VARIETIES OF LYRICAL EXPERIENCE

Comparing the literatures of two or more nations isn't exactly an easy task, especially when the common element examined happens to be the lyric- the primal literary genre, archaeologically and anthropologically speaking. More so, with the European romantic concept of the lyric already embedded in the textual imagination. Which needless to say has not only been the defining moment for modern Asian, and South Asian literatures, but also in recent experience, the breeding ground for comparative literature specialists to examine in some detail the exact nature of the tradition as well as the corruptions, disruptions, and possible avenues of reviving the tradition. Amiya Dev calls it "renovation," which presumes "literary maturities," according to Earl Miner the other editor of the book. Presumably the book intends to display that maturity in its inclusion of diversity in authors, literatures, topics, and approaches to the study of lyric in respective culture from Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Greek and Indian. It's a capsule experience of intercultural studies.

The tradition of the lyric - where the individual, social, and community response to a 'basic' human emotion like love, death, life, beauty, nature, embodied in song - is neither a western import, nor has it been erased from public memory even though the Romantics are long gone. It certainly has been ruptured to an extent, primarily with the onslaught of colonial power and domination in especially the Asian continent. Kim Uchang (Ch 2) suggests that Japanese domination of Korea since the last century has had a telling effect on Korean poetry. It has resulted in adaptation of the Japanese seven-five metre in poetry, which means a loss of the complex varying syllabic prosody in the Korean lyric. Again, the Japanese haiku, written in the seven-five metre too has influenced modern Korean poetry, thereby "succinctly" reshaping the "process of figuration of the (Korean) world in poetry." Desi situations, discussed both by Sisir K. Das (Ch 5) and Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta (Ch 6) entail the gradual erosion of the influence of ancient and medieval corpus of poetry constituting nature, love,body and soul, on the later Indian, including Tamil and Bengali poetry, since the 19th century.

The wealth of the lyrical experience in "Indian" poetry is evident in the Upanishads and the traditional medieval Bengali poetry for instance (mangal kavyas, baromasis), as Dasgupta asserts. There can be little doubt regarding their influence in shaping Bengali poetry of Madhusudan Dutta and Biharilal Chakravarti - the latter of whom influenced more than most the early Rabindranath. Rabindranath's encounters with rustic Bengal from his early childhood to his youthful days, including his visits to his zamindari estate in Shilaidaha, as well as later sojourns in Santiniketan, has been immortalised in hundreds of poems - in a manner reminiscent of a close reading of the Romantics in the context of a highly sensuous, localised natural landscape of Bengal. Both the essayists are conscious of the transformations in reception and practice of the lyric in the latter day scenario. That the lyric since the 19th century has no longer been of a specific religious value according to the cult (Vaishnava, Saiva, Sufi) it identified itself with, meant that its development as an aesthetic, conceptually affective literary form was no long expressive of the devotional strain, typical of the medieval lyric. The gradual adaptation of the Petrarchan sonnet by Madhusudan into amitrakshar chhanda (fourteen line poems, which retained popularity until Jibanananda, he post-Tagorean, and the last of the Bengali romantics, probably), was a clever display of provincialisation of Europe. Of course the indigenous elements of the lyric like nature, love, and God were not altogether lost. How much has remained of the essentially rustic lyric form in Bengal from the medieval to the modern makes an interesting read in the essay discussing baromasis - the poetry of the seasonal, spiritual, mundane experience of life in the country.

An interesting comparative study (Ch 3) by Steven Shankman registers the degree of commonality between ancient Chinese and Greek practice of the lyric. The premise of both the cultures is defined as being devoid of a sense of the primacy, of the individual. While Sappho's most complete poem (Sappho 16) displays the other in the self, ancient China is defined by "shame culture," equally represented in the "Classic of Poetry. 76." "The young woman who is the speaker of the "Classic of Poetry, 76" is deeply fearful of what people will say, or their frequent gossip. Sappho, too considers what people will say." The most enduring comparison between the two is the denial of epic grandeur and the subsumption of the grand military experience - constitutionally epical - by a sense of prepossessing love. Thus qualifying for the lyrical position, undoubtedly.

Two essays (Ch 4 and 7) deal with the changing forms of the same experience in Japan. Haroldo de Campos, the noted Brazilian poet, pays a scholarly tribute to the poems by Princess Nukata (born 630 AD), who survived a period of bloody intrigue at the Japanese court, proving equally artful in poetry, love and politics. The diet, though staple in courtly experience produces an effective genre of poetry, which again is the subject of de Campos' interpretation. Or that is what we experience in the essay. He "enters the Yamato world of the Princess," as Miner suggests, "adding to his translations a new poem of his own, 'Koi,' or erotic love." This, Miner thinks, is lyric renovation at the source level. It's also an instance of renovation of the genre from within, like the adaptive techniques of the Indian lyric scenario briefly discussed above.

Leith Morton's discussion (Ch 7), the longest in the book, is mindful too of ruptures and transformations of the genre from within. He uses the poetry of Yosano Akiko- one of the most modern Japanese poets (1878-1942), who in turn has adapted the oldest poetic form in Japanese literature to write extreme erotic poetry. Her experience of the clash of two worlds - the old and the new in Japan - Is symptomatic of her use of the kyuha waka (old style) and the shintaishi (new style), rhetorically celebrated by Yosano Tekkan (1873-1935), Akiko's future husband in his 1910 collection:
We have not yet exhausted
This thing called love
Myself and one other
Have made new
The poetry of Japan.
The essays that sample the varieties of lyrical experience from China, Korea, Japan, Greece and India, may not have been able to create enough empirical ground for an inference in favour of the radically different formulations of the lyric to be renovated today, but they surely do indicate a consciousness of renewal at work. The very allocation of individual space to the varieties of lyrical experience asserts the sought after 'difference' which keeps the "much-debated cultural relativism" realm alive. Does that overwrite the privileged discourse of the post-modern omnibus? To an extent, yes. But there's a long way to go.

--Abhijeet Paul
-The Statesman (3 June 2001)