Namaste!! Welcome to Nepal!!!

                   Nepal, a land of astounding natural beauty, is equally blessed with a rich culture heritage. Since time immemorial the people who inhabited the mountains slopes, valley and the plains at the foot of the lofty Himalayas began an oral tradition of folk songs which historically are the forerunners of modern poetry. The ups and historically are the forerunners of modern poetry. The ups and downs of the people are well recorded in their folklore and with the impact with the modern liberal education our poets created poems depicting the vicissitudes their ancestors had undergone and the emotions and feelings evoked through their encounters with the daily life they are bound to lead.

                             Before Gopal Prasad Rimal (1918-1973) lunched prosepoems on the zos we had three distinctly different but equally fruitful and glorious traditions in Nepali poetry, viz.the folk songs, the Sanskrit metrical verse pattern and the ghazals

                              The folk style known in Nepal as Jhyaur   used to be oral to begin with. Comprising of various tunes and beautified with local colours it came cown from generation to generation and was and is still sung by villagers in the length and breadth of the country. This indigenous tradition is kept lively and full of charm by talented  young songster who compose them on the spur of the moment to sing before their lovers and fans. this style was put to higher poetic purpose by many poets and is still successfully used by innumerable versifiers in Nepal.

                                The Sanskrit metrical verses in Nepali have also flourished in the Nepali language well. They began quite early. those who studied classical Sanskrit handle the metres perfectly well. A number of short and long epics with innumerable verse pieces were composed and popularized by talented Nepali poets in Sanskrit metres.Bhanu Bhakta Acharya (1814-1868)wrote his famous Nepali Ramayana employing Sanskrit metres which lured great poets later like Shambhu Prasad Dhungel (1889-1929) and Lekha Nath Paudyal (1884-1965) who perfected metrical verses further. It is still practiced by several traditional poets in Nepal.

                                The third form of verse poem is the ghazal, first experimented by Moti Ram Bhatta (1866-1896) in Nepali when he has studying in Banaras in India. The ghazal was a sophisticated composition begin in Urdu among highly intellectual and sensitive poets who recited their works in front of an elite audience. The theme almost always used to be love.Bhatta with a group of Nepalese poet friends familiarized the  form in Nepal in which he employed both amorous and religious subjects. The tradition caught on with several Nepali poets. Maybe, due to lack of readers or composers of a few decades it had almost faded into historical oblivion, but a few wave of poets has now come up to revive it for professional singers.

                                Beside the ghazals, poets like Laxmi Prasad Devcota (1909-1959) and others wrote their loose verses resembling ghazals in the Romantic vein which were fit for singing.                      

                               Among all these traditional forms and Sanskrit metrical compositions are extremely difficult to write because of the syllabic requirements of length and its number and the strict rhyme scheme. The metres could be well handled in the original Sanskrit because of the flexibility of the language and mostly due to the abundance of synonymous words in it, whereas in case of Nepali the counting of syllables and using short ones at exact spots without compromising with the idea to be conveyed could not be successfully accomplished even by poets of highest intellectual calibre.        

                                 In point of fact, all the three traditional forms were not only involved in the  intricacies of form but they were also highly restricted to subjects to be used in poetical expression, The folkloristic and ghazal  patterns, to say the least, didn't always suit to poets who wanted to give vent to emotions and sentiments that overwhelmed them as modern complexities invaded our life. The prose poem was the most suitable form for a free  flow to poetic talent. Bal Krishna Sam (1903-1981)had realized this and in his verses we find glimpses and flashes of this realization but it was in Gopal Prasad Rimal, his student, that prosepoem first appeared and was successfully used in Nepali.                                             

                                  Sama and Devcota were highly influenced by western litreture,mostly English.Sama was influenced in his plays by Shakespeare and Devcota by the English Romantics in his lyrical poems. That influnce,however, is not directly responsible for bringing modernity in Nepali literature, nor the direct influence of Walt Whitman (1819-1892)'s Leaves of Grass on Gopal Prasad Rimal's prosepoems.It's true that Rimal, later followed by Devcota and Sama established the prosepoem as the major form of poetic expression in Nepali, which, as time passed, became the most appropriate vehicle of modern Nepali poetry. It was only after the revolution of 1951 which heralded an age of democratic upsurge and confusion that even the earlier Romantic poets like Rimal & Devcota began to contribute to modern Nepali poetry together with such talents like Krishna Bhakta Shrestha (1940),Bhupi Sherchan (1936-1989) and Varaigi kainla (1939). The new batch of poets, was well educated in the western liberal tradition and was fully aware of what was going as far as their thinking and creations were concerned with their contemporary poets elsewhere in the world.

                                   The political situation in Nepal was totally tyrannical during the rana regime.So the later part of 30s and the whole decade of 40s were a period of Romantic poetry, a period of full of stylistic experimentation when prosepoems were written but by conceling the real democratic motives in the disguise of mythological and folklorist images, symbols and phrases. 

                                    After the Revolution of 1951, and atmosphere of freedom was suddenly unleashed which inspire political ambitions in many people.Litereture was, as if, set a side for somtime.In the anarchy and chaos a general feelings of bewilderment and consequently total a ptahy enveloped manu poets including Mohan Koirala(1926) and his contemporaries. The prosepoems that grew abundantly at that time were obscure, confusing and cynical. In a way even the intellectual readership was totally isolated from modern poetry because the obscure poets of the time completely forget their poetic responsibility and created their works which conveyed no coherent thought, no logical agrument and no sense at all except a few words and phrase that expressed in patches and flashes their disregard,disrespect and disdim for and ordered, disciplined and civilized life.No beauty in expression, no reading pleasure and no nuances in language with and inherent lyricylity was found their confused outbrusts.Had Rimal,Devcota,Krishna Bhakta Shrestha and Bhupi Sherchan in the first decade and Vasu Shashi (1937-1980) Vairagi Kainla and Hari Bhakta Katuwal (1935-1980) in the ensuing period not expressed themselves in their clear,lucid and readable style through the medium of their exquisite poetry, the tradition of modern Nepali poetry would have stpped right there.But it was not so.

                                     To picture the anarchid and completely dehumanizing that prevailed before the royal takeover of 1961 and an uneasy and oppressive environment after it, the poet didn't have to take recourse to farfetched obscure image, not to meaningless outbrusts making poetry extremely unpopular. Not only didi Krishna Bhakta Shrestha,Vairagi Kainla Vasu Shashi and Katuwal express their dissatisfaction and revolt against the political anomalies of the time pretty well but the comming generation which include Vaneera Giri (1946),Manjul (1947),Krishna Bhushan Bal (1947),Vishnu Bibhu Ghimire (1953), Ashesh Malla (1954),Dinesh Adhikari (1959) and the host of of other also most convincingly brought home the Social malaise in their beautiful poems. Modern Nepali Poetry continues to further develop because the poets of the new generation have began to write in simple, sweet and succinct diction employing appropriate common man's image in most acceptable forms.

                                     Modern Neplai poetry is a rich treasure which makes its readers aware of the Nepalese people people's psychological make-up and the future prospects for their happy and prosperous life in the best possible expression the language is capable of providing. To know Nepal and it's people with their porud heritage, independent sprit and fello feling for all human beings, what else can be a more befiting medium than their modern poetry, a small but important chunk of which is sincerely tried to be represented in this selection.

                                     On translation:-Translation, in general, in a very hard task. It is an attempt to transfer not only the ideas of the first language to the targe lanugage but also the motives, feelings and cultural background embeded therein. Not only in poems, but in prose as well the nuances of the original language cannot always be easily transmitted.

                                      Poetry in Nepal requires, almost a superhuman intellectual acrobities to reader it into another language. There are countless word in Nepali in which sound suggest the sense and equally numberless grammatical forms which have no near equivalents in any other language.Then there are culture complexities and historical prejusics as great stumbling blocks to the poor translator who has really hard time to overcome.

                                      The present translator has tried his best to do justice to the original as far as possible and hence in his so doing many expression in English, despite his Herculean effort to remain within native bounds, would sound a little outlandish. But translator has no place devited in the poet's intent convey the feeling exactly and totally to his readers. Lapses are bound to occur, but even then the translator with his sincer feeling that English is the language belonging to all of us, humans, and as it has as many varieties as there are different communities using it he has taken some liberty here and there of employing the Neplese kind which is gradually emerging and taking its shape.                                               

                                                                           Translated By :- Tara Nath Sharma                        .                                                                        

Photo Gallery

About Nepal

Art&Architecture

Nepali Poems