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MANI RAO

LIVING MANTRA— Mantra, Deity and Visionary Experience Today. Palgrave-Macmillan, Contemporary Anthroplogy of Religion Series, 2019. About the book: Living Mantra is an anthropology of mantra-experience among Hindu-tantric practitioners. In ancient Indian doctrine and legends, mantras perceived by rishis (seers) invoke deities and have transformative pow ers. Adopting a methodology that combines scholarship and practice, Mani Rao discovers a continuing tradition of visionaries (rishis/seers) and revelations in south India’s Andhra-Telangana. Both deeply researched and replete w ith fascinating narratives, the book reformulates the poetics of mantra-practice as it probes practical questions. Can one know if a vision is real or imagined? Is vision visual? Are deity-visions mediated by culture? If mantras are effective, w hat is the role of devotion? Are mantras language? Living Mantra interrogates not only theoretical questions, but also those a practitioner w ould ask: how does one choose a deity, for example, or w hat might bind one to a guru? Rao breaks fresh ground in redirecting attention to the moments that precede systematization and canon-formation, show ing how authoritative sources are formed.

REVIEWS “Mani Rao moves beyond aesthetic and linguistic interpretations to elaborate mantra as an activating force and transformative embodied experience. Mantras, deities, practitioners, communities of practice, even authoritative texts, emerge as dynamic, evolving assemblages of meaning, know ing and feeling. We are invited to think of mantra as a form of potency dynamized by the agency of its practitioners. An insightful, gripping and accessible scholarly w ork.” —Lata Mani, Historian, Cultural Critic, Filmmaker “Mani Rao show s an extraordinary ability to enter into the lived experiences of her informants. In this ‘anthropology of mantra,’ Rao studies modern situations of visionary and auditory religious experience, w ith many descriptions of the relationship betw een image and sound, deity and mantra. This book should be of great interest to scholars of Indian religion and to practitioners of both Hindu devotion and yogic meditation.” —June McDaniel, Professor Emerita of History of Religions, College of Charleston, USA

Book your copy online: https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783319963907

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KALIDASA FOR THE 21st CENTURY READER— Selected Poetry and Drama. Translated from Sanskrit. Aleph Books, 2014. Finalist for the Lucien Stryk Prize 2015 “Inviting as well as formidable/Like the ocean/with gems and monsters both”— tropes for an ancient king but a fair description of Mani Rao’s Kālidāsa for the 21st Century Reader. Verse plays and epics by the greatest poet and dramatist in Sanskrit are available here for the first time in accessible, lyrical translations that erase the distance of time and previous scholarly renderings and evoke the majesty, humanity, and sheer beauty of image in Kālidāsa’s poetry. “They inhaled/The scent of lake-lotuses/Cool from ripples/They inhaled it like/their own breath” – Erica Mena https://literarytranslators.wordpress.com/author/ericamena/

“Adopting a variety of poetic techniques to translate his different works as each one employs a different meter, carries different emotions, belong to different genres, etc., Mani Rao gives us nuanced tones in his voice that we’ve previously missed.” — Poetry at Sangam. Read excerpts from Meghadutam: http://poetry.sangamhouse.org/2014/08/meghadutam-by-kalidasa-translated-by-mani-rao/ “Mani Rao gives us versions from what she tells us is Kalidasa’s least admired poem – but, completely reinventing Sanskrit translation, she also gives us new eyes by which to think on it.” — Almost Island. Read excerpts from Ritusamharam http://almostisland.com/spring_2014/special_issue_the_past/a_collection_of_seasons.html Interview in Kitaab by Zafar Anjum. Nov 2, 2014. https://kitaab.org/2014/11/02/poetry-for-me-is-an-intense-form-of-writing-kitaab-interview-with-mani-rao/ Interview in Pune Mirror by Kunal Ray. Oct 12, 2014. https://punemirror.indiatimes.com/others/sunday-read//articleshow/44786197.cms Interview in The Sanskrit Podcast by Shoba Narayan shale.com on why Kalidasa matters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP6UFn1chAs

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https://www.amazon.com/Kalidasa-21st-Century-Reader-Selected/dp/9382277757

BHAGAVAD GITA AS A POEM— Translated from Sanskrit Autumn Hill Books USA/Canada 2010; Penguin India 2011; Fingerprint India 2014

Print Pick in The Hindu, Dec 12, 2011— “to be celebrated and dwelt over.”

“Rao’s version of the Bhagavad Gita unpacks the original Sanskrit with a range of avant garde techniques—in prosody, diction, mise-en-page and lineation—rendering a new translation of the well-known philosophical text unlike any before it.”– The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry. 2nd Ed. Edited by Jeremy Noel-Todd ad Ian Hamilton. “Rao plays with the words of the Gita—not changing them, but changing the way we experience them. The text is fluid, playful, eminently readable, and yet true to the complex philosophical conceptions Krishna presents to Arjuna in the poetic dialogue that forms the heart of the poem. We see modernist hints of Walt Whitman, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Aram Saroyan peeking through the veneer of the ancient text, which Rao renders both more and less familiar to Western audiences, allowing the text to dance around in the reader’s head…” – Eric Gurevitch “The great virtue of The Bhagavad Gita is courage, and in her luminous new translation, Rao is courageous indeed. Her lines venture to keep pace with the original, stride for stride, revelation for revelation. As Wittgenstein wrote, ‘courage is always original.” I can avow that Rao’s is the first truly original version of this sacred text to appear in decades.” – Donald Revell “Mani Rao has transformed the most famous spiritual poem in India [….] as a poem to be perceived directly, intuitively, cutting through reason and linearity to arrive at the underlying undying poetry and grace of this epic work.”– Frederick Smith

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Download introduction, read excerpts, translator’s note, and essay in exchanges (2009), read interview in Full Tilt (March 2011) on http://manirao.com/books/bhagavad-gita/

A conversation with Devdutt Pattanaik about his Gita and my Gita at Bangalore Literary Festival (Dec 2015): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSKzYFlmPeM

USA/Canada: https://www.amazon.com/Bhagavad-Gita-Translation-Mani-

Rao/dp/0984303618 Indian Subcontinent: https://www.amazon.in/Bhagavad-Gita-Mani-Rao/dp/8175993022

2.22 you discard old clothes for the new you discard one worn-out body for another

you are not your body 2.23-2.24 weapons cannot pierce | this | unpiercable fire burn | who | unburnable water wet | you | unwettable wind dry | really| undryable

| are |

forever free fixed fromever

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NEW AND SELECTED POEMS Poetrywala, India 2014

Poem, Sisyphus Moon, Sisyphus Full Null Life, Sisyphus Chain Who knows how many Days in the Life of Brahma Pebble, Sisyphus On a beach Wave Wave Wave Polishing Up there Slick stars who made it

GHOSTMASTERS

Chameleon Press, Hong Kong 2010

The womb never leaves a child You wear it on your back even as you look for it in absent-minded mourning The new skins you grow are slough But this is flesh – kin – Slide back into its canoe Bark curved from memory And thus dressed go to the shore your bride death

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ECHOLOCATION

Chameleon Press, Hong Kong 2003 (out of print) Math Paper Press, Singapore 2014

The sky is fitted linen, stretched over sealine without a crease, pegged to the spikes

and jags of mountains, kingsize, navy, preparing to be sunshot. Sooner than lovers can hide, no sooner than the taste of stars striking your lips, one by one stunned and falling to light.

It’s all been said and yet, need, blowing between our lips, streams inside a tree. We flowed out of time and back so soon eating eggs our own. Through each other we pass like water.

At the sun to see how it never changes, at the moon to see how it does, algae slipping beneath our feet, roots travelling and dewdrops dying in visible speed. There is no such thing as a circular river.

Unlike bread, the body becomes softer with age. We tag our children with our names, store the plaits of our daughters. Stash berries under rocks and look for them later.

Held in the fangs of a wristwatch, a well-worn path of a nail in our veins, heart-hammered time trail.

No matter who two are kissing, eternity arrives, jelly bean eyes black crystal balls. The longer we look, the more we recognize and anything we could say is too obvious. The songs we like are the songs we know, and every song on the radio is about us.

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SELECT REVIEWS OF POETRY “Mani Rao’s poetry is entirely genuine in a way that I can’t help knowing from line to line. That is its risk and its vulnerability. The poems are not games but seem to draw from offstage but direct, lived experience, a close attention to the momentary and an acute awareness of both self and reader. This is no rudderless, fashionable disjunction: for several years, she has been cutting her own fiercely singular path through the thickets of our language; with each new book her compositional values become both more light and more precise, and her gestures—for this is a poetry of intense ellipsis—more sure, more instantaneous, more stunning.” – Vivek Narayanan “There’s an uncanny lightness in Mani Rao’s poetry, a buoyancy that lifts the reader weightlessly to a safer place. Again and again in this wonderful book, I’m moved and gratified by the effortlessness of Rao’s obedience, even as she attends the language with devoted attention. If you believe that reverence is a grave matter, this isn’t the book for you. – Claudia Keelan “…her style is so singular that it is impossible to mistake it for someone else.” Uttaran Das Gupta in The Book Review “The poems deserve closer, less clichéd attention. They are reflections of sex, blood, bile, and god, and while they look like prose on the page, in the mouth they feel like poetry.” – Jeet Thayil, Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. Rao has become a master poet, and as with many master poets, her poems have become more difficult and demanding. Any reader comparing 100 Poems: 1985-2005 to her latest collection, Ghostmasters, will quickly spot the growth and change as Rao pursues her self-defined aesthetic, myths, and—yes—theology. Reid Mitchell, Cha.

PREVIOUS POETRY TITLES

100 Poems (Selected Poems 1985-2005). Chameleon Press, Hong Kong 2005 Salt. Asia 2000, Hong Kong 2000 The Last Beach. (with Chinese translations by Huang Chan Lan) Hong Kong: Asia 2000, Hong Kong

1999 Living Shadows. Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Hong Kong 1997. A-1 poster-book with

drawings and poems Catapult Season. Writers Workshop Calcutta 1993 Wing Span. Writers Workshop Calcutta 1987

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Essays: select publications “Up, Down, Up.” Review of Availalable Light by C.P.Surendran. Scroll. Aug 2nd 2018. “Preface” to Autobiography of a Goddess— Andal,” a translation by Priya Sarukkai Chabbria and Ravi

Shankar. New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2016. “A Brief History of the Bhagavad Gita’s Canonization.” Religion Compass, Nov 2013. “Lorine Niedecker Condens.” Interim (Vol.28 No.1 & 2, 2010 and Vol 29 issue 3, 2012). Using only

Niedecker’s words, a poem-essay of her poetic principles. “Automatic Writing – Real, Surreal, Indeterminate.” Fulcrum (Issue 7, 2011). Review of Arvind K. Mehrotra’s Songs of Kabir. Translation Review (Vol 83, 2012). “Reading the Rigveda.” Indian Literature (Issue 262. Vol LV. No 2. March-April 2011). “Caterpillar to Butterfly: Thoreau’s dietary journey.” Thoreau Society Bulletin (Issue 270, 2010). “Repetitiveness in Gita translations.” eXchanges (Winter 2009). “Decoding Augustine via Saussure.” In-Between Journal of Literary Criticism (Sep 2009). 131-139. Poetry: select publications Desde Hong Kong: Poets in conversation with Octavio Paz. Hong Kong: Chameleon, 2015. Harper Collins Book of English Poetry by Indians. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2012. Sixty Indian Poets. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2008. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. London: Bloodaxe UK, 2008. Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. New York: W.W.

Norton USA, 2008. The Golden Treasury of Writer’s Workshop Poetry. Calcutta: Writer’s Workshop, 2008. Zoland Poetry Anthology. Boston: Steerforth Press, 2007. Poetry Live! Anthology of poetry for Hong Kong schools. Hong Kong: Chameleon Press, 2005. In journals including Interim, Almost Island, Poetry at Sangam, Omniverse, Anomalous Press, Mascara, Colorado Review, Indian Literature, Cordite, The Literary Review, Desilit, Softblow, Kavya Bharati. Tinfish. XCP. Oxford Magazine, 91st Meridien, Iowa Review, HOW2, Fourth River, Washington Square, Asia Literary Review, In Posse Review, Filling Station, Wasafiri, Chandrabhaga, Papertiger, Nth Position, Meanjin, JAAM, Takahe , Dimsum. (Full list on manirao.com)

Select Readings, Talks, Teaching: - Reading and Lectures at Rishi Valley School including a Translation Workshop, 2017. - Guest Lecture at Mt. Carmel College on translation and my books in translation, 2017. - Lectures at Center of Advanced Research and Training in Translation and Multilingualism, Osmania University, 2017. “Translating Texture: Techniques of translation” at OU Arts College; “Rediscovering Kalidasa: Translating Indian Classics Today” at Secundrabad PG College; “Translating the Gita: the Relevance of Retranslation” at Koti Women’s College. - “Is there no Bhakti in Sanskrit?” at Pune International Center, 2017. - “How to Bridge Ancient Wisdom and Modern Knowledge” at ThinkEdu Conclave, Chennai 2017. - Various Lectures on Bhagavad Gita: Black Mountain Institute Alumni Series Las Vegas 2016; Kala Ghoda festival 2015; Chinese University of Hong Kong 2014; University of Iowa 2014. - Panels and talks on Poetry and Translation: Odissa Literary Festival Bhuvaneshwar 2015; Kala Ghoda Festival Mumbai 2014; Lekhana festival Bangalore 2014, American Literary Translators Association Conference panel 2010; Asian Writers Conference Creighton University Omaha 2009; ACLA Harvard University 2009; Vegas Valley Book Festival 2008; Chatham University Pittsburgh 2005; - Poetry readings at Kritya International Poetry Festival Trivandrum 2007; Bowery Poetry Club New York 2008; PEN World Voices New York 2006; Chicago Humanities Festival 2005; Vancouver Asian Heritage Month 2004; Cairo Atelier 2004; The Age Melbourne Writers Festival 2004; Wordfeast Singapore

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International Poetry Festival 2004; The Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004; Eye on Books Hong Kong British Council 1998; City Festival Hong Kong 1999, 2000, 2001. - Radio host for “Time for Poetry” on RTHK Radio 4, Hong Kong’s first radio segment in English on poetry, 2005. - Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad. 15-hour single credit Creative Writing course for Engineering and Design students. 2018, and scheduled for 2019.

Previous career Between 1986 and 1992, I worked as a copywriter and creative director in advertising agencies in Mumbai. In 1993, I moved to Hong Kong to run a creative consultancy and in 1995, joined Star TV’s in-house off-air creative department. Over the next nine years, I was Senior Vice-President of Marketing and Corporate communications working across Asia. During this 20-year career in India and Hong Kong, my literary activities were parallel to my professional life. In 2004, I was able to leave this career and pursue literary and scholarly interests full-time.

My work Language and writing has been at the center of my life, whether making a livelihood from it in media and marketing, or writing and writing about poetry. In 2005, invited writing fellowships followed by an MFA made me more informed as well as qualified to teach poetry; fortuitously, it also led to a serious engagement with translation in a translation theory course. I found that translations of the Gita fell short of the textural delights of the original, began to do research and retranslated the Gita. By then, I was steeped in the study of early Indian sources and went on to do a PhD in Religious Studies. Early Indian thinking positions sound and syllables as the very material of creation, and mantra (sacred sound-formulas) as the medium and instruments of creation and transformation—my PhD dissertation was in the experience and poetics of mantra practice. An all-round Indological understanding also came from vedic hermeneutics, tantrism and shaktism, Buddhism, historiography, postcolonial theory, modernity and ethnography/anthropology. Whereas Sanskrit gave me the ability to do textual research in early sources, anthropology cultivated respect for the practical and contemporary world. I believe I am a poet and translator with a solid grounding in research, a researcher with a taste for literature, and a scholar keen to blend the theoretical with the empirical and pragmatic.

Grants, Fellowships, Residencies 2005, 2009 Visiting Fellow, Iowa International Writing Program, University of Iowa 2006 University of Iowa International Programs 2006 Writer-in-Residence 2010 Witter-Bynner grant for Bhagavad Gita translation 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016 Kearns Gurney-Harris summer grant 2015 Finalist for the Lucien Stryk Prize, American Literary Translators Association 2018 Omi Ledig House, Fall Residency

On the Jury of Lucien Stryk Prize 2012 for ALTA (American Literary Translators Association), USA TFA (Toto Funds the Arts) Creative Writing Awards 2014, India Cliff Becker Poetry Prize 2018, ALTA (American Literary Translators Association), USA

Academic credentials

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2016 PhD, Religious Studies, Duke University Dissertation: “Visionary Experience of Mantra: An Ethnography in Andhra-Telangana.” Committee: Leela Prasad (chair), Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Morgan, Hwansoo Kim

2010 MFA Creative Writing, University of Nevada Las Vegas 1985 BA English, Stella Maris College Madras, India

Contact and Links Email: emailmanirao@gmail.com Website: www.manirao.com for links to writing, reviews and interviews. Join Facebook Author Page: https://www.facebook.com/mani.rao.poetry/ Follow on Academia.edu: https://independent.academia.edu/ManiRao