Poppies in Translation

Indonesia, South Africa, Estonia, Lithuania, Shetland, Nicaragua. Many worlds meet in these poems as nature dyes Sujata Bhatt’s many languages with its own hues. The real merges with the surreal and the allegorical; certainties are undone in an open-ended quest. A Chinese cook ignores a predatory snake, a heart surgeon lives most intensely between operations, Gregor Samsa’s sister proposes a different sort of metamorphosis, someone listens to the Holy Ghost sing, a woman hears her daughter’s voice in birdsong, and the poppies in translation mutate according to the languages and histories they inhabit, ultimately persisting in a space beyond language. At times, language itself is injured by history: Bhatt reimagines the haunted undertow of postwar Germany as experienced by Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Meanwhile, the poppies are ever-present.

Sujata Bhatt is a graduate of the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and the recipient of a Cholmondeley Award and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She is the award-winning author of the poetry volumes Brunizem, Collected Poems, A Colour of Solitude, Monkey Shadows, Point No Point, Pure Lizard, and The Stinking Rose.