Poets - Cathal Ó Searcaigh & Yuyutsu RD Sharma

Practice of Writing – Cathal Ó Searcaigh & Yuyutsu RD Sharma 09/03/2007

Who is the beautiful boy? He sits silently at the head of the table, his eyes looking inward, Nepalese perhaps, or Indian. Is he a son of the gaelic poet who, last night, in the Great Hall, under portraits of smirking vice-chancellors, read a poem about his son in Katmandu? If so, there is not a hint of his chubby, pinkly Irish father in him. On the surface of things it seems more likely that he belongs to Yuyutsu RD Sharma’s entourage. A student, a young relative, a catamite? Nobody offers an explanation for his presence. He might as well be a monk on the brink of Nirvana, for all the attention he pays to anybody in the room.

The poets arrive. Cathal Ó Searchaigh under his pillbox cap. Yuyutsu RD Sharma also under a cap, a cap of thick black hair that reaches his eyebrows and hides the handsome brow that I glimpsed several times last night as he self-consciously pushed back his foilt before intoning a poem in accented English or better still, in Nepalese.

The poets have a story. They met in Yuyutsu RD Sharma’s family owned bookshop in Katmandu. An extended family bookshop, an extended family that includes 23 children. These family details emerge in response to questions from poet, Maeve McGuckian who has slipped, obtrusively, into the room about half an hour into the session. Would a woman in Katmandu enjoy the same freedom to write and travel as Yuyutsu RD Sharma? Yuyutsu RD Sharma equivocates. It is unlikely that he is unaware of the feminist obsessions of women poets so his equivocation is probably evasion. Maeve McGuckian persists, briefly, then the topic fades away. Nobody else in the room cares all that much that Mrs Yuyutsu RD Sharma may not be as free as her husband to tour the world on a Rockefeller fellowship.

Yuyutsu RD Sharma is overtly political. A poet must speak out. Nepali poets always have. That is why the anthology of Nepalese poetry which he edited is entitled Roaring Recitals. He speaks of rule by corrupt oligarchies and corrupt democracy. Poets, in Nepal, have always struggled against the establishment. He speaks of the anguish of Gopal Prasad Rimal who is driven mad when democracy for which he has striven degenerates into vile corruption. He ends his days “roaming insane in the streets of Kathmandu with the dream of a true democracy seething within him.”[1] Oddly, the poet’s doctors removed one of his ribs to create pain that would distract him from his madness.

The role of poet, according to Yuyutsu RD Sharma, the Nepalese muse “is in connection with politics” and again, “politics is an axis on which poetry turns.” He sees analogies. Belfast, with its violence, is like Khatmandu. The suppression of Cathal’s Irish language against the encroachment of English colonialism is similar to the Nepali experience of encroachment by corrupt government. I am grateful for a poet who engages with the struggle of the underdog, wherever.

His route to poetry has been an alternative one. At seven years old be became possessed by a snake goddess at a shrine that is a focus of pilgrimage. He was honoured by devotees, even by his own devout father who bowed before his seven year old son. His father wished to give him to the associated monastery but the chief monk advised him to send the child to college. Thus, Yuyutsu RD Sharma received his education and lost his early gift of being a vessel of the goddess. However poetry also is a possession. One has prefigured the other.


Cathal Ó Searcaigh is anticlimactic. How can a man from up the road compare with a Nepali whose literary career has begun with possession by a snake goddess? It would have been wiser for him to have spoken first. He tells of his preoccupation with words and of his gaelic speaking neighbour who had to invent names for new household appliances, names that did not previously exist in the pastoral gaelic language. Fridge became ice trunk, vacuum cleaner, a whirlwind brush. Ah. The moment of engagement as the pastoral tongue conftonts globalization. His poetry is for reading aloud so that it can create the sense of incantation that is at the heart of poetry. Cantrach, in the gaelic. Chanted too, in Nepali, Yuyutsu RD Sharma interposes, operating on the human nervous system, in the manner of a mantra which is the utterance of one full breath, eventually instigating tranquility. Tranquillity?

Yuyutsu RD Sharma and Cathal Ó Searchaigh engage in mutual translations. Both are bestsellers in Khatmandu. A gaelic poet needs translation, the imprimatur of English, Cathal notes. Presumably the same applies to the Nepalese poets. Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s career is almost contemporaneous with my own. He was influenced by a teacher who read an extract from Hilaire Belloc. “What do you think of that?” the teacher asked, creating a seminal event for the young Sharkey who awakened to the beauty of language. Then there was Yevteshenko’s “A Precocious Autobiography” and the Liverpool poets. Ah yes, the beat poets. Our generation. I wanted your soft verges and you gave me your hard shoulder. Motorway poem. Ah, memory.

Another epiphany was when Cathal realized he must write in his own language. It happened in a pub in Cricklewood where he read Derek Mahon and learned what is meant by the word home. Irish can be loud and rhetorical. It allows amplification of utterance. In English yu have to turn the volume down. In Irish you can write in the manner of the eighteenth century and still be contemporary.

Yuyutsu RD Sharma interposes. Translation, he belives, should be a recreation of the poem, not a literal translation. The poem becomes something new in its transition from one language to another, becoming partly the creation of the translator.

There is a pause. The beautiful boy stands and I realise that the visit of the poets is over.