Kannada’s varakavi (heaven-touched poet), Dattatreya Ramachandra Bendre or Da Ra Bendre, is one of the greatest lyric poets to have lived. In this article, a long-time translator of his poetry attempts an 'experimental review' – in English – of Bendre’s 1951 'ಗಂಗಾವತರಣ (Gangavatarana)' collection, a high point of 20th-century lyric poetry.
It is difficult to be objective about a writer you admire to the point of near-devotion, especially when he is a ‘dead poet’ you never had the chance to meet and who wrote in a language whose literature you know for a fact is nowhere close to being as well-known as it deserves to be.
The difficulty is compounded when you have spent a number of years translating and promoting his poetry and have only recently published a book containing some of these translations.