by Joy Goswami
I was confronting the unknown again but this time I was ready.
My mother was the headmistress of a mofussil school. She ran the house, my father having died when I was very young. When my mother passed away, I was 29, unemployed, and my only reaction to what was happening was deep depression and rage. Somehow that trauma strengthened me and I wrote. I kept writing, for myself, for the little magazines. At the age of 31, I fell in love for the first time. It didn’t last very long. It was only when I was 36 that I suddenly found celebrity-hood being thrust upon me. This happened because I won the Ananda Puroshkar for Ghumiyechho, Jhaupata. Suddenly, people who had not given me a second look would stop me in the street and want to talk to me in our small neighbourhood. I wondered, what would be my real identity? I felt I was standing in front of a void. Like Picasso said, the canvas was a void and you had to plunge into it. I wrote a long poem ‘Aaj Jodi Amakay Jiggesh Koro’ (‘If You Ask Me Now’). Meanwhile, I had begun working; my first job was at the age of 37! There was routine in my life, there were commitments. And suddenly, in the midst of all this, the words started coming again, like a storm, new forms, images, words, sounds, I was confronting the unknown again but this time I was ready.
SC: You speak of words coming to you. How does the poem first take shape in your mind— as a line, a picture, a moment you have seen and recollected?
Carrying the line around from the time it occurs to me to the time when I will finally write it down becomes an act of preservation.
JG: For me, the poem always shapes itself first as a line. That can happen to me anywhere. Earlier, when I was living my vagabond life, it was easier to be always there, ready for the line when it came. As a householder, with a wife and a daughter, with friends dropping in at any time, it is harder for me to hang on to the line when it does come, unexpected. If I am surrounded by people when a line arrives, unannounced, I find the press of conversation and voices unbearable. And so I retreat to the only place where I can be alone, the bathroom, and I run the taps. Safe behind the screen of sound that the running water makes, I utter the line as it made itself known to me, and I repeat and retain it for the time when I will be able to put it down on paper. For me, carrying the line around from the time it occurs to me to the time when I will finally write it down becomes an act of preservation. I rescue the line from the babble around me for the moment when it will become part of my poem. Surjo-Pora Chhai in fact was largely written like this, on the move, in the head.
SC: Could you talk a little more about how Surjo-Pora Chhai was written?
For me the form of my poems is linked with what my body is going through.
JG: When I wrote Surjo-Pora Chhai, I was 46 years old, I had about fourteen or fifteen books of poetry behind me, and also a couple of collections, selected works, that kind of thing. The year was 1999. A lot was going on that was affecting me. The Kargil war, Kosovo, images of millions of refugees fleeing … I was also fleeing in my own way at that time. I would be crisscrossing the city, by tram, by bus, and these poems would float up into my mind. You will notice that the poems in Surjo-Pora Chhai are very short, and have very short verses, one line, space, two lines, space. That was really dictated to me by the rhythm of the tram journeys. I would think of two lines, and the tram would brake, or the conductor would ask me for my ticket, and the space insinuated itself into the poem. Normally I try to save my lines from interruption. Here, the interruptions became part of my lines. For me the form of my poems is linked with what my body is going through, whether spatially, emotionally or physically. What I was running away from on all those endless journeys was really a running towards the words. I was trying to hide in the words. The words that make up Surjo-Pora Chhai were my refuge, and my sanctuary.
SC: But what a terrifying sanctuary! Throughout Surjo-Pora Chhai there are images of great bleakness, great desolation. There is the overriding presence of death, skulls, graves, dying suns, a sense of annihilation, earth and flesh seemingly inseparable. A lot of the images are surreal, like the oar that falls out of the boat turning into a winged, horned sea-creature pulling this giant boat through a drowning world. What was in your mind when you were writing these?
You see the thing is to go beyond the reach of the word. In poetry a limbless body can become an astral body.
JG: The genesis of Surjo-Pora Chhai was really my terrible depression. Also, I was thinking of all sorts of things. About Andrew Wiles who was speechless when asked how it felt to have finally solved Fermat’s Last Theorem—he had no words to describe such ‘unbelievable beauty’. I was also wondering what Niels Bohr would have thought after the discovery of atomic structure. I was thinking of the enormous burst of energy from the dropped asteroids that wiped out the dinosaurs from the face of the planet, of pterodactyls taking to the air in the split-second before their annihilation. I was thinking of myths, of Hiranyakashipu and Vishnu in his Matsya Avatar, I was also thinking of Lord Ganesha transcribing the entire Mahabharata without any breaks or interruptions as Ved Vyasa spoke the shlokas aloud. The whole notion of poetry being ‘received’ rather than ‘written’. In this book, there is the image of a ‘headless painter’ painting his shlokas on the back of the universe—as if the universe were a giant canvas. All these things, you understand, were happening unconsciously. Surjo-Pora Chhai took three months to write, from my fleeing-thinking stage to the final penning-down stage. I put it away and 6 months later, when I submitted my manuscript to the publishers, I found that I had been cured.
SC: So this collection of dark poems had helped you return to reality. There was something to rejoice about, then, some hope?
JG: You see the thing is to go beyond the reach of the word. In poetry a limbless body can become an astral body. Which is why the title poem, which is really about the end of the world, suddenly turns into a prayer, an invocation: ‘Come, bless me, shed—not light—/ But ashes, burnt by the sun!’ The poem here becomes a means of reproducing within the reader the emotion that I am feeling. The poet and the reader share the same shock of a possibility of hope, however desperate, a sense of wonder, a straining towards something more than annihilation.
I use the exclamation mark. I use it like a whiplash, underscoring the final stroke of transformation or joy or unexpectedness.
SC: Does that explain why this poem, unlike a lot of others (whose concluding lines are either left unpunctuated or punctuated with a full-stop), ends with an exclamation mark? Often, especially when seen in translation, an exclamation mark can be seen as an unnecessary flourish. But judging by the precision with which you have punctuated all your poems, I was wondering if this was also as precisely thought of.
JG: Yes, you’ll notice it in some other poems in this book. Wherever the concluding impulse of the poem is an active one, a determining one, rather than a passive or inconclusive one, I use the exclamation mark. I use it like a whiplash, underscoring the final stroke of transformation or joy or unexpectedness. Like the poem in which the dove sitting on the man’s shoulder ends with man and dove fusing into one blazing ember—that was something even I had not known was going to happen. But it did, and I signalled that moment of discovery with the exclamation mark.
SC: You mentioned that you like to avoid repetition at all costs. After Surjo-Pora Chhai what did you do that was different?
My first and primary and enduring impulse will always be poetry. I will always write it, irrespective of whether it is read or published or seen.
JG: My book Horiner Jonno Ekok which came out in 2002 happened in a radically different way. In Surjo-Pora Chhai I was trying to enclose, shut out, in this one I was willing to let in. It was as if after being shut in a room with four windowless walls I had decided to peel the walls away, in soft layers as if they were paper, not brick, lay them down flat and let the world in. I wrote Horiner Jonno Ekok in a state of openness. The noise of the city, the slogans of a procession passing outside my house, the yatrapala of my childhood days, tele-ad dialogues, a voice over a microphone, the abuses b
eing hurled at each other by two competitive bus-drivers trying to out-race each other on Kolkata’s chaotic roads, I was allowing all that noise, all those voices in.
SC: You have also written prose. A few novels. Is your approach to prose the same, or is it different?
JG: Novels are what I write out of the commitments to my job and my family, poetry for love. My first and primary and enduring impulse will always be poetry. I write prose when I am asked to. I write poetry without being asked, and I will always write it, irrespective of whether it is read or published or seen.
SC: What do you expect from a translation of your poetry? What kind of freedom do you think a translator can or should exercise?
JG: The thing for a translator to keep in mind is that sometimes it may be necessary to forgo the rhyme and maintain the thought. Sometimes, translators try to duplicate the original rhyme scheme and lose the thought. Neither do I like the approach where a translator completely rewrites the original. To my mind, a good translation conveys the imagery, the atmosphere, the ideas in the original poem, sort of ‘shows the scene’ as it appears in the original.
The reading of a poem is, for me, the only proof of its truth.
SC: Do you believe that poetry has its role to play in today’s world?
JG: Sometimes the world is more ready to listen to a poet than to his work. That’s what happens when you get co-opted by a cause or an organization. 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.
Some poets speak in the same voice all their lives. Some keep changing the voice they speak in.
5 December 2008, Kolkata
On theory:
Imagine a man hiding behind a rock. He hides behind the rock, he peeps out, he shoots from under its cover, he hides, he saves himself. Then he races to the next rock, hides, shoots. And the next and the next. The bullets hit the rock but not the man.
Now imagine a man walking into the clearing where all the rocks are. As he walks the bullets hit him. He is hit, parts of his body fall on the clearing as he walks, he is hurt and yet he keeps walking.
The first man is the weak poet, who needs theory to hide behind. Each rock is a theory he shields himself with. The second man is the poet who is willing to risk walking unarmed towards life, towards all the blows of experience, the man who is willing to risk himself as he walks.
On voice:
Some poets speak in the same voice all their lives. Some keep changing the voice they speak in. Some poets are ventriloquists’ dummies, in the sense that through their work you hear the voices of the poets they are imitating.
Sometimes poetry is the place you hide. Sometimes poetry reveals oneself. Sometimes it makes one secret.
On poetry as disguise:
Sometimes poetry is the place you hide. When you cannot tell something to a friend, a wife, a colleague, you tell it to a poem. It is like hiding at the bottom of a lake. You are crouched at the bottom. Above you is the clear water. That water is language. Sometimes poetry reveals oneself. Sometimes it makes one secret.
On language:
What makes Shakespeare survive? What is it about his plays that speaks an archaic language and yet is performed across the world—in Spain, in Japan, in China? Not the language, but the core of what those plays are about. It’s like any modern township, say here in Kolkata. In days it can be razed to the ground and a new township, architecturally completely different, can spring up. But if you drill through the ground on which that township rises, first you hit soil, then water, if you’re lucky you hit oil, and finally you reach the tectonic plates that are still, slightly, shifting. Under that is magma. At the core of any human being is that magma. That’s what stays the same, no matter what else changes. Jealousy, ambition, blind love, these are what make Shakespeare survive.
Each time it wasn’t foreknowledge of what would happen that changed the way I wrote, or even any conscious decision. It was life. Life interrupted.
How does one’s language change?
This is what happened to me. All my life’s experiences impacted what I wrote. After my first book I fell ill, and was hospitalized. When I came out of the hospital I remember standing at a tea-stall, by the roadside, people were passing, trams, buses, office-goers, smoky, a very haphazard evening, a sad evening, but it seemed to me that this was life, I was out of the hospital and back in life. The book that came next was Aleya Hrodh. Surreal poems. Four-five years later, one morning my mother was helping herself to a paan, my friend was just leaving to go home, and I was going for my bath. One minute she was eating that paan, the next minute she was bent over, vomiting. I went to her, her face was running with sweat. We took her to the hospital. It was a brain haemorrhage. Within an hour she was dead. I called my friend, and told him we needed to go to the crematorium. Why, he said. Because my mother’s dead, I said. He couldn’t believe it. He had seen her alive a few hours ago. This changed the way I wrote. This shock of having my mother die in front of me led to the book Unmaader Pathokrom…
Then I fell in love. It lasted 3 months. In those 3 months I wrote lyric love poetry. When we broke up I wrote a different kind of poetry. Then when I got the Ananda Puroshkar, things changed again. People who saw me everyday suddenly saw me anew. I would go to buy something from the store, and the shopkeeper would say, ‘Oh you write poetry! You never told us!’ Things changed overnight. And in response I wrote ‘Aaj Jodi Amakay Jiggesh Koro’… So each time it wasn’t foreknowledge of what would happen that changed the way I wrote, or even any conscious decision. It was life. Life interrupted. A young poet once asked me, ‘Doesn’t theory interrupt?’ and I said, Yes, if you write behind closed doors and you need to win arguments with your poet friends by quoting theory. But before theory something else interrupts and that’s life. If you open the doors, life walks in, and changes the way you write.
Sometimes it’s a gift to be able to get away from the eagle sitting with its talons on your head, to do something so removed from the act of writing and creativity, to clear the mind with routine and return refreshed and renewed.
On apprenticeship and labour:
Rabindranath Tagore, on his deathbed, dictated a poem to Rani Chanda. When she read it back to him, he dictated three changes, and was still not happy. He said he’d fix it after his operation. He never recovered from that operation. Even after 80 years of writing, it was that same hesitation, the same uncertainty, which word shall I choose, like the uncertainty of ‘which gate shall I take to come to your house?’ even though I have come to your house so often. Almost all of Jibanananda Das’s poems were the result of umpteen deletions and rewrites. The first draft of the poem ‘Bonolota Sen’ shows the extent to which he has revised and rewritten, as does the facsimile of the poem ‘Machranga’ and the book Ruposhi Bangla. Here was a seeming effortlessness, with such labour behind it. Rilke translated by Buddhadev Bose—‘shanto haater ditiyo kono kaaj’— sometimes it’s a gift to be able to get away from the eagle sitting with its talons on your head, to do something so removed from the act of writing and creativity, to clear the mind with routine and return refreshed and renewed. And yet when poets write essays on poetry, be it Tagore or Jibanananda Das, how much easier it was to write about poetry, than to write the poem itself!
How much easier it was to write about poetry, than to write the poem itself!
On subject and voice:
I cannot answer the question ‘what do I write about’, because I do not know, I never know until it is written. And I cannot answer the question what is my voice, because I do know…
On rhyme and form:
When you’re young, you feel such triumph
in pulling off a successful rhyme. And then you realize that a perfect rhyme changes the path that your language could have taken, even perhaps changes the thought. And then you have to leave it behind, to tear away into the unrhymed and find a new way of speaking that will not bend your thought by the force of that compulsion to rhyme.
The caveat to oneself—don’t return to the same form!
9 December 2008, Kolkata
On folklore, protest and lyric:
Folklore, spoken poetry on farms, probaad or protest can sometimes be expressed through obscene verse. When you get stabbed, you yell, you do not speak in proper speech. On the other hand, there are many poems with their source in story. Kahini mulok onek kobita. The lyric can be seen as personal poetry, utterance, prarthona or prayer.
On form:
The caveat to oneself—don’t return to the same form! Form is an organic decision. Looking at language units—changing the unit of meaning carried in each word, the impulse being—‘I will say it, but I will not say it!’
One of the writer’s freedoms is the freedom to not write, if that is what he chooses.
10 February 2010, Mumbai
On the writer’s freedom:
The writer’s freedom is sometimes taken away by the publisher, by the establishment, by the reader, but mainly by the writer himself. It is the writer who loses his own freedom, he reaches out his arms, and says, take the bangle from my right arm, take the watch from my left. He does not even guard it. One of the writer’s freedoms is the freedom to not write, if that is what he chooses.
On the ‘great writer’:
Who is the greatest writer? Am I the greatest writer of this century? This question is difficult to answer unless enough time has passed after the writer’s death. It is like being given an exam paper. You need an hour to write it. But if it is taken away after 5 minutes, there is no way of judging if you have passed or failed. Seventy years after Tagore’s death, one can say he was a great writer. It is the books that travel through time that are the ones that matter. Take Old Man and the Sea: after months and months during which maybe he [Hemingway] went and fished or saw a bullfight or did whatever he pleased, with the publisher asking him for the book for which he had already taken the money, he had not sold his freedom. He gave his slim 90-page book when he was ready. And that book time-travels towards us.
