Bhawanipatna Jan25: Kalahandi poet, Bhawani Shankar Nial, a resident of Bhawanipatna, earned huge appreciation and recognition on a global platform as his poems have been translated into the Italian language by the illustrious Italian poet, Emanuela Rizzo. Touched by the profound depth of the poems pertaining to human problems and predicament during the lockdown, Mr.Bankim Mund, a lecturer of Dharamgarh women’s college, translated the original Odia poem into English which in turn was translated into Italian language by Mrs.Razzo.
Being published in Italian journals, the poem further musters avid appreciations from the poetry lovers so much so that noted Italian critic, Dr. Alessio Zanichelli, who writes for the journal of contemporary literature ‘Atelier’, has written critical appreciations of the four poems – Lockdown, Self-identity: An expedition, Enough and An encounter with death, by Mr.Nial.
Dr. Alessio Zanichelli studied literature and philosophy between Italy and Switzerland, writes for the journal of contemporary literatureAtelier; he is the heir of the poet Attilio Zanichelli and has recovered his work with his last academic studies, with a view to a future publication of the unpublished poems.
Alessio:
“I recently read four poems by Bhawani Shankar Nial through the initiative of Emanuela Rizzo #iostoacasaequestaseravileggounapoesia, to whom I am a collaborator and critic. Reading four poems by Bhawani Shankar Nial means rethinking the present in history, through an exercise in intercontinental sensitivity and human solidarity. The poems are these: An encountered with death; Enough; Self-identity: an expedition; Lockdown.
At first, the reader is confronted with numerous important metaphors, where images occupy the heart of the writer’s civil commitment: allusions to the socio-economic mechanisms of the country; persistent social surveys in the form of a pressing litany; the dialectical rhythm of Marxist culture and declined with philosophical systems of thought, protagonists in the author’s thought.
In particular, the poetry that expresses these requests the most is Self-identity: an expedition, in which the author proceeds from top to bottom, initially observing the laws that regulate the cosmos and coming to think of human investigations, represented by “them”. Similarly, in the poem Lockdown the poet opens his sensitivity to the global health emergency, triggered by Covid, but the gaze follows the thought from the general to the particular, returning to the end of the circle to the situations that people are experiencing from a historical and civil point of view.
Thus it seems that the present is a temporary state, contrary to eternity that does not concern the limits of men; so it is a world in the making, in perennial construction within history that Bhawani Shankar Nial knows how to sing in an epic way addressing the people and processes of change in India.
Enough and An encounter with death express a more subjective and intimate inner search; a dizzying vision of the secrets of life and death, this peered closely on the edge of the precipice to “the harsh jungles of planets and satellites”, but always with awareness and philosophical research: “in the laboratory of my oblivion”; “[…] molecules/ of my meticulous and fastidious questions […] (An encounter with death.) Sometimes, however, dialectics bend even more to inner dialogue; it proceeds with questions and answers of personal research in the face of questions about the meaning of the research itself, as in the poem Enough, where heaven and earth come together in the miracle of Being, recalling the example of Osho”.
