Reverence and Memory: A Conversation with Amit Majmudar
- Amit Majmudar
- Jun 15
- 16 min read
Editor-in-Chief, Samuel Loncar, in conversation with Marginalia's George Steiner Editor of Poetry and Criticism, Amit Majmudar
Introduction
Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio. He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist and is the author of twenty books. His poems have won the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in the Norton Introduction to Literature, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The New York Review of Books, and numerous Best American Poetry anthologies as well as journals and magazines across the United States, UK, India, and Australia. His essays have appeared in publications such as The Best American Essays 2018, The New York Times, The Times of India, and The Kenyon Review. His recent book publications include Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary (Knopf), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books), Three Metamorphoses: Novellas in Verse & Prose (Orison Books), and the first and second volumes in a trilogy that retells the ancient epic poem, The Mahabharata. The Book of Killings: The Mahabharata Volume 3 is forthcoming from Penguin India.
Conversation
Samuel Loncar
Hello, Amit, it's a real pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much for joining me today and for all the amazing pieces you’ve contributed to our pages.
Amit Majmudar
Thank you so much for hosting me and for inviting me to be part of the team.
Samuel Loncar
Well, it's an incredible pleasure, and I'm excited to chat and get Marginalia’s George Steiner Editor's take on several questions. What are you working on right now for your own writing and reading?
Amit Majmudar
For my writing, I’ve just finished a novel about Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote. In his 20s he was a slave in the Barbary Coast for five years. He made four escape attempts, and they're all really exciting. I've written his imagined memoirs, a first-person account of his time as a slave in North Africa.
Cervantes in Chains is an adventure novel, actually, because his actual life was an adventure. He was at the Battle of Lepanto, and he was injured there, and then he and his brother were captured and enslaved at the same time. He was sailing from Naples to Barcelona. If you were sailing in the Mediterranean at that time, Algerian pirates might come and board your ship and then take you into slavery. And that's what happened to him and his brother and many other people.
Samuel Loncar
How did you discover that? Were you researching Cervantes?
Amit Majmudar
Yes. I knew about the capture for the longest time because he actually writes about it in Don Quixote. In the later part of Part One, there's this story within a story called “The Captive’s Tale,” which is basically a fictionalized story of his captivity. He also wrote novellas that have references and episodes set in North Africa, and his early plays were about that experience, too. After gaining his freedom, he tried to write for the stage (he might have become the Spanish equivalent of Shakespeare!), but he was unsuccessful in the theater so he went to prose. I knew about all this, but not the nitty-gritty, so I’ve been reading a bunch of non-fiction books about Cervantes. The more I read, the more I thought, “This is a novel waiting to be written.” So, I've written the memoirs that Cervantes didn't write, I like to think.
Samuel Loncar
What a lovely insight into how stories grow more stories. Now, I'm going to ask you a question I've always wanted to ask you: how do you read as much as you read and read it so well? Well, let me add what I see is special in your reading and throw in a second question.
You have this incredible range that comes from, I think, your generosity of mind, the way you take in the entire Western and Indian tradition. You're the most American writer in this way, and your work makes me think of Van Wyck Brooks. There was this era in New England when a blacksmith taught himself 19 languages. There was this incredible global literary culture. Your work recovers America as a center of global literature, a literature in which other ethnic and religious identities are actually part of the American identity. They don't compete with it. You being an Indian writer isn't in competition with being an American.
So, you have this beautiful position through all of your work, and I'd love to ask, in that position, what do you think is going on today in literature and poetry? You're so uniquely positioned to comment on it as a distinguished award-winning poet, former Poet Laureate of Ohio, the author of major novels about intellectual matters, children's stories, and the greatest epics. What is your vision for what you want to see happening in literature that you'll be helping us do here at Marginalia?
Amit Majmudar
First of all, that's a very beautiful way of thinking of my work and my position. I think that it goes back to something that was articulated and embodied by Goethe in the late 1700s-early 1800s. He's the person who coined the term world literature. He has an entire book where he's imitating and “Germanizing” the ghazals of Hafez, the Persian poet. In Faust, he is hybridizing the Medieval German tradition with the classical tradition. Goethe has always been a guiding light for me.
But I do also see what you're talking about with New England, because I know that you know some of the deepest Vedantic writers are actually Americans like Emerson and Thoreau. I remember distinctly reading a letter by Emerson where he's telling someone about the big new literary fad, the great new trend, the hot book of the of the year in Concord, and it's the Gita! He's talking about a translation of the Gita that is taking everyone by storm.
But before I go on, let me say for the audience that I am not a professor, and I don't have a university background when it comes to literature, but I know a lot of professors and I talk to them because as a poet, inevitably, that's my constituency—the people who are teaching poetry as well as teaching literature. If we're talking about what's happening in American literature, or America and in the 21st century, what they report to me is that a cultural amnesia has taken hold, particularly among their college students. I'm reporting here what multiple other professors have told me, people who teach literature and teach the young, but I think that what's happening is that our culture is becoming less book oriented and more video and audio-visually oriented, so they're moving away from the written word, and more towards the spoken word.
The far more popular form of poetry in America is literally called spoken word. This recorded Zoom meeting is another example of how we are trying to harness the audio-visual, the spoken in the service, in this case, of the written word. But we need it. We need it because that's where the people are. I think that the cultural amnesia in question is downstream of something, that’s it’s further influenced, or reinforced, by a politically-motivated demonization of the past. When you look at different times in history, people have turned on their past and turned on the civilization that preceded it. That happened in late antiquity, in the transition from the classical civilization—late classical paganism is what we today call it. They didn't necessarily call themselves pagans, but from that tradition to the Christian tradition, there was a period of time where the Christian theologians were making cultural choices. They were like, “Plato's okay, maybe a little bit of Plotinus, but you know, these gods and goddesses and these other pagan ideas are beyond the pale.” That's why when Petrarch was coming up, Petrarch couldn't find anyone to teach him Greek. Dante couldn't read Homer. He didn't have any way to read Homer. That might sound crazy to us today, but it was an example of that shift, that deliberate forgetting. Similarly, I think that there are political forces, political positions, people with certain strong political beliefs who consider that, for example, the British Empire and Shakespeare and Kipling are all part of one thing that they should be totally opposed to. That’s just one example. When we take issue with many of the things that the British Empire did, we think that we have to be opposed to all the cultural manifestations of it, and that its cultural glories are not, in fact, glories at all—they are simply adjuncts to the historical depredations carried out by the people from that civilization. So I think this is a very, very powerful mix: the change in medium at the level of the audio visual versus the written word in addition to the cultural shift and the demonization of the past. That's basically the mechanism as I see it.
Now, where do I fit into that? Well, I don’t think I fit into that—I don't have either of those things going on now. I grew up in the inflection point right before the internet came into education—the internet really came in when I was entering college. Most of my strong reading habits were established in high school before the internet, and that's pure chance. I have twin sons. They resemble me in a lot of ways. One of them is a huge reader, and the other one's not. So it can still happen, but, it's not guaranteed.
The other thing is that I'm a splitter, not a lumper. I'm more likely to say, “Hey, look, you know, this particular thing that this particular religious group or imperial power did was something that I disapprove of; that their actions were not good for my co-religionists or my people in the tribal sense...but that doesn't make me have a problem with their poets.” That tendency to “split” strikes me as the right way to go about engaging culture while retaining historical awareness. I think that's where I can maybe be an example. You don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Samuel Loncar
That's powerful and profound, the connection of the two shifts: one, a sort of technological cultural shift away from the written word, which I think is the end of modernity—a Protestant print culture moving into an electrical age, which McLuhan prophesied. There's strangely less room for different stories in a global, oral age, and there's less time to engage. If you're natively electronic, natively raised in this new oral age, it's very unnatural to read a 500 page book. I’m struck by how it's changed even in my own life.
Then, as you said, it's very powerful when that is combined with an intellectual movement which has enormous cache in some parts of elite culture, which makes you apologize for engaging what would have simply been considered works of literature you were supposed to know if you were educated, right? So that makes it very fraught, lumping moral questions now into esthetic enjoyment. To me, it feels like we're not sure how to pull those apart culturally, so we feel guilty about a lot of our pleasures. Do you think there's a connection between why we have this intellectual movement and the cultural change in technology itself?
For example, a Marxist might say, “Look, people were already overwhelmed with how much there was to read. You know, Amit’s a very special guy. He obviously has this incredible mind and attention span. But, you know, most people found it overwhelming to think, ‘I have to master the Western canon, right?’” So, you could argue, as many people have argued, that there's a desire to eliminate canons, partly from the memorial burden that they impose, feeling like it might not be possible to be a good citizen of the Republic of Letters if one has to read Shakespeare and Goethe and know everything in The New Yorker.
I wonder how much you think of it is also a structural change where many people don't have the resources of attention to even finish one book. The idea of becoming you, though everyone benefits from your work, might feel very daunting to people. Do you think that they're unrelated, that it happened to be we shifted into this new oral age away from print, and then, at the same time, there happen to be intellectual movements that justify trashing the past, or is it, in some way, like a Marxist might think, that's a super structural symptom of the fact that we don't know as a culture, in our institutions, in our literary and educational institutions, how to empower people to feel like they could meet the demands of the literary pleasure that you bring us. You bring us the pleasures, but I think when people think about this as educators, people feel like overwhelmed. So how does one do this today? How does one enjoy literature in this wonderful way you do?
Amit Majmudar
Let’s remember that right now, at this particular moment in time, we suffer from something that you can either think is a good thing or a bad thing: the hypertrophy of the historical record, of the literary record. At this particular moment in time, we have a psychological consciousness of a vast number of different cultures that compete in our minds for attention, and we think of many of them as basically equal. Not all, maybe, but most we think of as equal.
I would find it hard to believe that someone in the 21st century is going to say, for example, “Well, Greek classical civilization is better than Indian classical civilization, and therefore you should only read the Greek classics and not read the Indian classics.” We have all these books from cultures that, basically, we respect and we think have something to offer to humanity. They are all being translated in English, so it’s there if you want it. In the past—and this holds true of basically all the writers that are part of the “canon” today— they didn't have as much to read as we do.
Today, we've mentally psyched ourselves out into thinking a person needs to know everything. You don't know everything. You are never going to know everything. It's like looking at the ocean and thinking, “I need to drink this ocean.” Because there are so many cultures competing at the same time and so much out there, it's hard to get enough to fully understand or comprehend even the culture that you're technically a part of. For the Western tradition,you need to know the Biblical tradition and the Greco-Roman tradition to truly understand, for example, what Milton is talking about. And then there's the different cultural things related to the country that each Western tradition is from and the language that they're from. Western civilization is a hybrid of two traditions. But if you have several different histories and competing civilizations and cultures and traditions, there's only so much time in a day, there's only so much memory in the mind, and there's only so much you can do. I think people feel daunted because they feel like they can't engage with the texts, to a significant degree, if they don't have all of this learning behind them.
But I think, as someone who first encountered these books as a 13 to 14 year old without any real background, there are absolutely gems within the tradition or within the canon that you can engage with in the absence of extensive background information. Simply by engaging with them, you will build your background information naturally and pleasantly. When I was 14-15 years old, without realizing that they were high cultural landmarks, I read Ovid's Metamorphoses, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and The Decameron by Boccaccio. These are all really entertaining books, and they're wonderful gateway drugs to the Western tradition, and I think that approaching it the way I approach my scientific learning, isn’t necessary. My medical background meant I had to learn the Krebs cycle. I had to learn organic chemistry from the ground up, and then apply that to biochemistry, and then apply that to physiology, and then go on that particular pathway. Literature doesn't have to be like that, and it shouldn't be taught like that. I think that you can just follow the pleasure principle and abandon books. If they don't they don't speak to you, pick up other ones, try different ones that you like, see what you like. You can literally follow the pleasure principle and end up inadvertently accumulating an amount of knowledge that outsiders might think is daunting. Personally, I've never finished a book that I wasn't interested in. I’ve left many books unread, meaning that I started them and then decided to stop because it wasn’t my cup of tea. My final point is that audio books are your friend. So many books are out there on audiobook with excellent narrators. You can listen to them slower or faster, whatever speeds you want. You can listen to books while walking or doing chores around the house. You can fill in the little interstices of time with literature. So there's a lot of ways to do it, and it's all about following the pleasure principle, in my opinion.
Samuel Loncar
Well, that's very liberating to hear, Amit, and I think other people are going to be very happy to hear that. I had an English teacher, Dr. Karen Prior, who always told us to “Read promiscuously.” It was one of her mottos, playing on the erotic playfulness of, “don't do something if it isn't fun,” and “if you enjoy it, then let yourself go.” So how does that look for you as Marginalia’s first named Editor, the George Steiner Editor for Poetry and Literature?
How do you view George Steiner? There are people who've written takedown essays of Steiner—I’m thinking of Joseph Epstein—which I don’t think are fair at all, but Steiner is seen as this very formidable icon of the canon. Now, of course, that's not a fair representation. Harold Bloom, in a way, is a better icon for that. But Steiner was fluently trilingual and knew Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. He had at his fingertips the European classical Biblical tradition, as you describe the Western tradition. What is his importance to you, and how does it connect to your own experience of literature that you've just shared, and your vision as our first named editor, as the George Steiner Editor for Poetry and Literature? Could you tell us about the sort of the Steiner connection to all this?
Amit Majmudar
Steiner is easily my favorite literary critic. He's up there with the Canadian critic Northrop Frye. What both of them have in common, for me, is the way they represent reverence and memory.
Samuel Loncar
Reverence and memory. That is beautiful.
Amit Majmudar
Yes, reverence and memory. People revile Steiner for being so interested in the Western canon, which is basically a way of criticizing someone who is inordinately interested in the literary past or literary heritage of the civilization of which he's a part. And whether they do that for Harold Bloom, or they do that for Steiner or whoever, that tells me more about that person than it does about Steiner. Because in the end, what you are saying is, “I don't like the reverence and memory that this person is exhibiting.”
So, basically, you want me to be an irreverent amnesiac? No, thank you. So that's what Steiner represents to me. He represents reverence and memory. Now, I actually briefly corresponded with Steiner before his passing. Briefly.
Samuel Loncar
This is a great scoop. Let’s hear it.
Amit Majmudar
In 2012, I published this really long essay in The Kenyon Review. It's been collected in The Great Game: Essays On Poetics, and it’s called “George Steiner, Last of the Europeans.” I talk about The Poetry of Thought, which is one of his later books that he wrote about the relationship of philosophy and poetry. The essay found its way to him, because William Logan, who's a critic who used to play chess with Steiner, put us in touch. Steiner thanked me for the essay, because it was very flattering of Steiner, the essay, but I also brought up how the charge that “Steiner is Eurocentric” is actually true, and that his survey never mentioned the most successful philosophical poem in the history of the world, recited by millions of people daily to this day, the Bhagavad Gita—I was six years away from translating it at that point, but I had that eventual project in my mind. He said that I made a good point. That’s what he wrote back to tell me, and he said that he regretted that he didn't have the language, and that he didn't have the cultural background for it, which is fine. I don't hold that against him at all.
But in any case, I think that what I seek to do is to build on Steiner's legacy, because the reverence and memory that he showed for the Western tradition is what I hope to show for as many traditions as I can incorporate. I feel that my knowledge is lacking in Chinese and Japanese literature, and I'm always trying to rectify that and find translations and find books based on the pleasure principle that I can engage with. There are others, and I also regret that there are literary traditions that have been extinguished in the Americas that we'll never be able to access because they're gone.
One of the pieces that I'm arranging for Marginalia is a collection of shorter pieces by different writers called “In the Translators Workshop.” I've reached out to various translators, asking them to pick a line, or a very short passage, and then give me the inside baseball about moving it from its original language into English, focusing on what's lost in translation, subtle cultural nuances and the words that either match or don't match, why they don't match, or why they do match. I've lined up translators from Old Norse, the Popol Vuh—Michael Bazzett, who translated the ancient Mayan text—Russian, and Sanskrit. I have literary traditions and languages that are not the usual suspects. Marginalia’s readers are going to be able to see the nitty gritty of how they are brought into English by some of the most excellent translators of our time. So, that's how I'm incorporating Steiner's legacy and trying to bring it forward under the sign of Goethe.
Samuel Loncar
That is really exciting. I'm thrilled to hear that. I can't wait to see them myself. Thank you so much for your time. Have a great day, Amit.
Amit Majmudar
Thank you. You, too.
Amit Majmudar is Marginalia's George Steiner Editor for Poetry and Criticism, a poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio. He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist and lives in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children. Majmudar’s essays have appeared in The Best American Essays 2018, the New York Times, and the Times of India, among several other publications. His most recent collection of essays, focusing on Indian religious philosophy, history, and mythology, is Black Avatar and Other Essays (Acre Books, 2023). He is most recently the author of The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024) Later Adventures of Hanuman (India Penguin, 2024), The Book of Vows: The Mahabharata Trilogy Volume 1 (Penguin India , 2023), and The Book of Discoveries: The Mahabharata Trilogy Volume 2 (Penguin India , 2024). The Book of Killings: The Mahabharata Trilogy Volume 3 is forthcoming from Penguin India. Learn more at www.amitmajmudar.com. X@AmitMajmudar
Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale) is the Editor-in-Chief of the Marginalia Review of Books, the Director of the Institute for the Meanings of Science, the creator of the Becoming Human Project, and the founder of Olurin Consulting. His speaking and consulting clients include the United Nations, Red Bull Arts, Oliver Wyman, and Flagship Pioneering. His work focuses on integrating separated spaces, including philosophy and poetry, science and spirituality, and the academic-public divide. His book, Becoming Human: Philosophy as Science and Religion from Plato to Posthumanism, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Learn more at www.samuelloncar.com X@samuelloncar
