by Joy Goswami
And what of Du Dondo Phowara Matro? Among the three books was this the sanest, simplest, most conventional? I wish I could affirm that. In his essay ‘Creating the Sky’,6 Joy Goswami writes, ‘Leafing through [Benoy Majumdar’s] Shreshtho Kobita (Best of…) it will be clear that the exterior of most of his poems is reality. Tangled or wobbly, serene or restless, sometimes, in fact, an evanescent reality. But the interior is made in dreams. Which cannot be destroyed or dismissed. Because within the memories and instincts of thousands of human beings the meteorites of these dreams are still racing. Of which some may at some point strike, others may not find throughout their lives a piece of earth worth crashing down on. But as long as they live, they will live in the form of those meteorites. Life’s elementals—fire, water, air— exist in the dreams of those poems. Yes, dreams.’
These lines seem to me applicable to Joy-da’s own poems in Du Dondo Phowara Matro. On the surface is reality, a recognizable mundane reality in which roll-shops, dustbins, vegetable-vendors, riksha-vans, well-known landmarks of the city of Kolkata, the poet’s father, the ancestral home, couples in love, in lust, pet cats, empty rooms that remind of romantic rendezvous, efficient cooks, and ice-cream sellers can all be found. This is real, the poet says, this exists, this is where I live, these are the people in my life. Nothing could be more familiar, more comforting. Except that the pet cat is playing with a comet-like sun, the ice-cream man is selling an ice-capped mountain, the efficient cook knows where you will find not just the sunglasses you misplaced but all the misplaced quasars; a world where labourers on a construction site carry supernovas instead of stone chips—in other words here it is again, that unnerving coexistence of the quotidian and the cosmic. The exterior of these poems is reality, sometimes even an evanescent reality. The interior is pulsing with the meteorites of dreams. Once again, I found myself in the terrain that Surjo-Pora Chhai had introduced me to. Du Dondo Phowara Matro was the book that would help me close the circle begun in 2005.
*
In his Preface to Nijer Jibanananda, Joy-da writes, ‘Poetry penetrates, at the speed of thought, as if it wants to return to the beginning of time.’ With reference to the character of David Bowman in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Joy-da writes, ‘In the course of his space travel he had arrived at another reality.’
I sometimes think of Joy-da as a traveller on a space-odyssey of his own, his poems as time-machines of the mind, hurtling from inner to outer space and back. There seems to me in his work an acute consciousness of the illusion of reality and the reality of illusion. ‘Whether we openly admit it or not, what we imagine is what is really true. The way we live, that is merely fact,’ Joy-da writes. There is an awareness of the futility and failure inherent in the poet’s quest and the durability of the poem he leaves behind. ‘Every poet is a failed poet, because he cannot ultimately write exactly what he wanted to write. He races towards the next poem or holds his breath waiting, for this very reason. Alone, face to face with himself, before the blank page, that failure becomes apparent. Shakti did not want to run away from that failure. And because the howl of that failure, that incompleteness touched him, that poet remains a man with a curse on his head. […] To attempt to rise from the ashes while acknowledging the end is ash is the only thing that remains for poetry to do,’ Joy-da writes.7
All that the poet will and should be judged by is the poetry he leaves behind—‘Because the written word is the writer’s first and last identity.’
Joy Goswami has thought long and hard about the poet’s role. Again and again, he asks, what is it? To be a seer, a witness, a blind prophet, like Tiresias? Or is it simply to build the sky—‘Burning in the disquiet lit by desire he pierces through and rises into beauty’s peaceful sky. [His] goal—to build that sky in poetry’.8 Or rather, is the true poet a dreamer, a master of disguise, a keeper of secrets? ‘Hurt only comes from having loved, that’s true […] But in the light and dusk of pride and hurt you haven’t noticed, perhaps, that the poet often roams in disguise like Harun-al-Rashid. Sleeps on the road in the guise of a drunkard. Flees to the jungles. Becoming a commotion he hides inside any hullaballoo. You cannot grasp him. Behind all this pandemonium he hides the core of his poetic imagination. If he loses that, he loses all.’9
What Joy-da privileges above all is the creation of beauty. ‘Here he is, our authentic poet,’ he writes sarcastically, ‘Here it is, the authentic role of art. The role of protestor its only role … But … what if among the poets there is one who has lost his own way, who does not know what must be done. Who is constantly seeking a way forward? Who discovers the world anew each day and thinks, today I learnt something […] What use can Van Gogh’s Sunflowers be put to? […] Yet, the fact that to create beauty is in a sense a protest against all the injustices of society, a silent war, can we remember this all the time?’10 Others have searched for this beauty, in the midst of which is ‘a deadly poison,’ Joy-da writes,11 ‘to survive having internalized that poison is an everyday occurrence, to halt occasionally while searching for that beauty and to look behind.’ What kind of beauty is this? A terrible beauty. These words recur in his essays and interviews like a haunting refrain. At one point in his essay on Jibanananda’s poem, ‘All Those Jackals’,12 Joy-da writes about the amazement of an ‘incomparable, mysterious and terrifying beauty. Arriving at this point one gets a jolt. In this uncertain, inferior life of being beaten, and escaping, this is the first time they [the jackals] are standing before a kind of beauty. Beauty? Or is it terror, the terror of an unknown mysterious marvel! Would it be wrong to call this beauty?’ He mentions the mathematician Andrew Wiles breaking down when asked to describe how it felt to have solved Fermat’s Last Theorem and then saying, it was ‘an unbelievable beauty’.13
Terrible, mysterious and necessary. Joy-da writes, without self-pity, ‘No one will read poetry. The poet knows—that moving stream will not turn around to look at poetry. Because that stream is what we call the mainstream. Even so, the poet will arrange his wares of incense alongside. Didn’t I say there was someone in the poem we could not see? That someone, who kept the incense burning? That’s the poet. Even if he cannot be seen, cannot be recognized, the fragrance he sends will reach us. Will reach this racing blind stream of time. Someone will get that fragrance. And that someone is the reader.’14 Joy-da’s faith in the reader of poetry is unshakeable. In the 2005 interview he said, ‘To me, poetry’s impact is best seen, not on society at large, but on the mind of the individual interested reader. Poetry cannot always function as social commentary, or as a tool for improving society. Very often, poetry has no relation to reality. It could be surreal, a dreamscape, but at its core is the emotional truth, the imaginative truth that allows the reader to make that leap of faith. The reading of a poem is, for me, the only proof of its truth.’
Reading as validation, reading as rescue. For the poet, however isolated, the reading of other writers is a life-force. ‘Save me, my friend. In your book, companion, my mournful blood circulates.’ Quoting this line in a book review, Joy-da goes on to say:
Having reached this point, the book […] is transformed into a living body. […] one understands this is the cry of a grief-stricken solitary sceptic. That grieving sceptic to whom books have shown the way in every century. The minute the circulation of one’s own blood in the book of another is made apparent, all manner of distinctions between the self and the other are abolished. All thinkers-poets-artists-actors-revolutionaries and creators of texts from time immemorial, living or dead, despite differences of opinion, complement each other, in fact are each other’s friends, this stream of thought comes flowing in from all corners of the earth and gets equated in one source. The book is caught in the midst of this realization.
And that book, when we put our ears to its cover […] we can hear the earth’s blood circulating.15
Texts speak to each other, across continuums and disjunctions. Poets speak to the moment, be it salvaged from a prehistoric cataclysm
or a memory of last night’s love-bite. Italo Calvino wrote in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, ‘To read a book, to love a person, it is necessary to be other than that book and that person, and we read in order to overcome our otherness. […] What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.’ Joy Goswami seems keenly aware of this. He writes, ‘The way the poet, as he goes towards the poem every day while reading this earth, reading tree after tree, roads, tea-stalls, river-banks, bridges, colleges, while reading cinema halls and office crowds, bus routes, tram routes, while reading lovers, mothers and children, you too, in the same way, standing in the midst of this business of living on this earth are reading the poet bit by bit—are coming forward together, towards each other—in the moment of this union a poem triumphs.’16
The language is unmistakably sexual. This sexual frisson is there not just in his writing about poetry, but in his poetry itself. Whether it is ‘The tongueless lovecry’ of the ghost in Surjo-Pora Chhai who has no woman to mate with, or the woman in Moutat Moheswar who ‘makes sure you know/ She too sleeps with another god’ or, in Du Dondo Phowara Matro, the tectonic plate on the seabed that says as it slides into another, ‘“This entering is just what I need”’, Joy-da is unafraid to speak of pleasure, the jouissance of reading, of writing, the poem as fruit, seed, womb, sperm. Coitus at the end of the world. Eros plus massacre.
And yet (or do I mean always?) in the midst of cataclysm— calm. The poem not just a precipice to leap off in an act of ‘serial courage’,17 but a place of sanctuary, a bridge. The poem as archive of the history of our everyday lives, the amber in which a lost world will be preserved for all time. ‘That girl, we know her, we don’t know her. That world is gone. That world remains—in the poem. […] Every cry—every form of address—every veranda remains.’18 But for that poem to happen, one needs an almost inhuman patience. In his essay ‘In Praise of the Final Years of Life’, Joy-da writes:19
There is the waiting of a man. A silent, ceaseless waiting. It’s as if there’s nothing else in this poem. In the second line just the words ‘dusk dawn’. Followed by a lot of white space. In comparison, the line above it is long. This white space in between seems to speak of the uninterrupted waiting from dusk to dawn. The kind of waiting that involves the reddening of the sky, once on account of sunrise, once on account of sunset. The day comes, the day goes. The entire day. The next line says just one thing: I’m still waiting. Followed again by a lot of white space, that space, that silence, as if to indicate once again that duration of waiting. […] What kind of room is it with a door behind? […] That gateway, that door, to what? Poetry? The inside and outside of a poem? If you sit and watch in the mysterious room of poetry two bloodshot expanses might enter through that door and sprawl before you! Through the music the universe can then be glimpsed. That’s why the waiting.
The ceaseless waiting.
It has been a bit of a ceaseless wait for Joy-da to see his poems in English. I am happy to have been part of this journey into print. Apart from ‘To You, Ironhawk’ and ‘Ballad of the True One’ almost all the poems in this collection appear in English translation for the first time.
A few questions that I kept in mind while translating were—How to be true? How to make the poem travel into another country without losing the poetry en route? How to keep the original alive, its blazing core intact? How to disappear? In his essay ‘Homage to Translation’ Forrest Gander writes:
Are you aware that the glow generated by light-producing organs on the undersides of some fish acts to countershade them, erasing the shadow cast when they are viewed from below against the lighted water above?
Just so, the translator must disappear.
What has it been like for me? As a translator, I feel the most extraordinary, enabling tension. When I write my own poetry, I am in the middle of a landscape without a single landmark, I am lost, I put one word after another in order to find my way. When I translate I have the map before me. Relaxed, oriented, located, I begin translating, first word for word, sense for sense, swapping, exchanging, light for light, pressing forward with a kind of clairvoyance. I know where I must go—I must get to the other side of the poem, and turn back to see this new thing, this changeling sitting in its place. This stage is intuitive and immersive, almost—dare I say it—meditative. I am following instinct as much as I am following the words put there by the poet, the logic of his language, the direction of his thought. I feel a concentration that is fierce and free. I have read the poem many times, I know its pauses, the joints and breaks in its body, I know what moves it, internally; I feel a kinship with it prior to the act of translating, a closeness I carry with me as I go.
After that first intuitive draft come the rewrites until I arrive at the version that rings true, inside, where Bangla and English collide, confront and give way, one to the other. This is the time when I am tested most. Tested as a poet, as a translator, as a reader. This is when I must restrain myself from kidnapping the poem,20 pulling a bag over its eyes and driving it to the point where the ransom will be paid or the hapless poem shot. This is when I must return, gently, to the original with translation in hand and read them out to each other, like introducing two people who have forgotten they ever met. Are they listening to each other, are they in dialogue? Or are they quarrelling, getting angry, each wanting to win this round of battle? I find this stage the most terrifying and revealing. If, as Eliot Weinberger said, ‘Translation is a way of listening that changes the way you speak’, it is at this stage that I think—this English poem (for it must be in translation a poem) is me speaking differently, sliding into another set of rules, me as I never knew I was. And if this is the moment of truth, delight, poetry and the disappearance of the ‘I’—it is for this moment that I translate.
Translators routinely resort to metaphor when they talk about translation. A mosaic, a Persian rug seen from the back in which ‘the pattern is apparent but not much more,’21 the same melody played by a different instrument… I rarely attempt to analyse my methods and modes, I prefer just to do it. But if and when I had to, I would resort to poetry. Some years ago, while translating Surjo-Pora Chhai, I wrote a poem called ‘Translations’,22 from which I’d like to share the last three stanzas:
Ghosting through the dark,
our separate languages,
each tonguing the words
the other does not speak.
Faithful as mirrors,
I give him back the lines
he might have written
from my side of the mercury-sheet,
the sheen that films our eyes
and reflects us,
each the exact inversion of the other.
No explanation for madness.
From the place where listening
becomes a movement towards sound,
I am following the traces,
quicksilver, joy, sadness,
trawling for the word
that will be exact and unmerciful,
that will be synonymous
with truth.
Parallel worlds running out of words—
and still they come, whisper-vagrant,
sharp with honing, homing beaks and feathers,
landing without pulling in their claws.
There are no laws in this land of doubles.
I must make my own,
and when I am caught for trespassing,
I will know I have crossed the line
invisible to all but those whose eyes are flame,
tending already to cinder.
I can think of no better cue to stop. This may very well be your first glimpse into the enigmatic world of Joy Goswami’s poetry—
Now
There’s just one thing left to do.
Jump.23
Sampurna Chattarji
Kolkata, January 2014
from
Surjo-Pora Chhai (19
99)
Ashes, Burnt by the Sun
Prelude
It is an immense poem. Its root-rhythm, tree.
Sacrificial blood on its leaves, it too is leaf.
It is a mighty dance. Its root the huge dry
Outstretched hand of the earth underfoot.
It is so many seas. Its primal face in the water.
Soaking up the lower depths it raises mountains—
The wilder its expanse—the more it is the flight
Of grazing flocks—the more it loses the shepherds.
It is an infinite metre. Its root-tree, dance.
Yet, tree, you are ash in so many forests
I chase the ash—I catch it—I break that poem
And find the whirling atom!
[Salute to Niels Bohr, 1913]
My no-more-than-lightning hope
Towards which the old cannon kept behind the clouds
Slowly turns its face when night falls
