Of Grief and Survival: Spirituality and Affect in the Poetry of K Satchidanandan and Louise Gluck

This paper seeks to attempt a cross-cultural, comparative study of selected translations of the Malayalam Poet K. Satchidanandan and selected poems of the American Poet Louise Gluck. The emphasis is on the underlying spiritual concerns and related affects in their poetry. On the one hand, where Satchidanandan’s ideology differentiates the spiritual from the religious and calls the “sacred as equal to the secular,” Gluck’s poems showcase a sort of ambivalence wherein the poet wishes to be free herself from the compelling yet restricting forces of the “immutable”, (which is spiritual), and wishes a union with the earthly. Although their approaches are different, their concerns on spirituality converge at the point where the poets wish to anchor their notions of harmony and peaceful co-existence. Both their poetry, I feel, reinstate the need to connect to the instinctual and steadfast ideas of love and earthly life. Gluck’s notion of how “suffering can yield meaning” could be paralleled with Satchidanandan’s urge to “look at the ill-lit corners of hope” in attempting an understanding of the idea of humanity espoused by their poetry. I try to explore how the two poets use different poetic strategies to arrive at their notions of spirituality, and at the same time stay united by the commonality of the ultimate and universal need to preserve humanity at both the individual and collective levels.