Brooklynite Vijay Seshadri’s life has taken him from his birthplace of Bangalore,

Brooklynite Vijay Seshadri’s life has taken him from his birthplace of Bangalore, India, to a childhood in Columbus, Ohio, a stint in the fishing industry in the Pacific Northwest, a Ph.D. from Columbia, and then to learning poetry and language in Pakistan.

These multicultural experiences became a part of his poetic works, which yesterday received the recognition of the Pulitzer committee. They awarded the Sarah Lawrence professor the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collection, “3 Sections.” According to publisher Graywolf Press, this makes him the first Asian American to win in the category.

News India Times’ Ela Dutt talked with Seshadri, who goes into detail about his years working in the Bering Sea and his eventual move to Pakistan, where he studied poetry and learned the national language.

He says if anything was more unusual than going off to the Bering Sea, it was a person of Tamil-speaking Vaishnavite heritage wanting to learn Urdu.

His work is also influenced by his bicultural experiences as an Indian-American, which are addressed in his writing.

Among them, his poetic prose in “Nature of the Chemical Bond,” contained in his earlier work, “The Long Meadow,” is an ambitious attempt at autobiography and the relationship with his father captured on road-trips through the Confederacy, and intersected with references to the Congress Party, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Bangalore, East Indians and Harper’s Ferry, Antietam, Shiloh, Bloody Kansas, the American Revolution and Dred Scott.

Once he learned Urdu, he challenged himself to translate Urdu poetry into English.

The latest work, “3 Sections” also includes “Three Urdu Poems” two of Mirza Ghalib and one of contemporary poet Momin Khan Momin, which he translates into colloquial English. “I’m interested in that classical tradition but I feel frustrated. English just flattens it out,” he says about his attempts to translate Urdu. “I was gnashing my teeth in frustration because (the poems) were so linguistically self-contained.” But he is going to keep trying he says. Reviewers however, have acclaimed his translations, describing them as being in line with other similar efforts to translate Indian poetry into American English.

http://newsindiatimes.com/the-pulitzer-poet-bangalore-born-brooklyn-poet-vijay-seshadri-wins-pulitzer-prize/