by Joy Goswami
SELECTED POEMS
JOY GOSWAMI
Translated from the Bengali by
Sampurna Chattarji
For my father
Chandak Chattarji
who is the reason this book began
&
For Joy-da
from whom I learnt so much
Contents
Author’s Foreword in Bangla
Author’s Foreword
Beyond the Reach of the Word
From Surjo-Pora Chhai
From Moutat Moheswar
From Du Dondo Phowara Matro
Notes on a funeral procession
PS Section
Notes: Beyond the Reach of the Word
Notes on Poems
Acknowledgements
About the Book
About the Author
Praise for Selected Poems
Copyright
Author’s Foreword
Sampurna Chattarji has been translating my poetry since 2005. Over the last eight years, we have met many times. The two of us have looked at successive drafts and discussed them. We have spoken umpteen times on the phone regarding the translations. Occasionally, we have had to speak several times about a single poem. Finally, this book is ready.
Sampurna Chattarji is herself a poet, novelist and translator. Over the last few years she has had to travel abroad to take part in various poetry workshops and literary meets. In the midst of all this activity, Sampurna kept me informed via email about the progress of her translations of my poetry.
Sampurna is my friend and I have a special affection for her. Even so, I convey my gratitude to her.
Of all the translations of my poems that have been done here and there till date, this collection is closest to my heart. My thanks to the publishers as well for bringing it out.
Beyond the Reach of the Word
On 8 April, 1999, Joy Goswami wrote an essay in the form of a letter to a young friend, Aniruddha. He titled it ‘Concerning a Single Poem’. The poem was Jibanananda Das’s ‘Shei Shob Sheyalera’ (‘All Those Jackals’), a poem he first read twenty-seven years ago, a poem he loved and remembered by heart for twenty-seven years but never fully understood. In a postscript to the letter-essay, he wrote:
I’m troubling you again. Something happened after I finished this letter to you. I was watching Discovery Channel around one a.m. It was a show about a massive meteor that fell into the Sea of Mexico 65 lakh years ago. It was the Jurassic Age. The dinosaurs were wiped out … the effect was the same as if many hydrogen bombs had been exploded simultaneously. […] A mushroom cloud enveloped the entire planet. It rained sulphuric acid. Particles of radium fell incessantly from the sky. There was a huge crater at the spot where the meteor fell. The water had risen onto land. It was natural that the dinosaurs were wiped out by such a great cataclysm. […] When the meteor entered the atmosphere, it instantly caught fire. Such a big meteor, the commentary said, perhaps even the dinosaurs had seen its fiery tail filling the sky for one fraction of a second.
Reading this passage in 2012, I felt elated. This was the exact scene Joy Goswami had described to me in a telephonic interview. And here was a record of it entering and intersecting with the poet’s life. Why did that thrill me so? Why did the evocative essay concerning a single poem by Jibanananda Das feel like a moment of revelation? Because, for me, it wasn’t simply an essay concerning a poem by Jibanananda Das. It was an essay concerning the genesis of an entire book by Joy Goswami, which harked back not just to the poet’s childhood and his readings of a single poem, but to prehistory. That book was Surjo-Pora Chhai (Ashes, Burnt by the Sun) which he wrote in 1999 and I began translating in 2005. While visiting my parents’ home in Kolkata that year, I had found, in my father’s collection, a slim hardback book with the illustration of a strange crustacean (or was it the sun?) on its maroon cover. I leafed through it and I was hooked. That is how it began. And this, the book you hold in your hands, is where it led.
If the poet Arundhathi Subramaniam had not shown an interest in featuring my translations from Surjo-Pora Chhai in the India domain of Poetry International Web, which she edits, perhaps I would never have written to Joy Goswami (whom I shall refer to as Joy-da, which is how I address him). In my letter, I introduced myself, enclosed my translations and asked permission to publish them. To my surprise and delight, he wrote back with warmth and generosity. I responded, we spoke on the phone, and later, on my annual visit to Kolkata, I met him. Over the years that followed, we wrote, spoke, met and discussed, over endless cups of tea, not just the poetry but other obsessions and enthusiasms. I translated the poems in Surjo-Pora Chhai as well as the bulk of two other collections, Moutat Moheswar (Shiva, My High) and Du Dondo Phowara Matro (No More Than a Spurt of Time), along with three individual poems, two of which I translated at Joy-da’s request and a third, ‘Notes on a Funeral Procession’, which I found while reading Joyer Shakti (Joy’s Shakti), a little book of essays on the poet Shakti Chattopadhyay.
In my introduction to Joy-da’s world, I’d like to quote extensively from his essays on the reading of poetry. I came to his poetry as a reader. I stayed with his poetry as a translator, re-reading his work with concentration, immersion, love. Of all his books, Moutat Moheswar and Du Dondo Phowara Matro were the ones I gravitated to, once I’d emerged from the (then all-encompassing) spell of Surjo-Pora Chhai. I was also hugely taken with Horiner Jonno Ekok, a poem I have already begun translating, but which I feel would need to be published as a single book-length text, the way it is in the original. There are other poems from various phases of Joyda’s poetry that I have marked and saved to translate later. I see it sometimes as the project of a lifetime. And yet, this initial selection, made as it was from personal, internal impulses, has been one of pleasing serendipity. Joy-da believes these three collections are representative of his work in the deepest sense. Hypothetically, how would one have gone about choosing representative work from a poet of such staggering popularity and productivity? One could have gone chronologically and chosen poems from his first attention-grabbing book Christmas o Sheeter Sonnetguchchho (Sonnets of Christmas and Winter, January 1977) published when he was just twenty-two; one could have honed in on the collections that won prizes (Ghumiyechho Jhaupata, 1989; Pagli Tomar Shonge, 1994; Bojrobidyut-bhorti Khata, 1995); or even started with the poems that entered public consciousness through song and recitation (‘Megh-balikar Jonyo Roop-kotha’, ‘Malotibala Balika Bidyaloy’)—his words travelling seamlessly and simultaneously into popular culture and literary appreciation, winning both minds and hearts. Why, instead, this selection?
To answer that, I must return to the essays. In Nijer Jibanananda (My Jibanananda), Joy-da writes:
Towards the end of some remote adolescence I was introduced to the poem ‘Bonolota Sen’. That too, not by reading it, by hearing it from someone else. My mother used to teach in a school. There’s some sort of function going on with the teachers from different schools in that small town. Several schoolmistresses are singing songs. There’s going to be good food later. The chairperson is a fairly young man. The district SDO or Second Officer, perhaps. He is asked to say a few words, what shall I say, let me recite a poem instead, saying which he recited ‘Bonolota Sen’. And the first chapter of my acquaintance with modern Bengali poetry began.
Where, in which book, would I find this poem? Those days, in the years ’69-’70, even in a mofussil town so far away from Kolkata, I found it easily. At the station market on either side of the main road, there were two bookshops. I went to enquire, is there a book with a poem by this name? I didn’t have to say all that, the minute I said the name the book arrived from inside the shop. Even then, the book was as loved and respected as it is now. […] Readi
ng ‘Bonolota Sen’ at that age […] something happened inside me. Today I understand, the poem that makes ‘something’ happen inside—that is an effective poem.
When I read the poems in Surjo-Pora Chhai, what happened inside me was that ‘something’ no amount of erudition can articulate. For a writer to be unable to find words is a kind of torture. Your life is about finding the right words. But sometimes, even the most eloquent are faced with a kind of speechlessness when confronted with that ‘something’ in a poem that defies elucidation. You may write about it, around it, but ‘it’ will elude you. And so you will chase it. Through life, through dreams, through prose, as Joy-da does in essay after essay. I was seized by a ‘something’ so strong, I had to follow it. If Jibanananda Das’s poem ‘Bonolota Sen’ marked the beginning of Joy Goswami’s ‘acquaintance with modern Bengali poetry’, Surjo-Pora Chhai marked the beginning of my acquaintance with the poetry of Joy Goswami.
I share these personal histories in order to emphasize the way in which literary tradition enters the living moment. Poetry is more than an accepted (or ignored) inheritance—it can be a whiplash, a stopping of the heart, a speechlessness. As Joy-da marks, through his essays, the traces that Bengali poetry left on him, the influence and concerns of different generations, he creates a complex map of what it is to be a poet of his time, in his language. Reading the essays I became aware of a tremendous fluidity, a tangible openness. I became aware of the richness of the heritage—that poor word so miserably and unfairly burdened by its own weight—not just of the Bengali language and its literature which Joy-da reads, loves and creates, but also of its receptivity to world poetry. It was while sitting on a bench at Ranaghat railway station that Joyda first encountered, at the age of nineteen, Rilke’s autumn poems in Bengali translation by the eminent poet Buddhadev Bose. Being remote from Kolkata clearly did not mean a remoteness from the world’s finest poetry.
*
Joy Goswami was born on 10 November 1954 in Kolkata. At the age of five his family moved to Ranaghat, a mofussil town in Bengal. The death of his father when he was eight and his mother when he was twenty-nine left deep scars on him, a loss that haunts many of his poems. It was in Ranaghat that he completed his schooling, after which he preferred to give up formal education altogether and pursue the reading and writing of poetry instead. He was nineteen when his poems began to be published in the little magazines, appearing over the next decade in important literary journals. The journey that would establish him as ‘one of the finest poets in the “post-Jibanananda Das era” of Bengali poetry’ who shot to prominence with his ‘stylistically innovative, sensuous and imagistic poems’1 began in Ranaghat.
Time and again, in different contexts, Joy-da reiterates his preference for the poetry of suggestion, for poetry that is a kind of code. The real poet knows, he writes, ‘It isn’t the poem’s job to provide news—its job is to signal. That’s why we go to poetry.’ And indeed, that is why we go to Joy Goswami’s poetry. Because in them there isn’t the slightest desire to inform or enlighten. Instead, the desire is to take language away from its everyday meaning into a realm where each word is a signal that hints at something both alien and shockingly intimate. ‘You see,’ he said to me in our first-ever conversation about Surjo-Pora Chhai, ‘the thing is to go beyond the reach of the word. In poetry a limbless body can become an astral body.’ By repeatedly going beyond the simple meanings of words, the attempt is to throw light on newer and deeper layers in order to reveal a hidden knowledge. ‘Why hidden? Because in order to save the truth one often has to secretly guard it […] Sometimes, the poet fills his language with just such a coded mystery. He has to do this in order to save the inner strength of language from the tarnished condition of its everyday functional use, to free the word from its customary traditional meaning. […] That hidden knowledge can be captured in speech. “Hence, speech.” And this is where the poet, the scientist and the revolutionary come and stand at the same frontier, having carefully hidden the truth inside their coats.’2
In his essay ‘Frost Darkness Sun’, written in 1999, that year when frost, darkness and a blood-tinged sun permeated the poems he was writing, Joy Goswami quotes the poet Shankho Ghosh—‘In order to use words in a new way, what is needed is to break their effortless succession. […] What is most necessary is the point of attraction between two words, there, […] those dead restraints […] to loosen those knots is the poet’s work.’3 Elsewhere, Joy-da writes, ‘Shakti [Chattopadhyay]’s poetry has always been strongly suggestive. From within the enclosure of simple meaning he has repeatedly launched words towards limitlessness. Has released them, has given their meanings freedom.’4
This seems to me precisely what Joy-da does in Moutat Moheswar. If the poems in Surjo-Pora Chhai were short sharp salvos into the unknown that reeled me into the intense core of their bleak landscapes and offered me a surreal, allusively mythological universe that travelled from the bedroom floor to the limits of outer-space in the blink of an eye, the poems in Moutat Moheswar simply spun me into a language-vortex where nothing was as it seemed.
When I first translated a dozen poems picked at random from Surjo-Pora Chhai, the narrative force of the book was still hidden from me. As I would come to realize, while each individual poem worked like a well-aimed catapult, it was in their cumulative effect that the poet’s vision rang clear. A vision of a nuclear world, spinning uncontrollably towards its own extinction; a war-ravaged world where multitudes of the wounded limp on endlessly; an environmentally degraded world where mineral resource, oil and fuel gets rapidly and unthinkingly consumed; a space-travelled world where dark energy and black holes are widely acknowledged, if not necessarily understood. And yet also a world where the poet, now exhausted, now triumphant, raises his voice in invocation to the sun whose destruction he has witnessed—‘Come, bless me, shed—not light—/ But ashes, burnt by the sun!’ A world in which an affirmation of the ‘blood- and glee-stained’ poet’s rebirth is still possible through the only thing he can control— his words. And as he emerges, renewed, the astonished neighbours gab, ‘Would you believe it!/ He’s just as wicked— gobbling up the sun and the rain/ Blowing away the trees just like he did before!’
It was the discovery of these transitions from the unremittingly harsh to the unabashedly comic that inspired me to translate the book in entirety. By laying the corpse and the carnival side by side, by expressing an irreverence for ‘verse/ Which even the devil would not dream of buying’, this was a book that reinvested the poet’s role with urgency. Here was a poet interested in the atomic structure of words, in looking at poems as bursts of energy that could annihilate as much as regenerate.
In Moutat Moheswar, the poet seemed to be interested in the sheer mischief that words could wreak on the staid paths of language. Earlier, despite all the complications of Surjo-Pora Chhai, I had been on the verge of truly giving up only once, when faced with the lines, ‘Aaj ki nishchit ki bidyut ki horin ei doud/ ki prantor, ki udey jaowa ei haat/ Ki moyur ei nrityo’. The phrase ‘Ki moyur ei nrityo’ enchanted and exasperated me in equal measure. In Bengali, the adjectival use of the noun moyur to evoke the flamboyance and colour of the dance was very effective. In English, it seemed impossible. Until I discovered, in the labyrinths of a thesaurus, the wonderful word ‘pavian’ used to describe a sixteenth-century dance—so named on account of its resemblance to the movements of a peacock—and the poem resolved itself, hinged as it were at the very same line that had pushed me to despair.
Portmanteau words likewise called for inventive solutions. Sometimes, the entire mythology behind a Bengali word was impossible to pack into the English. For instance, in the line ‘Tomosha amar shima jol’, the word tomosha is not just darkness, it is the river by which Valmiki had his first poetic inspiration. I could not bring that reference into the poem without destroying it. Sometimes, sound-words had to go. Line breaks and punctuation threw up small but significant issues of their own. When would it be wise to retain an exclama
tion mark? When would it appear excessive? What made certain poems teeter visually while others maintained a careful sobriety? Why ellipses, why dashes, why inexplicable gaps? The poem that begins ‘In dreams the dead peacock, moon’ set the standard for what I would, by and large, do. Namely, retain the line breaks as per the original in those cases where any seeming awkwardness was really part of the disorienting effect intended by the poet. So if the tongue stumbles as it moves to the next line it is only because the poet intended that it should be ‘Impossible to read this obedient poem solicitously/ Sitting between Ma and Baba’. In poems like the one this quote comes from, punctuation offers no clue as to how the poem should be read. And there are several in Surjo-Pora Chhai and Moutat Moheswar that work similarly, leaving one off-kilter. As a translator I chose to enjoy that uncertainty, to celebrate that askew-ness. For Joy-da’s poems revealed themselves as being skillfully plotted, ingeniously controlled, knitted with internal rhymes that are as understated as the punctuation tics sometimes seem overt. I have attempted to recreate some of those effects in English as subtly as possible.
In Moutat Moheswar, I was stymied often. Here was poetry as code, as mystery, as pursuit of a language beyond the limits of language. I wrestled with problems of syntax; I wondered how to maintain the shape of the meaning without warping the line (or vice versa); how to find a sequence of words that would be as natural in English as it was in Bangla, a naturalness essential to the delayed shock of realizing that what was being said was far from ordinary (‘In softness I’ll set out from home/ In birdness I’ll set out from language’). What, I asked myself, could grammar give me that would not immediately have to be refused? In the poet’s syntax in Moutat Moheswar, there was an effortless undoing. In his modes of address, a blunt intimacy, a caressing new voice, voice of the jester, pleader, chanter. In Surjo-Pora Chhai I often got the feeling that the voice came from another planet, a human voice that had forgotten what it meant to speak into another human’s ear, had forgotten the warmth of breath and touch, a voice that spoke to darkness, scorpions, constellations, primeval substances, a world where Death could sit sipping unmentioned substances on your windowsill like an uninvited (but not necessarily unwelcome) guest, where the greatest intimacy was with a corpse. In Moutat, I was stunned by the living tone of the voice that ran through the book, teasing, cajoling, jibing, splintering everything with the certainty of the hawk that, like an axe, ‘has to fall’.5 One poem—Poem 46—suddenly came clear after I asked Joy-da to read it aloud to me, with all its inflections of humour, satire, irony and craving. Some tricky phrases came clear through conversation and, in one delightful instance, through mime. I avoided translating Poem 50 for the longest time, fearing not its length so much as its twists and turns, its sheer unabashed difficulty. I am delighted I did it. If at all there was a reason to have translated Moutat, that poem was it.
