Magadh

Poetry. South Asia Studies. Translated from the Hindi by Rahul Soni. MAGADH, Shrikant Verma's crowning achievement, was published in Hindi in 1984 and has established itself as one of the key works of late 20th century Indian poetry. Speaking both archly and urgently through unreliable narrators—commoners, statesmen, wanderers, people close to power (but never in power)—often like a kind of prudent and duplicitous advice for the ears of monarchs, the 56 poems range widely in tone from nostalgic to ironic to bitter to sorrowful. "Twentieth century Indian poetry has seldom been translated well, and very rarely as well as Rahul Soni's rendering of this Hindi classic."—Arvind Krishna Mehrotra