Seventh Season (Sahitya Akademi Award-Winning Collection of Odia Poems)

Seventh Season: The poems in the collection are extended monologues on death, reminders of its inevitability. At times the speaker's predicament mirrors that the poet sees as his own: What shall I wear on the day of my death?... (Shining Future). Though narratives of desiccation, decay, desolation, past memories, the imminent nothingness, perishability of a life well-lived, there is no pessimism; the poems are not a dark diagnosis of the central theme, but excel in the beauty of imagery and poet's powerful, inimitable idiom.

Padma Bhushan Ramakanta Rath (b. 1934) is an intense artist who celebrates life, love and death in his literature. With about twenty collections of poetry, Ramakanta's first anthology Kete Dinara (of long past days) came out in 1962. He was awarded Saraswati Samman for his modern classic Sri Radha which, in its multilingual renderings, endeared him to the Indian reader in a larger way. Not quite particular about English rendering of his works, this exercise is part of a routine ritual of Sahitya Akademi where Akademi awardwinning books from Indian languages are rendered into English and other Indian languages.

Lipipuspa Nayak is an academic, critic, filmmaker and translator who specializes in translation (Odia-English) of classics, with fourteen published works. In The Seventh Season, she has maintained the honesty and integrity of the original text, while recognizing the difference in idioms of Odia and English language.

**Contents and Sample Pages**