Recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature, Yuyutsu RD Sharma is a distinguished poet and translator.
He has published nine poetry collections including, Milarepa’s Bones, 33 New Poems, (Nirala, New Delhi 2012), Nepal Trilogy, Photographs and Poetry on Annapurna, Everest, Helambu & Langtang (www.Nepal-Trilogy.de, Epsilonmedia, Karlsruhe, 2010), a 900-page book with renowned German photographer, Andreas Stimm, Space Cake, Amsterdam, & Other Poems from Europe and America, (Howling Dog Press, Colorado, 2009) and Annapurna Poems, (Nirala, 2008, Reprint, 2012).
Yuyutsu also brought out a translation of Irish poet Cathal O’ Searcaigh poetry in Nepali in a bilingual collection entitled, Kathmandu: Poems, Selected and New, (2006) and a translation of Hebrew poet Ronny Someck’s poetry in Nepali in a bilingual edition, Baghdad, February 1991
He has translated and edited several anthologies of contemporary Nepali poetry in English and launched a literary movement, Kathya Kayakalpa (Content Metamorphosis) in Nepali poetry.
Two books of his poetry, Poemes de l’ Himalayas (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Poemas de Los Himalayas (Cosmopoeticia, Cordoba, Spain) just appeared in French and Spanish respectively.
Widely traveled author, he has read his works at several prestigious places including Poetry Café, London, Seamus Heaney Center for Poetry, Belfast, New York University, New York, The Kring, Amsterdam, P.E.N. Paris, Knox College, Illinois, Whittier College, California, Baruch College, New York, WB Yeats’ Center, Sligo, Gustav Stressemann Institute, Bonn, Rubin Museum, New York, Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, The Guardian Newsroom, London, Trois Rivieres Poetry Festival, Quebec, Arnofini, Bristol, Borders, London, Slovenian Book Days, Ljubljana, Royal Society of Dramatic Arts, London, Gunter Grass House, Bremen, GTZ, Kathmandu, Nehru Center, London, March Hare, Newfoundland, Canada, Frankfurt Book Fair, Frankfurt, Indian International Center, New Delhi, and Villa Serbelloni, Italy.
He has held workshop in creative writing and translation at Queen’s University, Belfast, University of Ottawa and South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany, University of California, Davis, Sacramento State University, California and New York University, New York.
His works have appeared in Poetry Review, Chanrdrabhaga, Sodobnost, Amsterdam Weekly, Indian Literature, Irish Pages, Delo, Modern Poetry in Translation, Exiled Ink, Iton77, Little Magazine, The Telegraph, Indian Express and Asiaweek.
Born at Nakodar, Punjab and educated at Baring Union Christian College, Batala and later at Rajasthan University, Jaipur, Yuyutsu remained active in the literary circles of Rajasthan and acted in plays by Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Harold Pinter, and Edward Albee. Later he taught at various campuses of Punjab University, and Tribhuwan University, Kathmandu.
Sharma was educated at Nakodar under the supervision of his maternal grandfather, Dheru Ram and grew up in a very religious atmosphere with his mother, Shanti Devi and at the age of nine became a shaman as he was thought to be possessed by a serpent spirit, his family deity. He came under the impression of Naga ascetics whom his father, Madan Lal, revered, but later followed the course of Western education and received his early education first DAV college, Nakodar, Punjab, and then Baring Union Christan College, Batala and the University of Rajasthan where he met American poet David Ray who encouraged him to write and publish poetry.
Yuyutsu quit teaching at Tribhuwan University in 1996 and opted for the career of a free lance writer. He also started visiting the Annapurna region of Western Nepal regularly but only in 2005 published his work devoted to the region as The Lake Fewa and a Horse and later in 2008, Annapurna Poems, Selected and New. He also met German Photographer, Andreas Stimm at Frankfurt book fair in 2004 and his collaboration with Stimm resulted in three books of picture/poetry book in black and white, currently put thereto in a 900 page volumne, Nepal Trilogy:Photographs and Poetry on Annapurna, Everest, Helambu & Langtang(www.Nepal-Trilogy.de, Epsilonmedia, Karlsruhe, 2010.
The Library of Congress has nominated his recent book of Nepali translations entitled, Roaring Recitals; Five Nepali Poets as Best Book of the Year 2001 from Asia under the Program, A World of Books International Perspectives.
Yuyutsu’s own work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Slovenian, Hebrew, Spanish and Dutch. He just published his nonfiction, Annapurnas and Stains of Blood: Life, Travel and Writing a Page of Snow, (Nirala, 2010). He edits Pratik, A Magazine of Contemporary Writing and contributes literary columns to Nepal’s leading daily, The Himalayan Times.
Visiting Poet this spring at New York University, in June, he will participate as Guest Poet at Poetry Parnassus Festival organized to celebrate London Olympics 2012.
Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world to read from his works and conducts creative writing workshop at various universities in North America and Europe but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home.
More: www.yuyutsu.de
Praise for Yuyutsu Sharma’s Earlier Work
The ‘blinding snows of the Annapurnas ridge’ inspire a poetry that confronts natural magnificence with exuberant humanity. Yuyutsu R D Sharma’s generous vision embraces not only the landscape and its people but the lesser fauna, like the pigeons that speak ‘a kind of hushed speech that robbers might use’ and the mules on the Tibetan salt route, exhausted and bow-legged from hauling ‘cartons of Iceberg, mineral water bottles,/ solar heaters, Chinese tiles, tin cans…’ These vividly coloured, muscular and energetic poems have an atmosphere of freshness, as though the snow itself had rinsed and brightened them. Like the ‘waterfall beds that/ smelled of the birth of fresh fish’, they have the tangy, dust-free odour of language born of lived experience.
Carol Rumens , The United Kingdom
Formed by 20th century South Asian and North American poetry movements and himself a verbal renewer of his country’s literature, Yuyutsu indefatigably writes along rivers and paths, mountains, valleys and villages, verse after verse…
Dr. Christoph Emmrich
South and Southeast Asian Buddhism at the University of Toronto.
Yuyutsu is the poet of the Himalayas, he lives near Everest, but that does not stop him from walking along canals of the European cities, creating an interesting interface between East and West. In Amsterdam’s shops instead of window dolls, he sees Hindu goddesses and in the radiance of the North Sea, the faces of Indian children dancing in the Monsoons. His poems are universal, fuelled by enormous powers of observation and reflection, able to reach the essence of things with the depth of great masters of the Eastern poetry.
Veronica Aranda in Preface to Poemas de Los Himalayas
Yuyutsu RD Sharma brings the bracing airs of the Himalayas to any city. His vigorous, expansive and elemental poems leave Yeti tracks on the streets and mule trails on the Tube. They are packed with rapturous couplings of the urban and the feral.
Pascale Petit, Former Poetry Editor, Poetry London
A fiercely sublime poet …the book confirms an enormous talent, as well as purity of purpose with which he approaches his calling. Lines jump out, burning themselves into your consciousness.
Eddie Woods in Amsterdam Weekly
With this buoyantly audacious work, Yuyutsu RD should be assured of his place in the canon of Asian poetry… In this new volume, he conveys the people and places, the flora and fauna of the Annapurna area of Nepal with an exhilaratingly fresh vision. It is poetry where pastoral elegy becomes fused with magic realism; where earthy common-sense mysticism becomes interlaced with a lush sexuality. The book is a voluptuous and loving evocation of Nepal and I admire its dramatic intensity.
Cathal O Searcaigh, Ireland
Yuyutsu is a first-rate poet in English and an excellent place to begin if you want to get in touch with Nepalese writing today.
William Seaton, in Bylines Interview
Yuyutsu’s subject is the intertwinement of the social and geographic, namely, how even the Himalayas were dirtied and damaged by partisan politics. In the poems, sacred energy appears in sexual, rather than theological, form; his incredibly tangy descriptions of crags and cliff faces swell with eroticism.
Jim Feast in The Brooklyn Rail, New York
Each poem is a delight in itself, a discovery, a new turn of phrase, a new sensation, a world of sound and light, and visions all colliding against each other to provide an unexpected and haunting experience.
David Clark in Exiled Ink, London
Yuyutsu RD lives close to Everest. His poetry climbs mountains, swims in rivers, and paints the falling leaves in copper. This tango with nature also occurs when Yuyutsu RD closes the window for a moment…
Ronny Someck in Iton77, Tel Aviv
The poems… are shining jewels of passion, energy and splendid craft, redolent with vivid, dreamlike visual imagery, strengthened by realistic observation and powered by strong male eroticism. His is an unabashed return to the male gaze that is refreshing and solemn by turns, reminding one of the stirring sounds of rolling drums, and beating rain…
Sucheta Das Gupta in The Himalayan Times, Kathmandu
“Something is always happening in Yuyutsu’s poetry. Like some burning concern for truth, something that, I think, a poem should do. For this, we owe Yuyutsu much.
Jayanta Mahapatra, Cuttack, India
Young, versatile energetic, he is rocking and rolling with new impressions… Yuyutsu’s poetry touches on concerns of global matters, acknowledging that we can never with violence create a Utopia or “construct a gorgeous pagoda from/furious flames/and whistling winds … Such lines capture for me the futility of the Iraq War, which I refuse to dignify with its official title, even more euphemistic and tainted with doublethink than earlier misadventures. We can’t build even a humble pagoda from furious flames and whistling winds.
David Ray, The United States of America
Yuyutsu R.D. brings to the Indian readers a distinct flavor of the Nepalese landscape and culture, in a sequence of poems that pulsate with needle-sharp images—Equally sensitive is his language that, scrupulously avoids stilted diction-words or phrases. His writing is so densely imagistic that he holds reader’s attention all the way through. Behind plethora of packed images is a genuine concern for the human predicament the trials and tribulations of the destitute everywhere. Hunger is the theme that runs as an under current-hunger that gnaws into the vitals of both humans and animals.
Shiv K. Kumar in The Hindustan Times
Yuyutsu has a good eye and a good ear:
The rain stopped in the jungle.
The cicada stopped its chirr.
To have an ear for a sudden silence in unique.
Keki N. Daruwala in The Hindustan Times
Yuyutsu’s poetry has long been a part of the Nepalese consciousness: We use his more aphoristic lines as a paradigm of contemporary Nepali political and social changes.
The Kathmandu Post
Yuyutsu RD Sharma’s poetry runs clear, tender, and passionate with a rage that often erupts volcanic in the face of the cruelty, despair, and injustice that saddles the disenfranchised poor of the earth. Poems powerful and devastating, yet gentle as flower petals wafting to earth in a summer breeze.
Michael Annis
http://www.nepal-trilogy.de/index.php/en/
The Way to Everest book with Poems from Yuyutsu R. D. Sharma. Also free download of the virtual book!
Poemes De L’Himalaya by Yuyutsu R. D. Sharma Published by L’Harmattan, Paris
