Tag: Arthur

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celebrations

Borderless Birthday Bonanza

Figments caught straying in whispers of a dream,
Weave together till they form a visible stream,
Filling a void with voices that sing,
With freedom and impunity ring,
Giving credence to a distant, imagined realm.

— Introduction, Monalisa No Longer Smiles: An Anthology of Writings from across the World

As we complete three years of our virtual existence in clouds, connecting, collecting and curating words of ideators, we step into our fourth year with the pleasurable experience of being in bookshops in hardcopy too. Monalisa No Longer Smiles: An Anthology of Writings from across the World, our first hardcopy anthology, takes us into the realm of real books which have evolved over eons in history. This anthology connects us to those who hesitate to step into the virtual world created by technology. And there are many such people – as ingrained in the human heritage is a love for rustling paper and the smell of books. We have had some excellent reviews, praising not just the content but also the production of the book – the cover, the print and the feel. The collection bonds traditional greats with upcoming modern voices. We are grateful to our publisher, Om Books International, Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, Jyotsna Mehta and their team for giving our book a chance. We do look forward to more anthologies hopefully in the future.

The writings we have collected over the last three years are reflective of diverse voices— some in concurrence with our thought processes and some in discussion or even in divergence. We have a variety of forms — poetry, conversations, fiction and non-fiction. Some are humorous and some serious. We try to move towards creating new trends as reflected in our anthology and our journal. For instance, Monalisa No Longer Smiles starts with an experiment — a limerick was adapted to express the intent of our book and journal; whereas normally this form is used to express light, or even bawdy sentiments. Perhaps, as the limerick says, we will find credence towards a new world, a new thought, a restructuring of jaded systems that cry out for a change.

Borderless Journal did not exist before 2020. Within three years of its existence, our published pieces have found voices in this anthology, in other books, journals and even have been translated to a number of languages. Our own translation section grows stronger by the day supported by translators like Aruna Chakravarti, Fakrul Alam, Radha Chakravarty and Somdatta Mandal. Our interviews and conversations probe to find similarities and divergences in viewpoints. Our stories tell a good tale rather than indulge in stylistic interplay and our poetry is meant to touch hearts, creating a bond between the writers and anglophone readers. What we hope to do is to expose our readers to writing that they can understand. Writers get lost at times with the joy of creating something new or unique and construct an abstraction that can be intimidating for readers. We hope to host writing that is comprehensible, lucid and clear to the lay person.

What we look forward to homing in the coming months is a mingling of different art forms to birth new ideas that will help our species move progressively towards a world in harmony, filled with peace and love, giving credence to voices like that of Tagore, Nazrul or Lennon. “Imagine there’s no heaven…Imagine there’s no countries…no religion, too…Imagine all the people/ Livin’ life in peace…Imagine all the people/ Sharing all the world…” The need to redefine has been felt and as Lennon says in his last paragraph: “You may say I’m a dreamer/ But I’m not the only one/ I hope someday you’ll join us/ And the world will live as one.” With this hope, we continue our journey into another year – a new adventure that will take us to a universe where heaven can be found on Earth, grounded and real, within the human reach and can be shared without war, greed, hatred and anger.

Here, we share with you a few iconic pieces that have found their way to our pages within the last three years.

Poetry

Poems by Arundhathi Subramaniam houses three poems. Click here to read. The following poems from her collection can be found here.

  1. When God is a Traveller (titular poem from her Sahitya Akademi Award winning book)
  2. Eight Poems for Shankuntala
  3. The Fine Art of Ageing

Murmuration by Jared Carter. Click here to read.

Poems by Sukrita Paul Kumar: Poetry on Ukraine. Click here to read.

Arthurian Legends by Michael R Burch. Click here to read.

Conversations

Keith Lyons talks to Jessica Mudditt about her memoir, Our Home in Myanmar, and the current events. Click here to read.

Unveiling Afghanistan: In Conversation with Nazes Afroz, former editor of BBC and translator of a book on Afghanistan which reflects on the present-day crisis. Click here to read.

Professor Anvita Abbi, a Padma Shri, discusses her experience among the indigenous Andamanese and her new book on them, Voices from the Lost Horizon. Click here to read.

In Conversation with Akbar Barakzai, a ‘Part-time Poet’ in Exile: The last interview of Akbar Barakzai where he says, ‘The East and the West are slowly but steadily inching towards each other. Despite enormous odds “the twain” are destined to “meet” and be united to get rid of the geographical lines…’ Click here to read more.

The Making of Historical Fiction: A Conversation with Aruna Chakravarti unfolds the creation of her latest novel, The Mendicant Prince, based on the prince of Bhawal controversy in the first part of the last century. Click here to read. 

Fiction

Half-Sisters: Sohana Manzoor explores the darker regions of human thought with a haunting psychological narrative about familial structures. Click here to read.

Rituals in the Garden: Marcelo Medone discusses motherhood, aging and loss in this poignant flash fiction from Argentina. Click here to read.

Navigational Error: Luke P.G. Draper explores the impact of pollution with a short compelling narrative. Click here to read.

The American Wonder: Steve Ogah takes us to a village in Nigeria. Click here to read.

Columns

Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes: A column by Rhys Hughes which can be fun poetry or prose. Click here to read.

Bhaskar’s Corner: Essays on contemporary life by Bhaskar Parichha. Click here to read.

Musings of a Copywriter: Humour by Devraj Singh Kalsi. Click here to read.

Pandies’ Corner: These narratives highlight the ongoing struggle against debilitating rigid boundaries drawn by societal norms, with the support from organisations like Shaktishalini and Pandies. Click here to read.

Notes from Japan by Suzanne Kamata: A column that takes us closer to Japan. Click here to read.

Non- Fiction

Dilip Kumar: Kohinoor-e-Hind: Ratnottama Sengupta recollects the days the great actor sprinted about on the sets of Bombay’s studios …spiced up with fragments from the autobiography of Sengupta’s father, Nabendu Ghosh. Click here to read. 

The Ultimate Genius of Kishore Kumar: Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, an eminent film critic, writes on the legend of Kishore Kumar. Click here to read.

Farewell Keri Hulme: A tribute by Keith Lyons to the first New Zealand Booker Prize winner, Keri Hulme, recalling his non-literary encounters with the sequestered author. Click here to read.

Epaar Bangla, Opaar Bangla:  Bengals of the Mind: Asad Latif explores if homeland is defined by birth. Click here to read.

At Home in the World: Tagore, Gandhi and the Quest for Alternative Masculinities: Meenakshi Malhotra explores the role of masculinity in Nationalism prescribed by Tagore, his niece Sarala Debi, Gandhi and Colonials. Click here to read.

Just a Face on Currency Notes?: Debraj Mookerjee explores Gandhi-ism in contemporary times. Click here to read.

The Idea of India: Bharata Bhagya Bidhata – The Making of a Motherland: Anasuya Bhar explores the history of the National Anthem of India, composed by Tagore in Bengali and translated only by the poet himself and by Aruna Chakravarti. Click here to read.

Translations

Tagore Translations, including translations by Aruna Chakravarti, Fakrul Alam, Somdatta Mandal and Radha Chakravarty. Click here to read.

Nazrul Translations, including Professor Fakrul Alam and Sohana Manzoor. Click here to read.

Gandhi & Robot by Thangjam Ibopishak, translated from the Manipuri by Robin S Ngangom. Click here to read.

Songs of Freedom by Akbar Barakzai, poems translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.

Give Me A Rag, Please:A short story by Nabendu Ghosh, translated by Ratnottama Sengupta, set in the 1943 Bengal Famine, which reflects on man’s basic needs. Click here to read.

Thanks to our team, contributors and readers for being a part of our journey. Let’s sail onwards…

Painting by Sohana Manzoor

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

Categories
Musings

Grune Point and an Inkling of Eternity

By Mike Smith

Grune Point. Photo Courtesy: Mike Smith

It’s almost monochrome, the seascape, like a bleak Lowry: a single eye-scarring line across the off-white canvas. But there are other lines too, not quite level, drawn on the sky in soft pencil, Prussian blues among the clouds’ grey, not quite horizontal. And the horizon is not true. Dull green-grey hillsides, the heather not yet in flower, slide to the sea’s edge a mile or two across the inlet.

And the foreground mud’s sprinkled with rocks like chocolate chips scattered on an over-baked cake. Up close, grey-white pebbles, streaked and scored, when you get your eye in, with all the colours of the rainbow; shingle banked up to the low dunes, the sand too coarse and grainy for making castles however well you wet it.

A whimbrel. Courtesy: Creative Commons

Sea-wrack at the tiered tide lines, grey-brown, softens it, and strung out banks of what might make good compost that has been washed out from beneath the grass further up, where the fields fray. Seagulls and oyster catchers, and a solitary whimbrel — its long, curved beak thin as the thin stick legs, give it movement. The sea is too far out for waves to show and islands of mud, tinged green, are settled in pewter grey.

To the west, the peninsulas of Southern Scotland, to the south, where imagination and sight mingle on the true horizon, the Isle of Man is a possibility among clouds. Some days it’s so clear and bright and seeming near, you think you might wade out to it, or even throw a stone. Ancients, they say, believed it moved: drifted, floated, came and went at its own will or that of Gods. Some think of it as Avalon, wither Arthur went after his sword –drawn from stone by the iron-master’s Art perhaps – thrown into the lake, had been caught and drawn to deep water.

Writers of local history – and J.R.R.Tolkien, no less – have seen the name as a link to the Arthurian tale of Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight, but others, no less authoritatively have asserted that Grune is a corruption not of green but of groyne[1], signifying a sea-defence. Certainly, if you walk the coastal path along the stepped concrete from Silloth through Skinburness you will pass many groynes, the northern ones with their asymmetric piles of shingle and stone facing the south, four foot of rotting timber showing on the north side. From Skinburness it’s rock armour; stacked boulders the size of armchairs to break the force of the waves, but these are far more recent, by a millennium or more, than the naming of the place.

Look out from your seat on the dunes, a cut log or a fully rooted tree, washed down by the rivers and cast up on the beach, smoothed and softened by the rub of sand and water and weather, heavy as rock when wet, light as papyrus when dry, your collar turned up against the steady breeze up from the south, the gorse behind you too prickly to shelter in just yet, and the emptiness before you is palpable. There is the sense that you could sit here for a week, a decade, a century, a thousand years and nothing would come to pass that would not pass and become the same, but slow forces are at work already that time will not reverse, and this place among those will see those changes first.

Turn around. Face north and see the curving sweep of Scotland’s shore. Look eastwards across the spit. Beyond the billiard-table Solway plain the tips of mountains Hadrian[2] knew and of Northumberland. To the south the lumpy, soft peaked Lakeland fells flanking Skiddaw.

Closer, just off the point, the course of rivers running in and out to sea: Eden, Wampool, Waver, sticky with black dots of foraging birds, slick and sticky with mud in the ten foot channels where water’s only inches deep, but where the mud would grasp you by the ankles and hold you fast as the fast tide, faster than you can walk or even run, rises.

People love or loathe this place. It lies beyond the sounds of traffic. Even on a summer’s day, when it bakes under an unshaded sun, you may have it on your own, perhaps a couple leaving as you arrive, a couple arriving as you depart, a solitary figure, half a mile away across the gravel bank, silhouetted against the sky. Even on a summer’s day when the sky’s so high and wide you think you might fall in, it may have you on your own.

Once, on a midsummer’s eve, the sun touching Criffel, we sat and watched a lone canoeist, soundlessly, the slow paddle barely breaking the water surface, come in, riding the rising tide, a hundred or so yards offshore, the sea carrying them on, perhaps from Skinburness or Silloth, or who knows where? And, reaching the point, where storms gouge and notch the gravel tip, to what rendezvous, we wondered, were they being carried?

Criffel is a hill in south-west Scotland. Courtesy: Creative Commons

You can be alone here, barely a mile from the nearest house nestled in the gorse, from the last of farmland hedges, from the bungalows lined up behind the slight embankment of the coast road, only those with garret windows in the roof catching a glimpse of the water that one day, undoubtedly and perhaps soon, will wash them clean, and this gravel tongue itself, away.

Then it will fade in memory. Eerie. Peaceful. Silent save for bird song and the keen call of the wind. Bleak and beautiful. Magnificent and mysterious. A place where you might be confronted with the awesome sky, and the mountains far and near, and the almost monochrome seascape, or with yourself and nothing else but an inkling of eternity.   

  1. [1] A barrier built out into the sea from a beach to check erosion and drifting.

[2] Hadrian was a Roman who ruled from 117 to 138. He built the Hadrian Wall to define his extent of rule in Britain.

Mike Smith lives on the edge of England where he writes occasional plays, poetry, and essays, usually on the short story form in which he writes as Brindley Hallam Dennis. His writing has been published and performed. He blogs at www.Bhdandme.wordpress.com 

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Categories
Poetry

Arthurian Legends by Michael R Burch

Tintagel
Tritram & Islode: Carved in oak, 1370-1374, Estonia
Can these legends be true? Courtesy: Creative Commons
At Tintagel

The legend of what happened on a stormy night at Tintagel is endlessly intriguing. Supposedly, Merlin transformed Uther Pendragon to look like Gorlois so that he could sleep with Ygraine, the lovely wife of the unlucky duke. While Uther was enjoying Ygraine’s lovemaking, Gorlois was off getting himself killed. The question is: did Igraine suspect that her lover was not her husband? Regardless, Arthur was the child conceived out of this supernatural (?) encounter.


That night,
at Tintagel,
there was darkness such as man had never seen . . .
darkness and treachery,
and the unholy thundering of the sea . . .

In his arms,
who can say how much she knew?
And if he whispered her name . . .
“Ygraine”
. . . could she tell above the howling wind and rain?

Could she tell, or did she care,
by the length of his hair
or the heat of his flesh, . . .
that her faceless companion
was Uther, the dragon,

and Gorlois lay dead?

Isolde’s Song

After the deaths of Tristram and Isolde, a hazel and a honeysuckle grew out of their graves until the branches intertwined and could not be parted. 		

Through our long years of dreaming to be one
we grew toward an enigmatic light
that gently warmed our tendrils. Was it sun?
We had no eyes to tell; we loved despite
the lack of all sensation—all but one:				
we felt the night’s deep chill, the air so bright
at dawn we quivered limply, overcome.

To touch was all we knew, and how to bask.
We knew to touch; we grew to touch; we felt
spring’s urgency, midsummer’s heat, fall’s lash,
wild winter’s ice and thaw and fervent melt.
We felt returning light and could not ask
its meaning, or if something was withheld
more glorious. To touch seemed life’s great task.

At last the petal of me learned: unfold.
And you were there, surrounding me. We touched.
The curious golden pollens! Ah, we touched,
and learned to cling and, finally, to hold.

Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into fourteen languages, incorporated into three plays and two operas, and set to music by seventeen composers.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL