Welsh Women's Classics: The Hindu Bard - The Poetry of Dorothy Bonarjee — The Poetry of Dorothy Bonarjee

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Dyma gyfrol rhif 34 yn y gyfres Welsh Women's Classics , sef y casgliad cyntaf erioed o gerddi Dorothy Bonarjee, sy'n cynnig asesiad arbenigol o waith Bonarjee ynghyd â chofnod byw o'i bywyd hynod. Cynhwysir traethiad gafaelgar a manwl o fywyd anghyffredin y bardd yn India, Llundain, Cymru a Ffrainc.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

34th in the Welsh Women's Classics series. The first ever collection of Dorothy Bonarjee's verse, offering an expert assessment of Bonarjee's writing and a vivid account of her remarkable life. Includes a detailed and gripping narration of the poet's extraordinary life in India, London, Wales and France.

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Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

Dorothy Bonarjee was born in India in 1894 into an elite Bengali family. As a child, she moved to London and in 1912 she enrolled at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth. Two years later, she was awarded the Bardic chair at the UCW Eisteddfod, and went on to publish poems in Welsh journals. Bonarjee later took a law degree at the University of London and eloped with a French artist. France remained her home for the rest of her life. Editors Mohini Gupta is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford. She was selected as the Charles Wallace India Trust Translator-Writer Fellow in 2017, hosted by Literature Across Frontiers at the University of Aberystwyth. Her English-Hindi translations have been published by Tulika Publishers. She is a Welsh-language learner and enthusiast. Andrew Whitehead is an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham and an associate editor of History Workshop Journal. He is the author of The Lives of Freda: the political, spiritual and personal journeys of Freda Bedi (Speaking Tiger, 2019). Andrew is a former BBC India correspondent.

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

This collection introduces the work of a virtually unknown and largely unpublished poet who wrote mainly in the period of the First World War, while she was a student in Aberystwyth and in London. Despite the title, Dorothy Bonarjee’s family were Christians, although, not unusually among Romantic poets, her work suggests a pantheism and she sometimes alludes to reincarnation. She left India in 1904 at the age of 10 and never returned. Thereafter she lived in Wales, in London and in France. Her triumph at the University of Wales Eisteddfod in 1914 was celebrated as the first time the Bardic chair had been won by a woman and by a foreign student. The poem – which was about the Welsh hero Owain Lawgoch, and which has not survived – was in English (both languages being accepted at the time). This clearly gave her the confidence to submit poetry to Welsh publications including The Dragon and Welsh Outlook between 1914 and 1919. Apart from these, the poems are selected from her ‘black notebook’, preserved by her niece. This source rarely gives context, although a few of the poems clearly date from her later life in France, but she never seems to have sought publication again. The impression is of a young, passionate, Romantic poet, obsessed above all with light. Her imagery is saturated with it, and in one London poem she even imagines being reborn as a car’s headlight. This preoccupation is evident from the first (1914) poem, ‘Noon’, where the ‘gorse-clad hills’ above Clarach are fired ‘to throbbing gold’. Sun, moon, stars and light reflected in water fill her poems. In an exercise in the pastoral, addressing ‘Glycera’ (remembering that 1914 summer, but written in 1916), the refrain ‘Dost thou remember ... the light?’ embodies the longing for pre-war, innocent joy. Intense noontide stillness is for her an ideal state (as in ‘The Day’). ‘The Pool’ is a particularly beautiful evocation of reflected starlight, and in ‘London 1916’ the city is described in terms of its varied artificial lights: ‘deep orange, yellow, staring white ... and lamps that flicker past like falling stars.’ Again in ‘Light’, she describes different parts of the city (including Christmas trees aglow in the Strand) and imagines the dead, drawn back to the city ‘like sad moths’. This and ‘Non Omnia Moriar’ suggest that she enjoyed her time in London very much and felt she belonged there. She took a Law degree at UCL and both she and her mother were keen supporters of women’s suffrage. She mixed in artistic and literary circles. This time probably gave rise to the delicate poem, ‘Dancer’, and the ambivalent, ‘The Café’. Some of the poems, such as ‘The Nightingale’, are clearly influenced by older Romantic poets but, in ‘The Huntress’, Bonarjee takes a more contemporary model and produces a wonderful, mysterious piece – a direction of development which sadly she did not continue. Not wishing to return to India, she eloped with a French artist, Paul Surtel, married in 1921 and settled in Provence. There are charming poems for and about their daughter, and one final, heart-breaking poem (‘To Amien de Mempson’) to a child who reminded her of her ‘little laughing son’ Denis, who died in infancy. Although the couple parted in the 1930s, Bonarjee remained in Provence. Unless there is another ‘black notebook’ to be discovered, she seems to have written little beyond the London years. Among the love and lost-love poems, some clearly refer to her own love affair with a Welsh student, but others reflect the widespread pain of loss and suffering through the war. ‘Peasants. France 1914’ empathises with the devastation of a traditional way of life. The introductions by the editors give a good account of Bonarjee’s life and acknowledge their great debt to Sheela Banargee, who has done so much to secure and promote her aunt’s poetry, and to Honno for bringing a lost poet back into the company of her peers.