Page 6 - silent_secret

INTRODUCTiON

Mr, Mohan Prasad's poetry needs no apology of an
introduction-much less from one than whom he is betrter
known in the1 poetical circles in Telugu; Tha:b he has
chosen to present' himself in English 11lranscreation is a
gesture of confidence in the individuality of his own sen-
sibility as well as the aesthetic need of a ·poet to establish
contact with a wider audience.

Mr. Prasad's poems project a vari:ety of moods, sad-
ness, pity, anger, petulance and despair, all con trolled and
united by a strong feeling for life. He prepresents the
transitional tension in the Telugu personality exerted by
the compulsive shif,_t from an agrarian to 1:ihe urban back-
ground ("discarding the plough of the bullocks pulling/My
red Cadillac/My necktie rising on the wind"). But he
adopts a tone of voice in which irony has mastered the
se~timent wtthout demolishing the human concern; it has
the shrill resonance of the Shehanai which at each break
of dawn clarifies and announces the Andhra landscape
(Shehanai is sadness searching for herself). The wonder-
ful candences of the Telugu language o-ften lose in transla-
tion rthe plenitude of verbal consciousness. But Mr. Prasad
o:fiten achieves the authenticity of the vernacular idiom
and the local partictJ.larly of scene in such lines as "an ant,
on the block oiles floor/starts on its pilgrimage to Kashi''.
And at' times the expression leaps into an increment-al cu_:rve
of chamatkara as in:

The lizard cannot stamp its feet
securely on the wall
There is no air in its feet:
Air is attachment!