by Joy Goswami
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Arundhathi Subramaniam, Ranjit Hoskote, Jayanta Mahapatra, Sharmistha Mohanty, Eunice de Souza and Melanie Silgardo for featuring early versions of some of these poems in—respectively—Poetry International Web, PENumbra, Chandrabhaga, Almost Island and These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry.
Arundhathi and Ranjit, thank you for your warmth, wisdom and support, always. (Additional thanks, dear A, for giving my translations the little push they needed to venture into the world!) Sharmistha, thank you for many invaluable dialogues, both formal and informal.
Grateful thanks to Allan Sealy, Chris Merrill and Bill Herbert, three people whose work I respect and whose friendship I cherish. Allan, Chris, Bill—thank you for the gift of your time and your words.
To my publishers and editors, Karthika V.K. and Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri—thanks for having taken this book on with your trademark enthusiasm and love. I consider myself blessed to have worked with you once again. Thanks also to Bidisha Srivastava and everyone else at HarperCollins.
To Prasanna Sankhé, my co-conspirator of many years— thanks for the beautiful cover!
Special thanks to Dr Sanhita Mukherjee, for being the essential link in the last stages of putting this book together. Your help with printouts and emails made things so much easier.
To Bukun, a big hug! To Kaberi-di, a big ‘thank you!’ for strength and sunshine, for affection and assistance when I needed it most, for making me feel like family. Joy-da, thank you for your unwavering faith.
To my second Dada and erstwhile local guardian, Thomas Abraham, thanks for sterling advice when this book was still in a nascent stage. To my first and foremost Dada, Subarno Chattarji, thanks for your fine mind, your faith in your little sister, and your objective critiques and responses at key moments.
To Rina and Chandak Chattarji, my dear Ma and Baba— for being such a vital presence at every stage of this journey, for music and conversation, feedback, comments and suggestions, for the making of tea and the resting of doubts, for patience and participation—no thanks are enough.
And finally, to Kiran David, my friend, my husband— thank you for seeing me through every storm.
Sampurna Chattarji
About the Book
Harper Perennial, a dedicated imprint for translations, has just completed ten years of publishing in India.
Perennial books showcase the finest and most compelling narratives from the Indian languages, books that are timeless and stories that capture the essence of their times and the region from which they emanate. In its entirety, the Perennial library, which features over a hundred titles, presents a kaleidoscope of India as seen through the eyes of the greatest modern writers in the local languages, comprising award-winning and well-loved novels, short fiction, poetry, plays, memoirs, biographies and travelogues.
To celebrate Perennial’s tenth anniversary, the editors at HarperCollins have handpicked ten of their favourite books, which are being published as special keepsake editions under the ‘Perennial 10’ series. We hope you will enjoy these outstanding works of literature all over again in their new look.
This collection brings together, for the first time, poetry from three strikingly different phases of Joy Goswami’s formidable literary career – Ashes, Burnt by the Sun (Surjo-Pora Chhai, 1999), Shiva, My High (Moutat Moheshwar, 2005) and No More Than a Spurt of Time (Du Dondo Phowara Matro, 2011).
Selected and translated by Sampurna Chattarji, this book, which includes several in-depth conversations with Joy Goswami, introduces the English reader to the world of a poet whose language is powerful, inventive and often enigmatic. While some poems invoke a landscape that is ‘mysterious, anguished and visionary’, in others, Goswami achieves mischief and melancholy with the deftest of strokes.
About the Author
JOY GOSWAMI was born in Kolkata and grew up in the small town of Ranaghat. His first poetry collection, published when he was twenty-two, brought him immediate critical acclaim. One of the most powerful poets in the post-Jibanananda Das era of Bengali poetry, Goswami has published over fifty titles, including a novel in verse, and several collections of critical essays. Among his many awards are the Ananda Puroshkar (which he received twice), the Bangla Academy Puroshkar, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad in 2011, and the first Tata Literature Live! Poet Laureate Award in 2014. Goswami has been awarded honorary doctorates by the universities of Calcutta, North Bengal and Kalyani. In 2001, he was an invitee to the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and, in 2010, to the Almost Island Dialogues held in Beijing and Shanghai.
SAMPURNA CHATTARJI was born in Dessie, Ethiopia, and grew up in Darjeeling. Her fourteen books include five poetry titles; the novels Rupture and Land of the Well; and a short-story collection about Mumbai, Dirty Love. Her translation of Joy Goswami’s Selected Poems was shortlisted for the Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry. She edited Sweeping the Front Yard, an anthology of women’s writing; and is the co-editor of What is Time, a forthcoming anthology of contemporary Indian writing. As a participant in translation workshops, she has worked with poets from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Switzerland, Portugal, Holland, Malta, Slovenia, Galicia and Estonia. She wrote her fifth poetry book, Space Gulliver: Chronicles of an Alien, during her CWIT residency at the University of Kent, Canterbury. She is currently poetry editor of The Indian Quarterly.
Praise for Selected Poems
Open this book anywhere, and you will find lines that are ready to leap at you, dragging you into a verbal turbulence that shows no sign of ending. But slowly, as you go from poem to poem, you see, through the clouds, specific things: buildings with names like Kanchenjunga, a harmonium, a mobile phone on silent, a crow, the Churni river, the Bengal Lamps factory, a blood pressure reading, a floating room, supernovas, a saddle quern, a Santro car, a kerosene stove, and moments of love making. You will also hear street cries. This is Joy Goswami’s world; recognizably, unforgettably, it is also ours.—Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Blood and dark time pace the room of these poems, with a dead peacock and a prickly pear on the cornice, and in the window an exorbitant moon. The ghost of a dead mother looks in, and for company there’s a luscious dryad off a dimly lit cave wall. In this grim but astonishingly vital setting, the poet presses hard “sky-truths” on a trusting heart and a mischievous tongue that can make Tagore look merely schoolmasterly.—Irwin Allan Sealy
Joy Goswami is a towering figure in contemporary letters, a prolific Bengali poet who writes in an impressive range of forms, addressing every conceivable matter of the human heart. What good luck to have this generous selection of his work, which will win readers the world over. “Language for the sake of any language/Is my thief, and I her thievery,” he declares, and in Sampurna Chattarji’s powerful versions of his poems we can appreciate the scale of his raids on the inarticulate. He changes every language with his every line. Listen well: he is speaking to all of us.—Christopher Merrill
I’ve been waiting for this book for more than a decade, ever since first encountering hints, descriptions and single poems by this foremost of Bengali poets. Joy Goswami is one of those writers you dream of encountering in translation, concealed to your eyes within another language, but the common property of every delighted reader of that language; capable of transforming both your imagination, and the way you imagine poetry. In these compulsively rhythmic and readable translations by Sampurna Chattarji, all the melodious, dextrous invention of his language is conveyed, as well as his unique eye, which flashes from the visionary to the slightest, subtlest detail, within a single phrase.—W.N. Herbert
Harper Perennial presents special editions of 10 of its finest books in translation
Bhima: Lone Warrior
M.T. Vasudevan Nair
Translated from the Malayalam by Gita Krishnankutty
Chemmeen
Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai
Translated from the Malayalam by Anita Nair
Ghachar Ghochar
Vivek Shanbhag
Translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur
Hindutva or Hind Swaraj
U.R. Ananthamurthy
Translated from the Kannada by Keerti Ramachandra & Vivek Shanbhag
The Liberation of Sita
Volga
Translated from the Telugu by T. Vijay Kumar & C. Vijayasree
A Life Misspent
Suryakant Tripathi Nirala
Translated from the Hindi by Satti Khanna
The Sea Lies Ahead
Intizar Husain
Translated from the Urdu by Rakhshanda Jalil
Selected Poems
Joy Goswami
Translated from the Bengali by Sampurna Chattarji
Wild Animals Prohibited: Stories/Anti-stories
Subimal Misra
Translated from the Bengali by V. Ramaswamy
Wild Words: Four Tamil Poets
Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathi and Sukirtharani
Translated from the Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström
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First published in India in 2014 by Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
This edition published in India in 2018 by Harper Perennial
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Bengali poems copyright © Joy Goswami 1999, 2005, 2011, 2018
Introduction and English translation copyright © Sampurna Chattarji 2014, 2018
P-ISBN: 978-93-5277-497-5
Epub Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 978-93-5277-498-2
This is a work of fiction and all characters and incidents described in this book are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Joy Goswami asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved under The Copyright Act, 1957. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers India.
Cover calligraphy: Nikheel Aphale
Cover design: Studio Em & En
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