Overview

Why are you silent, friends? What’s happened in Magadh? Magadh, Shrikant Verma’s masterpiece, takes its name from the ancient Indian kingdom of Magadh, which rose to prominence in the sixth to second centuries BCE. First published in Hindi in 1984, it is widely regarded as one of the most important works of modern Indian poetry. A chorus of narrators—commoners, statesmen, nameless wanderers—pieces together the histories of ancient cities and kingdoms on the Indian subcontinent, their rise to splendor, their decline and eventual fall. In poems that are stark and urgent yet richly allusive, Verma lays bare these kingdoms’ tales of corruption, guilt, ignorance, and arrogance. Rahul Soni’s landmark translation, finally available in the United States, stays faithful to the spareness and the haunting, incantatory cadences of the original text, revealing how startlingly prescient Magadh remains today.

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9781324097686

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Reviews

""In Soni’s luminous translation, this haunting and haunted masterpiece resonates louder than ever in our own times, with its stark images of cities pulverized by invading armies."" -- Philip Terry - The Guardian ""I read the poems in Soni’s translation with great admiration: the lines rendered so cleanly, they convey the spare, stately elegance of the original . . . Verma’s poems with their invocation of names from history and mythology—Magadh! Takshila! Pataliputra! Ambapali!—seemed to be about our past, and yet, they speak also to our debased present."" -- Amitava Kumar, Substack ""Written, surprisingly, by an important politician and journalist, and here vivaciously translated, this Hindi modernist classic of the fall of forgotten cities couldn’t be timelier. It is almost eerie how many lines apply to what is happening right now: the Indian deep past as the universal present."" -- Eliot Weinberger, author of Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei ""In Magadh, [Shrikant Verma’s] collection of verse, excellently translated, we can see, eerily prefigured, our own present: the grand illusions, the raucous vanity, the chronic self-doubt and ultimate fragility of power."" -- Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza ""In these enigmatic verses, India’s ancient cities become emblems of political overreach, moral decay, and the cyclical nature of time. Alive to subtle cadences and layers of meaning, Rahul Soni delivers a haunting translation, a landmark work in its own right."" -- Devika Rege, author of Quarterlife ""Forty years after, these poems are more relevant than ever, telling of power’s hollow victories, the peculiar burden of joy, how sorrow finds us wherever we may hide. This luminous translation renders Shrikant Verma’s classic into timeless English verse."" -- Jeet Thayil, author of Narcopolis

""Written, surprisingly, by an important politician and journalist, and here vivaciously translated, this Hindi modernist classic of the fall of forgotten cities couldn’t be timelier. It is almost eerie how many lines apply to what is happening right now: the Indian deep past as the universal present."" -- Eliot Weinberger, author of Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei ""In Magadh, [Shrikant Verma’s] collection of verse, excellently translated, we can see, eerily prefigured, our own present: the grand illusions, the raucous vanity, the chronic self-doubt and ultimate fragility of power."" -- Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza ""In these enigmatic verses, India’s ancient cities become emblems of political overreach, moral decay, and the cyclical nature of time. Alive to subtle cadences and layers of meaning, Rahul Soni delivers a haunting translation, a landmark work in its own right."" -- Devika Rege, author of Quarterlife ""Forty years after, these poems are more relevant than ever, telling of power’s hollow victories, the peculiar burden of joy, how sorrow finds us wherever we may hide. This luminous translation renders Shrikant Verma’s classic into timeless English verse."" -- Jeet Thayil, author of Narcopolis ""In Soni’s luminous translation, this haunting and haunted masterpiece resonates louder than ever in our own times, with its stark images of cities pulverized by invading armies."" -- Philip Terry - The Guardian

Author Information

Shrikant Verma (1931–1986) was an Indian poet and a member of Parliament from 1976 to 1986. He is the prize-winning author of twenty books. Rahul Soni is a writer, editor, and translator. He has translated the work of Ashok Vajpeyi, Pankaj Kapur, and Geetanjali Shree, among others. He lives in India.

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