversation wiht Vivek Narayanan and Sharmistha Mohanty, and László Krasznahorkai  in a shorter but no less illuminating conversation with Sharmistha Mohanty and Kabir Mohanty.

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I am envious of my friends who have proper reading diaries and know exactly what (and how much of what) they have read in any given month. It's something I ought to have done but never, ever have in all my life.

Last year, I resolved to learn poetry and failed unspectacularly at it. What can I say? No ambition, that's me.

This year's resolve to at least make a note of what I've read, watched and listened to seems more doable and it gives me a great feeling of achievement when I see the page filling up with stuff.

Of course, this makes no sense unless I also say a little bit about what I thought of all the things I've been reading/watching etc., but whether I'll post about it remains to be seen.

This is a good time to remind myself that I've had Bela Tarr's Satantango, based on László Krasznahorkai's book, for over a year now and still haven't watched it.

AI Winter 11

Almost missed noticing here that Almost Island is now up. Am reading Mukta Sambrani and. Well, and nothing.

Go read.