Shrikant Verma Magadh review, recensie en informatie over de inhoud van de Hindi dichtbundel uit 1984 van de Indiase schrijver. Op 7 oktober 2025 verschijnt bij And Other Stories de Engelse vertaling van het boek met gedichten van de uit India afkomstige schrijver Shrikant Verma. Een Nederlandse vertaling van het boek is niet verkrijgbaar.
Shrikant Verma Magadh review en recensie
- “Shrikant Verma brought to everything he did, whether poetry or journalism, a coruscating insight into the modes and styles of political supremacy. In Magadh, his collection of verse, excellently translated, we can see, eerily prefigured, our own present: the grand illusions, the raucous vanity, the chronic self-doubt and ultimate fragility of power.” (Pankaj Mishra)
- “Forty years after, these poems are more relevant than ever, telling of power’s hollow victories, the peculiar burden of joy, how sorrow finds us wherever we may hide. This luminous translation renders Verma’s classic into timeless English prose. One of its many questions – “Whose corpse is this?” – has been answered by our own ongoing hollow moment: yours and mine.” (Jeet Tayil)
Magadh
- Auteur: Shrikant Verma (India)
- Soort boek: Indiase Hindi poëzie, gedichten
- Origineel: Magadh (1984)
- Engelse vertaling: Rahul Soni
- Uitgever: And Other Books
- Verschijnt: 7 oktober 2025
- Omvang:
- Uitgave: paperback / ebook
- Prijs: £ 14,99
- Winnaar Sahitya Akademi Award
- Boek bestellen bij: Bol / Libris
Flaptekst van het boek met gedichten van Shrikant Verma de Hindi schrijver
Magadh, Shrikant Verma’s masterpiece, was first published in Hindi in 1984 and is widely regarded as one of the most important works of modern Indian poetry. A chorus of narrators – commoners, statesmen, nameless wanderers – pieces together the histories of ancient cities and kingdoms on the Indian subcontinent, their rise to splendour, their decline and eventual fall. In poems that are stark and urgent yet arch and richly allusive, Verma lays bare their tales of corruption, guilt, ignorance and arrogance.
Rahul Soni’s landmark translation stays faithful to the spare, haunting, incantatory cadences of the original, revealing how startlingly prescient and relevant Magadh remains today.
Shrikant Verma was born on 18 September 1931 in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, India. He was a central figure in the Nai Kavita literary movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Verma served as special correspondent for Dinman, a major Hindi periodical, from 1966 to 1977. In 1976, he was elected a member of the Rajya Sabha on a Congress party ticket, and served as spokesman of the party through the late 1970s to the early 80s. He published two collections of short fiction, a novel, a travelogue, essays and five collections of poetry. Verma won a number of prizes, including the Sahitya Akademi Award posthumously, for Magadh, in 1987. He died at the age of 54 on 25 May 1986 in New York City