E E Cummings: The Poet of Love E E Cummings is a relatively less known poet in English poetry, and even lesser read. Though he may be slightly better known in America - being American - than in England, because it is said that at the time of his death, he was ‘the second most widely read poet in the US, after Robert Frost ’ . In India, however, he is among the least known as an English poet. And in the Indian academia, particularly in the class-room poetry text books, he is seldom to be seen; mostly because of his too fanciful, almost tyrannous typographical experimentations in verse – displacement of Capital letters by lowercase letters, putting ‘parts of speech’ categories helter-skelter, – often using words like ‘if’ or ‘am’ or ‘because’ as nouns – radically flouting traditional rules of grammar and linguistics, his wilful use of punctuation and rules of syntax, sometimes synthesising two or three words into one, and such other shocking innovation...
Hindi Short Stories I propose to publish henceforth on this blog, in a series translations done by me, some of the finest short stories written in Hindi by eminent Hindi writers, though little known among non-Hindi knowing national or international readership, or even among the common readers familiar with the contemporary short story scene in Hindi. In Art, the real merit of a work lies in the work, and not in name of the artist. Read these stories by some lesser-known Hindi writers, most of them from Bihar, whose fictional writings are much lesser known even in the contemporary Hindi literary scene. These stories were published in a collection with the title I AM A WOMAN FIRST (in 2021), selected and translated by me in English. It begins with my Introduction written for this book, followed in this post by a remarkable O.Henryesque brief story written originally in Hindi by an eminent Professor of English Dr D P Vidyarthy. This series will continue every month on the firs...