Ashok Vajpeyi (Aśok Vājpeyī)
Biography
Ashok Vajpeyi, born 1941 in Durg, Madhya Pradesh, is a well-known Hindi poet, literary critic, essayist, editor, literary translator, cultural administrator, and cultural intermediary.
His fifteen volumes of poetry have been translated into many Indian and several European languages, and his critical works on literature and culture, as well as his essays on art, are held in high regard. He has also edited seventeen anthologies of selected poems.
His poetry deals with the eternal questions of humanity and nature, love, transience, and death, in a language marked by penetrating directness and simplicity, and which admits no fashionable or eccentric stylistic or narrative devices.
For European approaches to India, Vajpeyi's view of Indian culture is important and merits particular attention, because as a cultural intermediary he illuminates the fluid transition of this culture, across all fields of art, literature, dance, music, and philosophy, from folk or oral tradition to classical and written tradition — and in doing so does not recognise the division into folk and classical categories customary in Europe.
Also unique nationwide is his brilliant career in numerous roles within Madhya Pradesh and the central government, including Joint Secretary (Culture), Trustee Secretary (Bharat Bhavan), First Vice-Chancellor (Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University), and Chairman of the Lalit Kala Akademi. Fourteen institutions owe their founding to him; he is the initiator and organiser of several foundations and their scholarship programmes. Alongside this, he has always maintained a steady schedule of lecture tours and festival appearances at home and abroad. He is credited as editor in twenty books and renowned literary journals such as Poorvagraha, Bahuvachan, Kavita Asia, and Hindi Language Discourse Writing.
Georg Lechner
Prizes and Awards
Among others, the Sahitya Akademi National Award, the Agyeya Rashtrya Samman, as well as French and Polish honours.
Published in German
Vajpeyi's third collection of poems, Agar itne se – Gedichte, was published in the series "Literatur aus Südasien" as a bilingual Hindi-German edition, translated and edited by Dieter B. Kapp and Albert Prümm, Shaker Verlag, Aachen 2015 (in German).
Excerpt
- Ein Ort für die Liebe (A Place for Love, in German and Hindi)
Further Links
📄 Download this author profile as a PDF (in German)