Description

The Lives of Painters by Constantin Severin traces an artist talking about other artists through poetry: artists looking back, artists making a reckoning and confidants and kindred spirits engaging in a dialogue across time. These poems measure artists’ journeys: colours of excitement punctuated by monastic silence that falls through crevices of long, breathless sentences.

Debasish Lahiri’s translation brings the madness and ennui of these poems into Bengali. Sometimes soft, sometimes jarring, Chitrojapon mirrors the brilliant, disorderly process of creation.