The Whispering Tree: poems of love and longing

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Lovers can define love. What happens when a poet turns lover? He interprets it as a fever that “subsides after a week of nightmares.” The poet describes fondness, if it fits as a perfect synonym of ‘love,’ as smallpox. The lover bears “scarred memories” until death. He marks love as cancer that takes time to get diagnosed. The poet finds it insane as lovers “murmur, sing, laugh, quarrel, / and roam around, all, alone.” Love, as he expounds, becomes “sweetest” when ubiquitous, and thus, he emerges as Radha. The merger was on the cards, perhaps! Had this not been true, Satchidanandan won’t have corroborated love with the maladies. He became one with Radha and named it “unrealized!” Who else can portray love, if not a poet, in the light of the gopi who never admitted her attainment? A sense of submission prevails in this collection.

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Weight 0.5 kg
Dimensions 8.75 × 5.75 × 0.5 in
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CLASSIX

Release Date

30 June, 2020

About Author

Satchidanandan is an Indian poet, essayist, playwright, travel-writer and translator writing in Malayalam, the language of Kerala and a bilingual (Malayalam and English) critic and editor. He has been Professor of English at Christ College, University of Calicut, Kerala, editor of Indian Literature, the journal of the Sahitya Akademi (The National Academy of Letters) and later the Chief Executive of the Akademi. He then worked as a Language Policy Consultant for the Government of India and has been associated as editor with Katha, Delhi and the Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature. He edits the poetry quarterly Kerala Kavita in Malayalam and has edited a series of selections of poems by distinguished Malayalam poets  and a series of translations from South Asian literature, The South Asian Library of Literature in English  besides several collections of poetry and essays including Words Matter, an anthology of dissent published by Penguin India. He retired in 2011 as Director and Professor, School of Translation Studies and Training, Indira Gandhi National Open University, Delhi. He was also on the Project Advisory Board of Indian Literature Abroad, and the National Executive of the National Translation Mission and has been on the Executive Board of  Sahitya Akademi besides being on the academic/governing bodies of JNU, (Delhi), Ambedkar University (Delhi), Malayalam University (Kerala) and has been on the PhD board of four universities. Until recently he was a National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla and is a Distinguished Member, Loka Kerala Sabha, Member, Kerala State Higher Education Board and Co-Chairman for Art and Literature, Kerala State Planning Board. He is also the Director of the Kerala Literature Festival.

Satchidanandan has 27 collections of poetry in Malayalam, 16 collections of world poetry in translation, four plays, three books of travel and 23 collections of critical essays and interviews besides five collections of essays in English. He has edited several anthologies of poetry and prose in Malayalam, English and Hindi. He has 33 collections of his poems in translation in 18 languages, including seven collections in English, the chief of them being While I Write (HarperCollins), Misplaced Objects and Other Poems (Sahitya Akademi), The Missing Rib and Not Only the Oceans (Poetrywala), eight in Hindi, four in Tamil, two in Kannada, two in Oriya, two in Assamese, two in Marathi  and one each in Irish, Arabic, Chinese, German, French, Italian, Bengali, Telugu and  Gujarati. He has won 52 awards and honours for his literary contribution including Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad Award, Gangadhar Meher Award and Kavisamrat Upendra Bhanja Award, Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award (5 times, for different genres), Kumaran Asan Award, Bapureddy National Award, N T Rama Rao  National Award, Kuvempu National Award, Kusumagraj National Award,  Kerala Varma Award, Ulloor Award, P. Kunhiraman Nair Award (twice), Odakkuzhal Award, Vayalar Award, SBT Suvarna Mudra, Padmaprabha Puraskaram, V. Aravindakshan Award, Kavyotsav Award, Hariyorma Award, Kesari Nayanar Award, first Kamala Surayya Memorial award, Navamalayali Award, Kerala SSF award  and Ezhuthachan Award, the topmost award for any writer in Kerala, Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan Award, Baharain Keraleeya Samajam Award, Oman Kerala Cultural Centre Award, Kamala Surayya Award, UA Exchange Award, Sahitya Akademi Award for Malayalam, Kala award for total contribution from London, and Poetry for Peace Award from the Govt. of UAE. He has also won Green India Excellence Award for environmental writing besides Sahityasree from the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, Delhi, Senior Fellowship from the Department of Culture, Government of India, Sreekant Verma Fellowship from the Government of Madhya Pradesh and the K.K.Birla Fellowship for Comparative Literature. He is a Fellow of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi. Many of his books of poetry and criticism have been textbooks in Universities and there are several PhDs on his poetry. A film on him, Summer Rain was released in 2007. His name was in the Ladbroke list of the first ten probable winners of the Nobel Prize in 2011.

Press Reviews

This is a dark, powerful, pulsating collection of poems, the effect of which continues to reverberate, disturb and shock one out of one’s complacency long after one has finished reading them. — The Hindu

There is rebellion, anger, pathos and romance here, and most of it goes straight to the heart. — The Pioneer

His poetry attests to the abiding concern of the poet for all mankind. Synthesising hope with despair, the poet always expects light at the end of the tunnel. — The Asian Age

His words shock us, make us look inward, introspect and search for the ultimate truth. — Observer

In confronting our unsettled times through metaphors and images Satchidanandan asks us disturbing questions about us and the society we live in. — The Book Review

Satchidanandan’s poetry, if his recent poems are any indication, has reached a stage where aesthetics and ethics interpenetrate each other to produce deftly crafted articulations of ‘history’s endless rage.’ — Biblio

3 reviews for The Whispering Tree: poems of love and longing

  1. Animikh Patra

    World class production – there is absolutely nothing to complain. And Satchidanandan’s poems can mesmerize any poetry-lover anywhere.

    (1) (0)
  2. Utpal Datta

    When Satchidanandan writes a poem of love and longing, he never writes about tear, flower, and waiting, he writes something else. And that ‘else’ is the essence of the philosophy of his poem. The birth, growth, and maturity of Satchidananda’s poetry can be compared with that immortal phrase-’ poetry should come as a leave comes to a tree’. The poems from the book THE WHISPERING TREE easily takes a reader to a celestial level with the magic and aura created by the observation, interpretation, weight-music- color of the words, exploration of various levels of meaning of human crisis and at one point reader discovers himself in such a state where some undiscovered and unexplained images stand as a tapestry to reverberate a song of love in a language which was never heard before. Satchidnandan is the “poet of Voiceless” and in this collection, he became the voice of century-old voice of love which was being remained pressed and suppressed under the clamor of platitude expression love. It was said in Veda that words are like woman, she uncovers herself only to a particular man of her choice and Satchidanandan is that worthy human being, words uncover their beauty in front of him.

    (1) (0)
  3. Anonymous

    Love is an appreciation of all things beautiful on earth. And this book of poems is about beauty.

    (1) (0)
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