Random Harvest is the title of the collected poems that Rayaprol was planning at the time of his premature death. The present edition brings together virtually all the poems he published during his lifetime, as well as his translations of classical and contemporary Telugu poetry, and a selection of prose pieces, many of them unpublished before. Together with his translations of Telugu short stories and his long correspondence with William Carlos Williams, published in 2016 and 2018, respectively, it shines a brighter light on the creative career of one of the most interesting and original poets of modern India.
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“Rayaprol is a master of the unsaid. In his cagey love poems—and they are all love poems—reticence imbues the lines with mystery, making him the most enigmatic of our poets. Interestingly, this poet’s revelations take place in prose, in essays and diaries and letters. How good to have these lost writings returned to us.”
Jeet Thayil
“In a context that frequently slots Indian poetry into reductive geographic and generational cubby-holes, Graziano Krätli’s work adopts an invigorating deep-focus approach. It traces the trajectory of a very singular voice—that speaks of places where ‘dissatisfaction builds like sea kelp’, where ‘women have a way of growing old’, where we must find ways to walk ‘slowly through the green’ and ‘softly over the brown’—and in so doing, it allows us glimpses of the tensions and complexities of a broader historical moment. This is an act of homage to Srinivas Rayaprol, a remarkable little-known Indian poet, as well as a wonderful act of literary recovery.” Arundhathi Subramaniam
Random Harvest
ANTHOLOGY
ISBN 978-81-948772-3-3
Hardcover
270 pages
216 mm × 140 mm
October 2022