Dichter

Sachin Ketkar

(India, 1972)

Biografie

Sachin Ketkar was selected by Marathi poet Hemant Divate for the November 2008 edition of PIW India, ‘Poets on Poets’.

Sachin Ketkar (born 1972) is a writer, translator and critic, based in Baroda, Gujarat. He has authored two collections of poems – one in Marathi and one in English – and has translated and edited an anthology of contemporary Marathi poetry, entitled Live Update. He has worked on translating fiction and poetry from Gujarati and Marathi into English. His translation projects have focused on the work of Gujarati short fiction writers, Nazir Mansuri and Mona Patrawala, as well as 15th-century Gujarati poet, Narsinh Mehta. He holds a doctorate in translation studies and works as a Reader in the Department of English at the MS University, Baroda. He is also a contributing editor for New Quest, a journal for participatory cultural enquiry in Mumbai.

Writes Hemant Divate on the poet of his choice:

“Sachin is one of the most unusual talents in contemporary Marathi poetry today . . . He can be very detached about himself, and at the same time, he reflects upon the world in an exceedingly personal way. This makes his poems paradoxically self-centred and other-centred. He usually writes about mundane and ‘un-poetic’ objects in an exceptionally imaginative way.

“He translates the everyday world into an outlandish and bizarre work of art. . . . He grapples with contemporary social and personal problems in a poetic way by using and abusing images from the technological sphere and the present-day metropolitan milieu: the world of internet and mobiles, multiplex theatres, shopping malls and photocopying shops.”

Divate’s observations are clearly substantiated in the three Ketkar poems selected for this edition. While images of a fast-moving globalised world flow thick and fast, the poems seem essentially fuelled by a spirit of intellectual enquiry. A world of blogs and limited-over cricket matches rubs shoulders with a medieval world of myth and epic. Thus, in the poem about Jarasandha – the king of Magadha in the Mahabharata, who was memorably vanquished in combat by being torn apart lengthwise and thrown in opposite directions – the images seem primarily to be a means to probe cultural ironies and historical dislocations: “I order desi liquor / In the English wine shop. / In the desi shop/ It's the English liquor that I order.” Torn between his native soil and the cyber café, between T.S. Eliot and medieval Marathi saint poet, Dnyaneshwar, the poet parodies the postcolonial predicament in an extended literary conceit.

Divate concludes: “All this makes Sachin Ketkar’s vision and style particularly idiosyncratic and original. He is also one of the best young translators and critics in Marathi today.”

Bibliography

Poetry

Bhintishivaicya Khidkitun Dokavtana, (Marathi poems), Abhidhanantar Prakashan, Mumbai, 2004

A Dirge for the Dead Dog and other Incantations' (English poems), Sanbun Publishers, New Delhi, 2003

As Translator and Editor

Live Update: An Anthology of Recent Marathi Poetry, Poetrywala Publications, Mumbai, 2005

Links

Live Update: A Brief Introduction to New Marathi Poetry
Poet, editor and translator Sachin Ketkar discusses a contemporary Marathi poetry milieu in a state of creative ferment, and introduces his anthology of new Marathi poetry.

esnips; Live Spaces; Good Reads
Some websites with Sachin Ketkar’s profile and more English and Marathi poems.

Geocities
Sachin Ketkar's English translations of the 15th-century Gujarati saint-poet, Narsinh Mehta

Gedichten

ALL THIS FUSS ABOUT SKIN EXCERPTS FROM JARASANDHA\'S BLOG HAIRFALL AND PHOTOCOPIES THE CITY WHICH DOESN’T GO ANYWHERE

Gedichten

Gedichten van Sachin Ketkar

Partners

LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère

Sachin Ketkar

Sachin Ketkar

Gedichten

All This Fuss about Skin

Excerpts from Jarasandha\'s Blog

Hairfall and Photocopies

The City Which Doesn’t Go Anywhere

Sponsors

Partners