Post by Nitaidas on Feb 15, 2012 22:07:22 GMT -6
I have also wanted for a long time to start an online literary journal relating to the Caitanya Vaisnava tradition. The Caitanya movement brought about one of the greatest literary explosions in the history of the planet. An enormous amount of high quality literature was produced in Sanskrit and Bengali and other Indic languages in the centuries following Mahaprabhu's life. But what happened? After about the end of the 18th century not much that is any good has been produced. I would like in some way to encourage the production of a modern Vaisnava literature. Certainly we can never match the great writers of the 16th and 17th centuries or their voluminous literary production. But we can certainly do better than we have been.
So I want to announce the coming of an online literary journal, the name of which is as yet undecided. It will publish poetry, short stories, essays, translations, and even serialized novellas or novels. Dramatic plays are also welcome. I also intend in conjunction with my gurubhais to start a yearly poetry contest in the name of our gurudev Sri Tinkudi Baba with a real cash prize for the winners. The details of that will be announced later. We may even do the same with other forms of literary expression (stories, essays, translations, even novels) as time goes on. The main idea is to encourage talented writers to write and to build up a large body of interesting modern CV literature.
Now we have many talented writers on this forum and everyone is encouraged to submit pieces. The journal is open to anyone and anyone may submit pieces. The difficulty comes in defining what is meant by a specifically Caitanyite literature. Perhaps one way of looking at it would be to think of a Caitanyite literature as one that issues out of a Caitanyite world view tempered, to be sure, by our presence in and engaged with the modern world. Or, it might be a literature that incorporates Caitanyite ideas, ideals, and emotions without doing so in a crass or overly emotional way. What works as powerful literature in the 16th Bengal or North India will not work today. We need a thoroughly modern literature, not blind to the angst of modern life, that modern Caitanyites would find fun, even delightful, to read. At the same time one does not want it to be labeled a sectarian literature. It should be appealing to anyone who loves reading and literature. In other words, we don't want anything like that nasty series of Christain books called the Left Behind Series.
Is it possible, or, am I just daydreaming? Any other takes on what a modern CV literature might look like?
So I want to announce the coming of an online literary journal, the name of which is as yet undecided. It will publish poetry, short stories, essays, translations, and even serialized novellas or novels. Dramatic plays are also welcome. I also intend in conjunction with my gurubhais to start a yearly poetry contest in the name of our gurudev Sri Tinkudi Baba with a real cash prize for the winners. The details of that will be announced later. We may even do the same with other forms of literary expression (stories, essays, translations, even novels) as time goes on. The main idea is to encourage talented writers to write and to build up a large body of interesting modern CV literature.
Now we have many talented writers on this forum and everyone is encouraged to submit pieces. The journal is open to anyone and anyone may submit pieces. The difficulty comes in defining what is meant by a specifically Caitanyite literature. Perhaps one way of looking at it would be to think of a Caitanyite literature as one that issues out of a Caitanyite world view tempered, to be sure, by our presence in and engaged with the modern world. Or, it might be a literature that incorporates Caitanyite ideas, ideals, and emotions without doing so in a crass or overly emotional way. What works as powerful literature in the 16th Bengal or North India will not work today. We need a thoroughly modern literature, not blind to the angst of modern life, that modern Caitanyites would find fun, even delightful, to read. At the same time one does not want it to be labeled a sectarian literature. It should be appealing to anyone who loves reading and literature. In other words, we don't want anything like that nasty series of Christain books called the Left Behind Series.
Is it possible, or, am I just daydreaming? Any other takes on what a modern CV literature might look like?
