Kazi Nazrul Islam: Some Questions and Concerns

[Johir Uddin]

""The leading French philosopher Alain Badiou maps out a global revolutionary tradition of poetry in The Age of the Poets (2014) thus: "In the last century, some truly great poets, in almost all languages on earth, have been communists. In an explicit or formal way, for example, the following poets were committed to communism: in Turkey, Nâzim Hikmet; in Chile, Pablo Neruda; in Spain, Rafael Alberti; in Italy, Edoardo Sanguineti; in Greece, Yannis Ritsos; in China, Ai Qing; in Palestine, Mahmoud Darwish; in Peru, César Vallejo; and in Germany, the shining example is above all Bertolt Brecht. But we could cite a very large number of other names in other languages, throughout the world." One can surely place Nazrul in the constellation of the poets Badiou lists here. Nazrul even anticipates some crucial insights mobilized by some of those poets, as I have argued elsewhere.""

Read more here: https://www.thedailystar.net/literature/kazi-nazrul-islam-some-questions-and-concerns-1581637

[Johir Uddin]

"Fourth, not much attention has been paid to how Nazrul revolutionizes the field of metrical experiments by appropriating in his poetry with unusual effects at least five different Arabic and Persian meters such as Motaqarib, Motdarik, Hajaz, Rajaz, and Mashaqel. His poem called "Dodool Dool"—composed in Motaqarib—is a metrical tour de force, a poem that seems to be anticipating even some of the textures and valences of today's hip-hop and rap. Nazrul also studied ancient Sanskrit poetry, and he uses in Bangla such Sanskrit meters as Anushtup, Totok, Mondakranta, and even Shardul Brikrityo, clinching the point that even the experimental appropriation of meters is by no means a politically and ideologically innocent practice."

[Rafiz Uddin]

Thank you.

[Anta]

Thanks for sharing  :)