by Joy Goswami
On Tagore: Tagore wrote the play Roktokorobi in 1924, 11 years after he won the Nobel Prize. By 1926 he had revised and rewritten the play almost 11 times. He was the one who felt those changes to be necessary. Perhaps Tagore is the only single creator of a massive body of work whom we have a living memory of, a photograph, we have seen him. Unlike Ved Vyasa, whose authorship was added to along the years to make the Mahabharata—maybe a milkman added to it with a pot of milk, maybe a fisherman added a freshly caught fish to it, and it went on and on, accumulating, until it became what it is today.
Where is the self in the writer’s work? In some books you have everything but the self.
On the self in the writer’s work:
Where is the self in the writer’s work? In Kieslowski’s Camera Buff finally he turns the camera on himself. In some books you have everything but the self. You have history and research and wells with chits of paper thrown in them bearing the names of debtors and slaves and accounts, you have craft and years and many, many books, but what does it say about you? About your mind?
My mind may be small, limited. It may be the mind of the village where I grew up, the huts with the papaya tree, and the banana tree, and the bamboo trellis with the creepers of the bottle-gourd crawling over it, the flowers hanging down, and someone comes and plucks one of the flowers, to fry it for lunch, and that place, that village has its own mind. That is the mind I may want you to see.
People may ask, why should I read about your small personal limited world? I have one answer to that—don’t.
People may ask, why should I read about your small personal limited world? I have one answer to that—don’t.
On literature:
In physics there is the concept of the event horizon that defines a black hole. Outside a black hole, every mass, every body has its own defined, recognizable reality. Once it crosses the event horizon of the black hole and dips into its darkness, we no longer know what that reality is. Literature is on this side of the event horizon. Once it crosses over into society, you do not know what its reality is anymore. Is the society that mangles that known reality a black hole?
On criticism:
Why is criticism better than praise? Because it makes us return to the text that was criticized. It makes us re-read it, and in that re-reading, either strengthens one’s own conviction that the work is good, or makes us change it in ways perhaps not even suggested by the criticizer.
Inside you there is an unknown person who tells you what must be done to make a text better.
On self-criticism:
Inside you there is an unknown person who tells you what must be done to make a text better.
On poetry:
There is a scene from a film whose director I cannot remember, a boy is chasing his girlfriend in a cab, racing alongside the train where the girl sits, her hair blowing in the wind, and then the cab has a puncture. The boy gets out, closes the cab door and starts running. And he outruns the train, running straight into the horizon, while the train chugs along behind. The speed of his need was faster than any speed the train could ever hope to achieve! That’s where it [the scene] becomes poetry.
What the reader is interested in is ‘What do you say?’ Even after growing up they are holding their father’s hand to go to the market.
22 June 2010, Kolkata
On why writers write:
Most writers when they speak about why they write take refuge in the words of others. But what the reader is interested in is ‘What do you say?’ Even after growing up they are holding their father’s hand to go to the market. Even now, they are asking their retired fathers to give them money to shop with. They are using a borrowed currency, not their own.
On experience:
There might be someone who spent years being ill in a room. He may feel he has no experience to write from. But what about the experience of being in that room, looking out of the window, having the nurse open the door to say, ‘It’s time for your medicine now’? It may seem very small but out of that small world you can create something vast.
The upper octave in Indian classical music is called tara. The word tara means star. When the sur reaches its height, rises to its climax, it’s as if the mind has reached the stars.
18-19 March 2013, Kolkata
JG: At night, I used to gaze at the sky from my roof. Seeing the light of a star here, a star there, I’d think, what a great distance that light is coming from! Could it be that light began travelling even before the earth was born and reached my eye just this minute— could that be? The moment I think this, it’s as if my age starts increasing in the reverse direction. After going millions and millions of years in reverse I find I am older than the earth. Then I discover I am standing on the rooftop or in an open field. That’s when I return to my own age, my own time. This is my relationship with time.
SC: I can see the way in which your interest in science (physics in particular) has left traces on your poems. I know you have a deep and abiding love for Indian classical music … how has this affected your poetry?
JG: The upper octave in Indian classical music is called tara. The word tara means star. When the sur reaches its height, rises to its climax, it’s as if the mind has reached the stars. And when the sur descends to the lower octave, it seems as if it wants to go where the magma is. The middle-octave is the earth we live in.
Or let me put it another way. After working hard all day, the word throws its tired body on the shore. Before it—the sea. The name of that sea is tone, sound, song. A taal is time, a note is rippling space.
SC: Your poetry attempts to please no one. And yet you have an enormous fan following. What does that say about poetry or about you?
If someone dislikes my work, that dislike cannot influence the momentum of my writing.
JG: If someone dislikes my work, that dislike cannot influence the momentum of my writing, because I have no way of knowing what will satisfy him. If someone likes my work, even then I cannot drive my writing towards what he/she likes. I write what comes to my mind at that moment. Because I have no option but to write it.
SC: Inside you there is a space that is vast. What does poetry do with vastness?
JG: I don’t know. If love is born in my mind for someone I cannot express it to, I don’t know what to do about that either, apart from writing poetry. If the tyranny of those in power causes great distress in my mind, I write poetry about that too. I don’t know what poetry will do with all that. Similarly, the way ‘vastness’ flings the mind into time-and-space, I try and write poetry about that feeling as well, because all that I think of, I write in my poems, there is no other way.
SC: You are a very serious poet. You have a wonderful, wicked sense of humour. You have a pitch-perfect ear for common speech. You have a deep appreciation and knowledge of literary traditions. You are superbly modern. Talking to you is an opening of the heart, a sensational expansion of the mind. What relationship does conversation have to the written word for you?
As I write, at some point, I meet the unknown inside me. Perhaps that is the subconscious.
JG: What I cannot say verbally, that enters my writing to a great degree. And what I say in conversations is the tip of the iceberg. As I write, at some point, I meet the unknown inside me. Perhaps that is the subconscious.
SC: You have written a series of books ‘Joyer Shakti’, ‘Nijer Rabindranath’, ‘Nijer Jibanananda’—the short essays and poems in them tell us not only about your relationship to the greats of Bangla literature, but also the way in which a poet reads other poets. You suggest that one’s own life experience is enough to grasp a poem. Do you think this approach is undervalued? If yes, why?
JG: When I am reading other poets, I try to understand their poems using personal experience, social experience, even cosmic experience. I don’t know how well I succeed. Standing on the ground looking at the night sky, my mind goes millions of miles away. Then again, looking at my feet I realize that right below me, many
thousand feet below me—hot lava is bubbling. Between these two, here I am, standing on tender grass. My mind and body is keeping in touch with all these three layers at the same time. Whatever I want to say, I try to say through this.
I am in need of a different language for every different experience, so I keep moving on as I search for that language.
SC: We live in language. How do you find/ renew/recharge the language, as you have done in your poems again and again?
JG: I have been trying to write poetry for almost forty years. I have still not found my own language. I am in need of a different language for every different experience, so I keep moving on as I search for that language. Perhaps that’s why the language has changed from book to book because my experience has changed.
SC: You had once said to me, when you are not writing, you are writing. Do you feel that the death of the desire to write is the writer’s worst fear, even more than the fear of death?
JG: For me the fear of death is the biggest fear. Death is fearful to me because of the pain of death. A painful death is my greatest fear. When the poems come, I write. When I don’t find a language adequate to write in, I stay silent. It has happened that I haven’t written a single poem for three years. But even then I am with poetry, because I keep writing my love for other people’s poems. Even if I am not writing, when I am connected with the poetry of others, my heart is full.
SC: You write in one of your essays, ‘Dhakka khaowa protyek pathorey … proti muhurter srom’ (‘to stumble on every stone … the labour of every instant’)—the labour of writing, the seemingly effortless result … what is it like for you?
JG: This is something you will understand as well because you write poems and novels too—moving from writing to writing is a lot like water flowing and in the middle there’s a stone—the water hits the stone and spurts up. The writer’s writing-experience goes through this kind of rise and fall, this kind of pace.
SC: Joyda, in ‘Nijer Jibanananda’ you wrote, ‘…a dream has no other spectator but me. But a dream-driven poem does have a second spectator. The reader. The poet still has to think about the reader. The reader doesn’t have to think. The reader is as free as the dream…’ What did you mean?
When writing a poem, I want to stay free to the extent possible, I want to move towards freedom
JG: I have a feeling I didn’t get that right. When writing a poem, I want to stay free to the extent possible, I want to move towards freedom, because in my personal life I am not free in any aspect. At least I want independence when it comes to poetry even though this question arises in my mind—the one who has not experienced independence in his life, how can he be free in his poems? There’s no end to the questions I ask myself.
SC: You write about the way you encountered Jibanananda Das’s beloved poem ‘Bonolota Sen’—you heard it before you read it, and then you sought the book, and read it in print, and ‘something’ happened inside you. And you write, ‘Today I understand, the poem that makes “something” happen inside—that is an effective poem.’ This question is related to the inarticulacy that descends when we come across such a poem. We are at a loss for words, to explain ‘exactly’ how it makes us feel. Critics/academics would scorn the imprecision of the word ‘something’ … they would find language to keep that speechlessness at bay. A poet on the other hand might find a way of circling that ‘something’ as you do, of trying to find ways to explain that unnamed shiver to oneself. And the poem may resist that attempt or may open up to that attempt. Every good poem preserves its mystery. Do you think poets find a way to reach for that mystery in a way that critics cannot? What is the language with which poets appreciate/ critique a poem? In replacing one language (that of the poem) with another (that of the review)—what happens?
The critic is one who misunderstands the poet. But the one who will enjoy the poem, who merely wants pleasure from a poem, he says to the poet—see, I’m accepting your writing in my innermost depths.
JG: This relationship, it’s like the relationship between two human beings, whose mother tongues are different. The language of poetry and the language of prose are different. The way friendship is possible between people of many countries with many different mother tongues, this too is an attempt at such a friendship.
The critic is one who misunderstands the poet. But the one who will enjoy the poem, who merely wants pleasure from a poem, he says to the poet—see, I’m accepting your writing in my innermost depths. There is no war between the two.
Whatever’s happening inside me—an experience of grief, or love, the experience of a dream, a blow I have received from society—I am writing because all that is happening inside me. What others have thought does not get me going at the moment of writing. I have never been propelled by any ‘ism’, any manifesto. My creative urge has me in such a tight grip I never get a moment’s respite for anything else. At that moment, the pressure of that instinctual process is so powerful, I don’t have time to think about anyone else.
SC: While writing about Shakti Chattopadhyay’s poetry you mention the ‘true newness’ that is the result of years of apprenticeship to the word. What, to you, separates the truly new from the gimmicky? How do you recognize the genuinely new?
JG: [That which rings] unexpectedly true! Instantly lights me up inside. The poem that lights me up inside may not be liked by someone else, because every human being is unique, each one a separate unit.
SC: The question of craft, voice, style, the recognizability of it?
Craft is held within voice—taken separately craft is nothing, voice is what really matters.
JG: The way a poet writes, that is his craft. And that is his voice. Craft is held within voice—taken separately craft is nothing, voice is what really matters. Style comes from voice. If the poet’s experience changes, his voice changes as well. If I suppress tears, the voice that emerges from my throat will not be the same as the voice that emerges when I speak lovingly to a child. The poet’s voice depends on [the poet’s] experience. The poet who has personality—his voice will always be recognizable. In his personal life, the poet is often a very ordinary man. Being this ordinary man is a kind of disguise. He notices everything, he understands everything. When he writes his poems, that’s when his true essence is expressed.
SC: When does writing begin?
JG: For me, it begins when I feel goaded from inside, a few lines shape themselves in the mind—that’s when my writing begins.
I have never known what will happen while writing poetry.
SC: As a young poet, how did you orient yourself vis-à-vis tradition? What was it you gleaned from, and what was it you rebelled against, and how?
JG: I never wrote my poems in opposition to any poet or any group of poets. I don’t have any manifesto against any manifesto. I have often thought ‘that’s something I will not do’ but I never knew what I would do because I have never known what will happen while writing poetry. The force that impels me— surrounds me—I have no alternative but to go where it takes me! What emerges is a form, a shape, and that is my poem.
EXTRACTS FROM JOY GOSWAMI’S ESSAYS, 1994-2008
This section puts together, for the interested reader, Sampurna Chattarji’s translations of Joy Goswami’s prose on various aspects of Bangla poetry. By writing about the poetry of others, the poet illuminates his own.
I’ve looked at a piece of writing, had certain thoughts about it, and suddenly it looks the other way.
CONCERNING A SINGLE POEM
I want to share a few things with you, Aniruddha, about a poem I read 27 years ago, a poem I haven’t understood completely even now. You must be thinking, how is it possible that someone can’t understand a poem he’s been reading for 27 years! Or maybe you’re thinking, why bother talking about a poem that cannot be understood! Much better if we talked about one that can be understood.…
Whenever I’ve sat down with Jibanananda, each and every time it occurred to me—a known work seems new!
I’ve looked at a piece of writing, had certain thoughts about it, and suddenly it looks the other way. When I recollect its gaze and try to go further, it seems as if I’m going outside the writing. Imagine you’re sitting in a room, you’re talking to someone, and as he talks, the speaker’s voice is changing, becoming low, intimate, like a soliloquy—and then you see his eyes are gazing out of the window.
You look in the same direction. Outside there’s a hint of trees and leaves, the sound of rain in the darkness, or moonlight after the rain has stopped, then you’re leaping onto the wall surrounding another house, again that hint of trees and leaves—it’s dark outside, but there’s a dim light from an unknown source—all of it seems terribly unfamiliar to you!
This often happens with poetry. It’s different when a recently read poem seems unfamiliar. In that case there is the barrier or distance caused by the lack of kinship with the poem—you have to win it over bit by bit. But if it happens with a known, remembered poem, in fact a poem learnt by heart, you feel a tremor of fear. Do I have the right to talk about such a poem?
Take the poem, ‘All Those Jackals’. I’ve known this one by heart for ages. And I still haven’t understood its meaning! Only some signals reach me.
And the trouble is, this always happens with Jibanananda’s poems. Take the poem, ‘All Those Jackals’. I’ve known this one by heart for ages. And I still haven’t understood its meaning! Only some signals reach me. Let me try and show you those signals, the way I see them—the way we can see through the window the blurred outlines of a tall, far-off building or telegraph poles obscured by rain.
