A four-day international, multilingual, multicultural, traveling poetry festival, held across Kolkata and New Delhi, from 15th to 19th of March 2023, Canto Poetry Festival brought together poets and writers in engaging conversations about the process of their writing and the intimate act of writing poetry.
From Akhil Katyal and Aditi Angiras’s edited anthology of South Asian Queer Poetry, The World That Belongs to Us, to Megha Rao’s powerful collection of poems in Teething, the sessions were carefully curated and offered audiences insightful interventions and ideas about poetry and its inherent ability to challenge language to narrate challenging, ‘marginal’ stories. Megha Rao was in conversation with Karuna Ezara Parikh, whose brilliant poems in Where Stories Gather testify to the power of the ordinary.
Mani Rao’s lyrical translation of the epic Sanskrit hymn, Saundarya Lahiri was also discussed. An ode to the primordial goddess, the hymn has been rendered beautifully in English by Rao. Rao talked to Alison James about her eloquent translation process.
In conversation with Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, Vivek Narayanan discussed his evocative, rebellious rendition of Valmiki’s Ramayana, as represented in his poetry cycles in After. Rohan Chhetri and Tishani Doshi also discussed their respective books in invigorating conversations.
Lastly, in a thoughtful conversation on poetry and translation, Joy Goswami was joined by his translator Sampurna Chattarji. They discussed his verses in After Death Comes Water and Selected Poems by Joy Goswami.
ABOUT CANTO POETRY FESTIVAL
CANTO: a four-day international, multilingual, multicultural, traveling poetry festival, held across Kolkata and New Delhi, from 15th to 19th of March 2023. This festival brought together some of the most eminent poets, translators and intellectuals globally, including George Szirtes (Man International Booker Prize, T.S. Elliot Prize), Vijay Seshadri (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry), Daljit Nagra (Forward Prize), Wendy Doniger (PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, Tishani Doshi (Forward Prize, Eric Greegory Award), Amit Chaudhuri (Commonwealth Writer’s Prize & Infosys Prize in Humanities), Rosanna Warren (American Academy of Arts & Letters, Guggenheim Foundation), K. Satchidanandan (Dante Medal), Bibek Debroy (Padma Shri) and a host of Sahitya Akademi Award winners, including Joy Goswami, Anita Nair, and Arundhati Subramaniam. The festival is curated and directed by Avik Chanda. Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas is the festival advisor.
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