Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe

Abstract

Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe and Kelly Sullivan nidhi zak/aria eipe is a poet, pacifist, and fabulist. Her first collection, Auguries of a Minor God, was published with Faber and Faber in 2021. “Incantation for the Hare” published here for the first time, was inspired by Seamus Heaney’s “The Names of the Hare,” his translation of the Middle English poem “Les Noms De Un Levre En Englais.” This incantatory poem formed part of Eipe’s research project Honey and the Hare, carried out during her tenure as the Rooney Writer Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute of Trinity College Dublin in Spring 2023. She is poetry editor at Skein Press and contributing editor at The Stinging Fly. ________ Kelly Sullivan spoke to Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe over Zoom on 9 March 2023. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. kelly sullivan: Do you remember when you first read a Seamus Heaney poem? nidhi zak/aria eipe: I actually read his Nobel Laureate lecture before I read any of his poetry—during a phase in my life when I loved reading those speeches. The New Press published a collection of the laureate talks over twenty-five years. After that, the first Heaney poem I read was “Badgers” from Field Work, which I love because I’m a huge animal fan. sullivan: So you didn’t read Heaney in school? eipe: No. I did most of my schooling in India with a British Romantic-era literature curriculum.We read a lot of Blake, Keats, and Wordsworth and didn’t get exposure to many different kinds of poets. The [End Page 151] curriculum was strangely curated: we read one poem from each poet and period in an anthology of about thirty poems. My experience seemed similar to many people who only studied poetry in school: the formal way of writing poetry didn’t really appeal. What I did love was the mystical poetry I used to read: early Indian and Sufi poets in translation. I was in college before I was introduced to poets like Neruda, Lorca, Rilke, Miłosz, and Szymborska and started to encounter poetry more widely. sullivan: And were you writing yourself? Or did you really begin writing poetry after you encountered another world different from the British romantic poems you read in school? eipe: I wasn’t writing poetry myself. I used to experiment with all kinds of genres, but poetry was the one that I didn’t ever think I could write; every time I did write a poem, it fell short of what I envisioned in my head. I wrote a few poems in high school but didn’t ever consider myself a poet. The turning point for me was when my mother died, quite suddenly, five years ago. Soon after I lost the ability to write anything, which was a very strange experience for me because I’ve always had been able to express myself through language. After she died, I found that my link to English—actually my mother tongue—disappeared. And so I had to feel my way into writing and into language again; that’s when poetry actually happened for me. sullivan: So quite recently? Were you doing translation work at all during that time? I know that you used Sufi poets and other languages with Auguries of a Minor God. Was that part of your getting your own language back or part of the writing process? eipe: Yes. I’ve always been interested in translation and love reading outsider languages that I understand. I spent some time in a monastery when growing up and had access to a library there. People would visit from around the world and leave behind books from their countries. Often the languages of these books wouldn’t be ones that I understood, but there was something about the shapes of the letters on the page that I loved. So I would create meaning for these words in my early attempts at translation. Later, I started learning French [End Page 152] and Spanish as well as different Indian languages, such as Sanskrit. And I started...