Most people know me as the common-or-garden
soulless, insensitive clod. They couldn’t be more wrong. I’m a poet. Yes siree,
a bona-fide, card-carrying, licensed poet. Ask those chaps in Seychelles.
Check out the latest edition of SIPAY, one of the leading
(or possibly the only) literary review journals in Seychelles. Your corner
newsagent doesn’t have copies? No sweat: I’ve scanned and uploaded the relevant
pages:
(click to enlarge)
There you go. Pashupati Chatterji (that’s me) featured as
the “Invited Poet”. Yusss, it doesn’t get more poetic than that. And just in case you think Seychelles is just that little
island out there in the middle of a big blue ocean, let me tell you that there
are more poets per square yard on Seychelles than any other place on the
planet. What the Seychellois don’t know about poetry can be written on the back
of a picture postcard. If they say I am a poet, I jolly well am.
Highly impressed by my winning Chansons Sans Frontiere 2014,
their French-speaking editor Maggie invited me to submit as ‘featured poet’ a
couple of poems for their quarterly/bi-annual literary journal. (From what I
understand, it’s supposed to be quarterly, but they don’t usually get around to
pushing out more than a couple per year). This journal, by the way, is in
French, one of the three official languages of Seychelles, the others being
English and Creole. All the brightest literary minds in Seychelles consider
their day made if they get their stuff on it.
Maggie asked me to submit at least one poem on the theme of
‘I have a dream’ (j’ai un rêve). I
submitted a little piece entitled ‘I have a dream… of rabbits’. OK, I never
denied I was a soulless clod. Give me a soaring, inspirational theme and I
will write a comic verse on it. You can see the French version in the last of the
snapshots above.
Here is the English version (an adaptation, not an exact
translation):-
