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Subhash Jaireth Subhash Jaireth i(A28760 works by)
Born: Established: 1950 Punjab,
c
India,
c
South Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
;
Gender: Male
Arrived in Australia: 1986
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Works By

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1 y separately published work icon George Orwell’s Elephant and Other Essays Subhash Jaireth , Elizabeth Bay : Gazebo Books , 2023 26842018 2023 selected work essay

'In his new collection of essays Subhash Jaireth traverses the globe in an exploration of the personal and collective memory held within natural and built landscapes.

'His roving curiosity takes us from his early life in Delhi to his years as a student in Soviet-era Moscow. We travel to Burma with George Orwell and battle windmills in Spain with Don Quixote. Jaireth walks us through the landscapes around Uluru, Canberra and Sydney with the sharp gaze of a geologist and the imagination of a poet. We follow the roots of an old banksia tree in his garden, the traces left by ancient rivers and seas, and stories passed down from time immemorial.

'In George Orwell’s Elephant & Other Essays, Jaireth draws his life’s emotional map right on the soil under his feet, and in the process unearths narratives, characters and places that leave us aware of the layers of memory and meaning that shimmer all around us.' (Publication summary)

1 Glossatalgia : Meditations on the Grief of Loss of Language, Poetry and Memory Subhash Jaireth , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: Meanjin , June vol. 81 no. 2 2022; (p. 110-119) Meanjin Online 2022;
'In September 2016 I was asked to translate into Hindi Charmaine Papertalk Green's poem 'Nhananggu Yagu'. Can you do it in three days? I was asked. I'll try, I said and finished the work in time. The translation was published a month later by Cordite Poetry in an online anthology of Dalit-Indigenous Australian poetry curated by Mridula Nath Chakraborty and Kent MacCarter.' 

(Publication abstract)

1 1 y separately published work icon Aflame Subhash Jaireth , Elizabeth Bay : Gazebo Books , 2021 20877413 2021 selected work prose

'Aflame begins in Soviet Moscow and ends with a Tibetan Buddhist monk's self-immolation; residing between them - improvisations after celebrated Japanese Haikus. Written in an intricate and polyphonic structure, Subhash Jaireth's rare and carefully crafted rhythms reveal the creeping melancholic joy of silence and life's elusive beauty.' (Publication summary)

1 Teiresias Looking at 'All the Big Rain Coming from Topside' by Rover Joolama i "She calls him Teiresias the visitor who arrives each Thursday every second", Subhash Jaireth , 2020 single work poetry
— Appears in: The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry 2020; (p. 105)
1 1 y separately published work icon Spinoza's Overcoat : Travels with Writers and Poets Subhash Jaireth , Yarraville : Transit Lounge , 2020 18416119 2020 selected work essay travel

'‘It starts to rain as I step out of my hotel ….’ So begins Subhash Jaireth’s striking collection of essays on the writers, and their writing, that have enriched his own life. The works of Franz Kafka, Marina Tsvetaeva, Mikhail Bulgakov, Paul Celan, Hiromi Ito, Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza and others ignite in him the urge to travel (both physically and in spirit), almost like a pilgrim, to the places where such writers were born or died or wrote. In each essay a new emotional plane is reached revealing enticing connections. As a novelist, poet, essayist and translator born into a multilingual environment, Jaireth truly understands the power of words across languages and their integral connections to the life of the body and the spirit. Drawing on years of research, translation and travel Spinoza’s Overcoat – and its illuminations of loss, mortality and the reverie of writing – will linger with readers.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

1 Knowing and Unknowing Uluru : An Essay in Four Maps Subhash Jaireth , 2019 single work essay
— Appears in: Axon : Creative Explorations , December vol. 9 no. 2 2019;

'‘Space and place’, notes Yi-fu Tuan, the Chinese-US geographer and philosopher, ‘are basic components of the lived world. What begins as an undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value’ (Tuan 1977: 6). Uluru represents such a place, its placeness constructed by the living and knowledge practices of Anangu people and their ancestors, displaced and erased by European colonisers and settlers who imposed their ways of living and knowledge practices on the land. As a geologist I have been trained to look at Uluru from within European post-seventeenth century paradigm of modern science. However, in this essay I challenge what I have learnt as a geologist about Uluru by introducing Tjukurpa of Anangu into the story of my learning and un-learning. I tell the story with the help of four real and metaphoric maps: a geological map of the Rock; Rockholes near the Olgas by Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjari; Untitled (Uluru with shadows) by Long Tom Tjapanangka; and the installation Unfolding Memories by Rosario Lopez.' (Publication abstract)

1 Into White Darkness i "Barely dark is barelight", Misaki Takako , Subhash Jaireth (translator), Rina Kikuchi (translator), 2017 single work poetry
— Appears in: Westerly , vol. 62 no. 2 2017; (p. 195-197)
1 y separately published work icon Incantations Subhash Jaireth , Kambah : Recent Work Press , 2016 9917137 2016 selected work prose

''Those who have eyes, ' writes Georges Braque, my favourite cubist painter, 'know just how irrelevant words are to what they see.' Does this mean that I don't have the eyes to see? Perhaps it does. But it also shows my propensity to take refuge in words. I can't draw or paint. It's only words that I can rely on. If I turn to them, this is because when my eyes look at a painting, words help me discover more about myself.' (Publication summary)

1 जादूनगरी? = Wonderland i "मैं इस देश में जन्मा, ड्रीमटाइम से पोषित; परिदृश्य ऐहिक कथाओं से = I was born in a land, borne from a Dreamtime; a landscape of earthly", Samuel Wagan Watson , Subhash Jaireth (translator), 2016 single work poetry
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , October no. 55.1 2016;
1 2 y separately published work icon Moments Subhash Jaireth , Glebe : Puncher and Wattmann , 2015 8947620 2015 selected work short story

'These stories explore the nature of love, loss and memory: central to them is the uneasiness the narrators feel about their place in the world. A critical moment in the life of each narrator illuminates these themes in remarkable ways. For instance, in the story "Walter Benjamin’s Pipe" the narrator wants to comprehend that critical moment when Walter Benjamin, the famous Jewish-German philosopher and literary critic, decided to end his life. In the story "Bach (Pau) in Love," the famous Catalan cellist Pablo Casals imagines the situation which would have inspired Bach to compose his six suites for cello. In the story "Anna and Fyodor in Basel," Anna, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s wife waits for that moment when Holbein’s famous painting about the dead Christ makes its appearance in the novel The Idiot. In "The Quartz Hill," a Cantonese photographer looks at the prints of Paddy Bedford’s paintings about the Bedford Downs massacre and decides to visit Halls Creek in search for her Gija grandmother’s roots.' (Publication summary)

1 Review : The Last Candles of the Night Subhash Jaireth , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , October no. 16 2014;

— Review of The Last Candles of the Night Ian Bedford , 2014 single work novel
1 Love Song for a Sheet with Chinese Calligraphy i "If my heart", Subhash Jaireth , 2014 single work poetry
— Appears in: Meanjin , vol. 73 no. 1 2014; (p. 76-77) Meanjin Online 2015;
1 Meena, the Elephant, in the Kabul Zoo i "The elephant", Subhash Jaireth , 2013 single work poetry
— Appears in: Contemporary Asian Australian Poets 2013; (p. 131-133)
1 The Empty Table i "I have", Subhash Jaireth , 2013 single work poetry
— Appears in: Contemporary Asian Australian Poets 2013; (p. 128-129)
1 2 y separately published work icon After Love Subhash Jaireth , Melbourne : Transit Lounge , 2012 Z1900590 2012 single work novel 'Vasu, a young Indian student of architecture, arrives in Moscow in the late 1960s. He falls in love with Anna, an archaeologist and an accomplished cellist, yet his romanticism about the Soviet Union clashes with her experience. He goes back to India to design a village for a co-operative of coffee farmers, but he cannot forget Anna and on his return they marry. Anna wants to leave Moscow but isn't keen to go to India. They decide to go to Venice where Vasu has been offered a teaching position. In Italy their life unravels when Anna mysteriously disappears without a trace. Years later, Vasu discovers a painful but wonderful truth. ...' (Trove record)
1 'Es geht mir gut’ (‘I am Fine’) : Postcard from Ottla, Kafka’s Favourite Sister Subhash Jaireth , 2012 single work prose
— Appears in: Meanjin , Autumn vol. 71 no. 1 2012; (p. 38-52)
1 3 To Silence Subhash Jaireth , 2012 single work drama Adapted from two of the three fictional autobiographies which comprise Subhash Jaireth's monograph of the same name. Part One: 'Songs of a Weaver' about the Inidan poet, Kabir and Part Two: 'Remembering Anton', about Maria Chekhova, sister of the Russian author Anton Chekhov.
1 3 y separately published work icon To Silence : Three Autobiographies Subhash Jaireth , Glebe : Puncher and Wattmann , 2011 Z1798744 2011 selected work single work short story 'Don't be deceived by this Tardis of a book, its three small monologues contain multitudes. Through the gently detailed lives of its subjects whole civilisations emerge: the fifteenth-century India of the dying and illiterate poet, Kabir; the Stalinist Russia of Chekhov's younger sister, Maria; and the early seventeenth-century, Inquisition-ravaged Italy of the Calabrian theologian and poet, Tommaso Campanella. The characters, at the end of their lives, are haunted by their pasts, and in prose of simple, meditative, elegiac beauty, Jaireth suggests that this nostalgia is neither a longing for a lost place or a lost time, but is, rather, a homelessness in time - his own included - an uneasiness that has driven all that they have and have not done. The book is ultimately about the mystery of creation itself, the silence from which all things come and to which they inevitably return.' (Trove record)
1 Bach (Pau) in Love Subhash Jaireth , 2010 single work short story
— Appears in: Etchings , no. 9 2010; (p. 13-21)
1 In Praise of Slow Reading Subhash Jaireth , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 2 January 2010; (p. 12)
Publishers and literary agents are interested in publishing books that readers will buy. By promoting new releases as 'page turners', which can be read quickly, the culture of serious and contemplative reading, together with the culture of writing and publishing are devalued.
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