"It was a wonderful experience interacting with you and appreciate the way you have planned and executed the whole publication process within the agreed timelines.”
Subrat SaurabhAuthor of Kuch Woh PalIntroducing Saumitra’s poetry to an English relishing readership is like reliving its flavor a few years ago in Hindi when these very poems caught the print eye of an eminent publisher, Bharatiya Gyanpith. Saumitra’s selection was not only published from there but also awarded the ‘Yuva Puruskar’ and these poems have been expertly translated by Dhiraj Singh who gives a Midas touch of his pen when moving from one language to another.
Saumitra is, by profession an engineer and by passion, a poet. He has moved away from India, but his sensibility is filled with boyhood memories and tender moments of his youth. With an economy of words, he expresses himself in short verses that look like a map of his moods.
All aspects of nature find expression with Saumitra so much so that he emerges as a friend of live landscapes, changing skies and the smell of raw mangoes. He has a Wordsworthian involvement with nature and with the simple sweet voice of humanity.
The translation by Dhiraj Singh is equally sensitive and soulful, conveying the author’s creativity convincingly. To quote the very first poem-
‘Every tree
Calls out to her
But she chooses
Her tree and sits on it
She chooses and sits
And that is all
There is to it.’
At first sight these may appear to be single–focus expressions but page after page you come across sensitive lines like these you are bound to feel involved.
Poetry is not a sealed-off entity of nature alone. We live in an urban world and our concerns are city-bred. Then what impacts our young poet to focus on greener landscapes. Actually this appears to be Saumitra’s retort to the mechanized, mundane metro culture that leaves us myopic to personal pleasures and the bounty of nature.
- Mamta Kalia
Saumitra Saxena, Dhiraj Singh
Saumitra Saxena is a Hindi poet who has contributed remarkably to the field of Hindi literature, with works that have been acclaimed not only in India but overseas as well. For the past two decades, Saxena has been writing poems and is recognized as a prominent personality in the world of contemporary Hindi poetry. He has over 150 poems and numerous short stories credited to his name, and many of them have been published in leading literary journals, anthologies and newspapers.
Hailing from India, Saxena was born and raised in Meerut, a historical city in the state of Uttar Pradesh. After completing his graduation in India, Saxena flew to Chicago to pursue a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering. Saxena continued writing poems and sent them to India, where his poetry pieces were regularly published in print.
Amid his numerous pieces of work, Saxena’s first poetry collection, Mitra, meaning friend, was critically acclaimed; he received the prestigious Bhartiya Jnanpith Navlekhan Award in 2008 by the Bhartiya Jnanpith, India’s foremost literary foundation. His highly-praised work achieved a tremendous appreciation and is also included amongst other noted literature pieces in US universities and Washington DC-based Library of Congress. The long poem, Ek Swapnadrashta Ka Romanticism, or The Romanticism of a Dreamer, was first published in Rachna Samay magazine in 2011. It was considered a notable long Hindi poem of the first fifteen years of the 21st century by periodical Samay ke Sakhi. Harish Bhimani, India’s best-known voice-over artiste, gave his voice to two of Saxena’s poetry books. Several books on publication path include the English translation of Mitra, a poetry collection, Neele Pakshi, Safed Akash, and a short story collection, Sabse Pahle Sandesh.
After schooling, Saumitra has lived most of his life out of India. Currently, he is pursuing his career in research in the area of carbon footprint reduction and climate change mitigation, working as a scientist at a major University in Middle East Asia.
Contact: saumitra.saxena@gmail.com
Dhiraj Singh is AN ACCOMPLISHED media personality and artist. He is an alumnus of the esteemed Asian College of Journalism and has attended Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise’s creative writing workshop. His writings have included in-depth pieces on current affairs, arts and literature in leading newspapers and magazines such as The Times of India, Economic Times, Hindustan Times, Outlook, Tehelka, Art & Deal and The Little Magazine. He has an online arts column called #ArtIsEverywhere on NDTV-Mojarto. He is a former Executive Director of Lok Sabha Television, where he also anchored two very popular shows: Know Your MP and Fairs of India. He is a regular speaker at many forums, such as Bharatiya Chhatra Sansad, TEDx talks and Hunar Charcha.
He is a self-taught artist who makes abstract paintings and installations from X-ray plates. He has shown at many prestigious art events, such as India Art Fair (2009) in Delhi, Venice Architecture Biennale (2014), ‘Kindness: Udarta’ an Australia-India group show in Delhi and Melbourne (2012), among others.
He has written the biography of Delhi’s first woman art gallerist, Uma Jain, and short stories for The Little Magazine and The Punch Magazine. He has translated into English, Asghar Wajahat’s much-celebrated Hindi play about the Partition of India called, Jis Lahore Nai Dekhya, O Janmya Nai (Unborn in Lahore). He has also translated short stories by Munshi Premchand, Nirmal Verma, Bhisham Sahni and Ajeet Cour, among others. He is now working on a novel.
Contact: dhirajsin@gmail.com; +91-9350516671
