Drop in anytime to visit the poet Manjul, and you're likely to find a lively discussion on literature taking place in his sitting room. Located smack on the way everywhere (on Putali Sadak), Manjul's flat is like a Kathmandu version of Gertrude Stein's legendary Paris apartment-a crossroads where artists and literati of wide-ranging interests can meet. This flat is where I met almost all the Nepali writers I've ever met: Dinesh Adhikary, Manu Brajaki, Bhagirathi Shrestha, Shailendra Sakar, Abhi Subedi, Yuyutsu RD Sharma, Sulochana Manandhar, Usha Sherchan, Aavaas. I've come to rely on casually dropping by for tea and learning, from someone as erudite as Bharat Bhattarai, some spectacular quirk of Nepali language and literature. I've heard heated debates here, caught the latest rumours, met well-placed editors, and gotten carried away by Manjul's infectious enthusiasm to commit to do work for which I have no time. Even when Manjul is out, his flat beckons: After serving tea, Susmita Nepal, Manjul's wife, will toss aside her docile front and reveal her sharp novelist's mind.

When, in the social maelstrom of his flat, does Manjul get a chance to write? For write he does, and prolifically. In the past few years, he has published Village Poems (translated by Maya Watson), Mrityu Kabita, and Siddhicharanharu, and he's currently putting together several translations, collaborations, and collections of new poems. His poetic impulse clearly flourishes in hectic settings.

Manjul's Mrityu Kabita (Death Poems) received two awards this year-among them, the prestigious Sajha Puraskar. A collection of 108 variations on the theme of death, this collection made a decisive break with the poet's past. Gone is the political commentary of Manjul's early communist songs and poems. The romantic lyricism of his early work remains; his fondness for nature, and his flare for personification and metaphorical language remains. But in Mrityu Kabita, his concerns become philosophical, and his forms surreal. The first poem translated below exemplifies Manjul's shift to markedly un-communistic investigations into mystery and enigma:

Death Poem 4
Death
comes to me
in the dark of the night
and plays a flute
beneath the flowering plant

Touching this weeping life
with warm hands
with cool caresses
death
offers the brightness of the sun's dazzling rays
in the dark of the night


The next poem has an equally private tone:

Death Poem 35
Like a finger jabbing at water
death
writes the name of life

Cold or hot for the duration of the touch
After the touch has ended
neither the mark of the finger remains
nor the ease or pain
of the finger's jab

Like a finger jabbing at water
death
writes the name of life

Manjul did, at first, attract the ire of his comrades by moving towards such "bourgeois" expressions. The poet, though, was clearly seeking a more subjective language than the one allowed by Nepal's Marxist-Leninist aesthetics. Mrityu Kabita can be read, in fact, as a willfully lit funeral pyre for Manjul's own early work as a party propagandist.
In some works following Mrityu Kabita, Manjul has returned to social issues-but as an individual speaking directly to the people, without party controls. With more and more of Nepal's communist writers taking the path to this same crossroads, Manjul has become an emblematic figure of Nepal's progressive writings, refusing a language which irreconcilably splits personal and political, and private and public forms of expression