Akhil Katyal on longing, translation and Charles Darwin

Katyal talks about ways of grieving, his approach to translation, and the quest for possible worlds in his new volume

- Aditya Mani Jha

While writing a letter to a friend from college, David Foster Wallace came up with the line "Every love story is a ghost story." I was reminded of this line and its semantic genius (both love and ghosts are the sworn enemies of reason) more than once as I read Akhil Katyal's recently released collection of poems, The Last Time I Saw You.

This is the 39-year-old Katyal's fourth poetry collection, following Like Blood On the Bitten Tongue (2020), How Many Countries Does the Indus Cross (2020) and Night Charge Extra (2015). His poems tend to favour classic themes: love, loss, longing and occasionally, belonging. But like the Austrian poet Erich Fried's work, the love poem is also a formal vessel for Katyal, through which he can talk about anything under the sun, really. In God Hasn't Abandoned You, "trust is hung on walls/like old calendars". In Ordinary Things, he wryly describes a photographer's practiced flattery: "Like when teachers say 'interesting'/ to a colleague's remark,/he offered only non-committal compliments". Poems like Day Eleven of Learning Italian and Reading Rilke's 'Love Song' in German are informed by his work as a translator, while the titular verse is one of those love poems destined to be widely anthologized. Edited excerpts from an online interview.

One of my favorite poems in this collection is 'Darwin', which describes an experiment carried out by the scientist, when he made three of his children stare at the sun to study what he called 'grief-muscles' on their faces. Talk to me about Darwin the scientist and the literary figure.