• Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata
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Archipelago Books

Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata

Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata

by Karthika Naïr

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In Until the Lions, Karthika Naïr retells the Mahabharata through the embodied voices of women and marginal characters, so often conquered and destroyed throughout history. She captures the richness and complexity of the Mahabharata, while illuminating lives buried beneath the edifices of one of the world’s most venerated books. Through shifting poetic forms, ranging from pantoums to Petrarchan sonnets, Naïr choreographs the cadences of stray voices. And with a passionate empathy, she tells of nameless soldiers, their despairing spouses and lovers, a canny empress, an all-powerful god, and a gender-shifting outcast warrior. Until the Lions is a kaleidoscopic, poetic tour de force. It reveals the most intimate threads of desire, greed, and sacrifice in this foundational epic.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781939810366
Pages: 290
Publication Date:

Praise

I get lost in the grand narrative retelling of the literary legend, and then I am astounded by the personalized shifts with which Karthika stamps her voice on the Mahabharata, so tender, fierce and visionary. It's a liberating experience to be dissolved into what Amjad Nasser called 'the ten metaphors of poetry,' so to speak, between grief and love, ecstasy and despair, meaning and nonsense.
—Fady Joudah, Shelf Awareness

The most lyrical of all such attempts to see the Mahabharata through the eyes of its characters is the remarkable dramatic poem Until the Lions by the Kerala-born, Paris-based poet, dance producer, and librettist Karthika Naïr ... The thirty haunting, heartrending chapters, in a wide range of forms and styles, resonate powerfully with one another...Women whose names are known from the Sanskrit epic but whose character and inner experience are muted there suddenly come to life as full-blooded people caught up in the destruction endemic to a male world...
—David Shulman, New York Review of Books

The Mahabharata, the larger of India’s two epics, was composed roughly 2,000 years ago . . . In reading Naïr’s book, I felt as if I had scratched the surface of a palimpsest (the epic) and discovered a room teeming with three-dimensional living souls . . .Until the Lions adds a brilliant new thread to this rich literary tapestry . . . Until the Lions is undoubtedly a tour de force.
—Ken Langer, Harvard Review

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