New Delhi, April 22 The University of Bath, UK organised a panel discussion on poet-diplomat Abhay K.'s poetry collection 'The Alphabets of Latin America' on Thursday, April 21. The topic of the discussion was 'New Alphabets: Building a Poetic & Critical Dialogue between Latin American and South Asian Thought'.
The participants included Jessica Sequeira, a scholar at the University of Cambridge and Jorge Heine, research professor, Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University, and former Chilean ambassador to India and poet-diplomat Abhay K.
Jessica Sequeira commenting on the discussion said: "We take Abhay K.'s recent book of poems 'The Alphabets of Latin America: A Carnival of Poems' (Bloomsbury India, 2020) as a starting point to discuss possibilities and challenges of intercultural conversation between Latin America and India. How to go beyond the cliché of 'building bridges', avoiding pitfalls of orientalism, exoticism and facile universalisms, and including both appreciative and critical elements? What are the possibilities of poetry to explore culture? Abhay K.'s book of poems, with its lyrical travelling 'I', evokes places, people, religious traditions and politics in Latin America."
Prof. Jorge Heine shared: "Octavio Paz, the Mexican Nobel Prize winner, is in that category as well. Both Paz and Neruda (who are on the cover of The Alphabets of Latin America) had a strong connection with India, and Paz's book, 'In Light of India', is an extended meditation on Indian civilization."
Abhay K. said that he was delighted that his poetry collection 'The Alphabets of Latin America' is receiving global attention. The book has already been translated and published into Italian and has been reviewed in leading global literary journals such as World Literature Today, Agenda UK, Beltway Poetry USA among others. The book has been translated into Spanish and Malayalam as well.
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