But equally, Misra's writing too provides a kind of lens through which one can view and understand that turbulent period, and the events that took place, which was formative in so many ways for an entire generation.
In the stories in this collection, there are facets of West Bengal during the late-1960s, '70s and '80s; there is satire; the sexual morality of the Bengali middle-class is looked at, as is poverty and political degeneration. There are samples of different kinds of writing, pieces about what are essentially eternal problems, very ordinary and mundane, yet very real. Some of the stories are time specific, they help us to understand a particular time. There are some very short pieces – the term 'flash fiction' is now in currency – like 'From the Morgue on Bhawani Dutta Lane' and 'The Road to the Mill Jetty'. And there are longer ones, such as 'Radioactive Waste' (which Misra calls a 'novelette') and 'Calcutta Dateline'. Stories like 'Come, See India' and 'In a Deserted Spot Measuring a Foot and a Half' are prose poems. 'Heramba Naskar…' is like newspaper reportage. And there is sex, which this collection deals with fearlessly – and heretically – holding up a mirror to Bengali middle-class society. Sonagachi, Calcutta's famed red-light district (adjacent to which Misra worked for many years as a schoolteacher), is the setting for 'A Perfect Picture of this Social System – Who's Responsible?'.
Misra had told me that he has a kind of Gandhi fixation. The title and a few stories in The Golden Gandhi Statue from Americarefer to Gandhi, and he makes an appearance in this collection as well, in 'Mohandas and Cut-Ball'. The reader may wonder whether Gandhi and Naxalism form two poles in Misra's writing!
Through it all, Misra chronicles the unceasing, relentless descent through the two decades, from the turbulent, violent early-'70s, through years of collapse and stagnation, to the all-round, moral and political bankruptcy and corruption in Calcutta and West Bengal of the late 1980s, under CPI(M) rule. It is like showing the other face of Bengali 'enlightenment'. Misra, an iconic and unequalled 'underground' figure in the Bengali literary firmament, searches unremittingly for a form and a means to express and convey the reality of the ruinous putrefaction and mass debasement he lives within. Subimal Misra has constantly evolved as a writer. Moving on, and leaving behind what he did earlier, has been a conscious aspect of his writing practice. Through these stories, one can also observe the evolution of Misra's writing over the years, in terms of both form and content.
Misra had spoken to me about being influenced by the Bengali writer, Kamalkumar Majumdar. He said Majumdar knew French better than English, and actually preferred French. He liked Marcel Proust's long sentences a lot. His sentences are as if originally written in French, and hence they become long in Bengali. 'Come, See India', one of Misra's favourite stories, bears the Majumdar stamp. The language is sadhu bhasha, i.e., close to Sanskrit, with tat-samyoor Sanskrit-like words. Eisenstein's montage also appears here. The story also exhibits the 'cut-up' method, inspired by Burroughs and then given effect to by Misra in his own way. Misra said it is like cutting up a scene into tiny bits.
This was very interesting for me as a translator. It was as if I had to move back, and view the text from a distance, both visually and conceptually, to try and discern characteristic features, and then re-render this into English, thus restructuring the original and creating something new, with new punctuation. It was akin to a process of sculpting, to produce text art anew. I may have departed from the original in the course of processing the text in order to aid reading in English.
It is pertinent here to also mention something about the story, 'How a Horse Becomes a Donkey…'. In Sanskrit, one can create a compound word by stringing together one word after another. Thus, for example, in Sankaracharya's Soundaryalahari, we have the word sukham-akhilam-aatma-arpana-drisha (without hyphens), which means something like 'with the sight of voluntarily offering up all pleasures'. In 'How a Horse…', Misra too creates compounds, like what I translated as 'pervasive–boy–metaphor–rage–adorned' (without hypens) and 'massive shoulders–speedy–young son-in-law–lolling in adulation' (hyphenated). He told me that he had come across the former term in the Sanskrit text, Harshacharitra, about king Harshavardhana (seventh century AD).
'Calcutta Dateline' is among Misra's ten favourite stories. Here is an extract from the story:
A dark-skinned adivasi, his wavy hair flowing down to his shoulders, plays a dhamsa like a crazed man – who knows how long he has been playing? The dhamsa was about six or seven feet long, as tall as a person and a half, made of ancient buffalo hide. It had been carried on people's weary shoulders. Dark-skinned, muscular and bare-bodied, he kept assaulting the dhamsa in drunken intoxication with two saal sticks, and with the assault awakens Sing Bonga, the clan god …
Kudchi flowers, kudchi flowers
Bloom in bunches everywhere
A tiger ate the landlord in the forest
Translating this, I recalled a painting of an adivasi woman by Jamini Roy, which, when I gazed at it at an exhibition, had seemed to me to become like a hologram of the woman's movements and chatter. Similarly, Misra's use of this subversive adivasi song brought alive to me, anew, that it is adivasi society that teaches us and renews our civilizational and ecological values, as well as protest and resistance. The image, sound, beat, and cadence sprang forth from the page. Like the protagonist, Somprakash, who searches for 'pure experience', I too, in the course of translation, slipped into the characters, I sang and danced, and I tried to translate in that mood and cadence.
The final stage of translation for this collection was an almost magical experience, each day carrying me to a new high of aesthetic, socio-political and sensory awareness and craftsmanship.
With my son Rituraj training to be a chef, I had occasion to think of the body of work of a writer being akin to the work of a master chef, with the stories, essays, novels and so on forming different parts of a grand feast. In this vein, I had thought of my translation too as akin to a culinary craft, the book being like assorted hors d'oeuvres, or various cuts of meat with choice of garnishing. Craft presumes art. It leads to an artefact. Subimal Misra produces textual artefacts.
Misra holds that his conception of a novel is very different from the European one. He says that it boils down to whether one preserves or destroys the storyline. And so that determines how the writing will be read.
What does one make of a collection like the present one?
In 'Babbi', which appears in this volume, Misra writes:
All these disjointed narratives, coming in succession, produce a reaction in readers' minds. To extend their influence onto feeling and then go beyond that – to poison. That is what shock treatment is all about. Their mental balance wilts. The insensitive calculus of reason is shaken. Everything animate and inanimate, here and now, becomes mired in blood.
Janam Mukherjee, historian of the Bengal famine, sent me this comment about the story 'Radioactive Waste' in a personal communication:
Subimal writes about the persistent uncertainty, misapprehension and trauma of human existence, juxtaposing the absurdities of desire, disappointment and fear that characterize modern life against the mute indifference of dispassionate nature and the moral rectitude of myth. Man flounders, in Misra's prose, seeking to 'pluck flowers of beauty', while wallowing in the muck. In this sense, it might be said, Subimal Misra is the Beckett of Bengal, with a keen and withering eye as devastatingly bleak as Beckett's, and a humour as dark and sublime. In 'Radioactive Waste', goatish Ajoy's lust for fat and matronly Sushma is continually interrupted by the bomb blasts that characterized 1970s Calcutta, as well as by the claustrophobia of middle-class life, and the bloodstains of the self-inflicted wounds of existential doubt. Such stains, Misra warns us, 'are not easy to remove, they accrue, like a debt, over a long time'. Tied to this wheel of unrelenting, and unrealized desire and violence – both within and without – Ajoy remains human – all-too-human – and 'not for once did the idea of snapping the rope and escaping enter his mind'. Like the res
t of us, imprisoned by fear, he watches idly while the undoing of the natural world continues apace, and the waste that we have created out of the natural order of things – in this case radioactive transuranium – threatens to drown us all, whole and alive.
Reading Subimal Misra is a process, in which one has to first learn to read his writing. A grounding or preparation is needed, so that one can start discerning and appreciating the quality of the work, and especially his later writing.
Misra has a mischievous and pungently vicious eye. Here are some examples: '…his freshly fornicated wife' ('Wild Animals Prohibited'); 'The death-seed assumed labour pains…' ('In a Deserted Spot…'); 'When the shameless god comes around dawn, hobbling on his crutch…' ('Calcutta Dateline'); '…the colourful slough of plywood, fabricated over thirty years, which people at every turn call democracy' ('The Cow…').
As a translator, it became only too clear to me that he pays minute attention to everything around him, all the things which people habitually disregard and take for granted. And he describes this environment, an effort akin to meticulous crochet work, depicting a vast scenery rendered with merely a needle and thread. To find words for this as a translator is not at all easy. One can write, express and describe with ease all kinds of things. And yet be stuck at conveying the simplest things. Misra is a wordsmith of humble things.
In keeping with the objective of his writing practice, Subimal adds one or more blank pages at the end of his books, sometimes – as in the anti-novel, When Colour is a Warning Sign – with the following note to the reader:
As you read the book, write at once whatever comes to mind, whenever, here, on this blank page. Thereafter, copy that and send it to the publisher's address. In return, you can buy any of the writer's books at a 25% discount. Write whatever comes to mind, without inhibition. Bear in mind that the writer accords far greater importance to your opinion than to reviews in commercial papers, he accords your opinion respect and thinks about it. We would be especially grateful if you kindly include in your letter your name, address, age, occupation, which books and whose books you love to read, and a brief description of your point of view regarding the cultural world. If we receive your letter, we can send you a card that will serve as an acknowledgement.
Similarly, at the end of Thirty-six Years' Scuffles:
Write down your reaction to the reading in the blank pages, whatever came to mind while reading. The book will be complete when the writer's text and the reader's opinion come together. Subimal's books have never been completed, and won't, without the active participation of the reader, without the reader's reaction.
Misra expects the reader to engage actively with the text, the reading being a form of activism, matching the activist writing he himself engages in.
Some of Subimal Misra's images come up again and again. A magician performing tricks in the Maidan. A beggar woman on the street. The pages of an old calendar fluttering in the breeze. Lumpen youth sitting on newspapers under a street lamp, playing cards. Garbage, excreta and corpses on the riverbank. A dog standing over a dead body, tearing out and eating the flesh. The henpecked Bengali husband. Ruffian youth affecting sartorial and coiffured style. The stench of death pervading the city. A woman standing in knee-deep water, collecting wild spinach.
Through the very words and terms of speech communicated by him, a reader of Misra's Bengali original discerns how much Bengal is essentially a rural land, of rural and predominantly poor folk. Misra's writing is full of the dialect of South 24 Parganas district. The sensitivity and empathy with which he represents humble, labouring folk is untranslatable. And simultaneously, by also looking at the juxtapositions regarding the urbane, cultured class, we can see how power plays out in the society in all its ugliness.
The treatment of women in Misra's stories could be a possible subject for study by an activist scholar. Only in the Bengali original would the full context and nuance of each word be accessible. Take, for example, the stories, 'The Golden Gandhi Statue from America', 'Money Tree', 'The Naked Knife' and 'Fairy Girl', from The Golden Gandhi Statue from America. Or 'Here's How We Wring a Quarter of Lime', '36 Feet Towards Revolution', 'Heramba Naskar…', 'Come, See India', 'Spot Eczematous', 'Calcutta Dateline' and '…Aparna', in the present collection. The women can be sexually promiscuous and uninhibited. They are feisty, practical, cynical. They are clearly superior to the men, whom they make fun of and use. There is the vile, uncouth, iconoclastic and yet sentimental madam in '…Who's Responsible?'. The typical aspirations of the middle-class girl-woman is portrayed in 'Radioactive Waste'. Reduced to prostitution by mill closure, in 'The Road to the Mill Jetty'. Vulnerable, raped and murdered in 'In a Deserted Spot…' and 'Secret Vrindavan'. I hope the translation prods someone to think and work on this subject.
A translator's take on the writing is perhaps quite different from anyone else's. Reading the original so many times, and so minutely, leads to another kind of sensibility. As mentioned, several stories could not be translated, and this translator can only vaguely glimpse the character and range of Misra's work, emerging from rooted literary genius.
I hope the publication of translations of Misra's short fiction is a means to greater and growing awareness and readership of his work, in Bengal, across India, and around the world, wherever literature is cherished and flourishes, despite all odds. Misra is not a writer that any and every reader will like to or even want to read. That is natural and Misra knows that very well. But there will always be some readers who would. And taken together, from across the world, that would not be such an insignificant number. That readership keeps literature alive, irrespective of everything else. I know Misra would be happy that he reaches this readership, and so I hope this book is a means for that to start happening.
I also hope there is translation of more of Misra's considerable body of writing, and translation into several languages. I would personally like to see translations into Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Farsi, Japanese, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese. I am happy that The Golden Gandhi Statue from Americais now being translated into Malayalam, by Cecily Joyce, and into Farsi, by Mustafa Raziee. But the mediation of the English version can only lead to loss in translation, which a direct translation from Bengali to other Indian languages, can substantially remedy. Hence I will be working with Cecily and also hopefully with Mustafa, to attempt to bridge the translation gap.
I discovered Art Spiegelman's Mausin 1995 and over the last ten years or so I have been a collector and devourer of graphic literature. Almost from the time I began translating Misra, I have wanted to see graphic versions of his stories – although, perhaps because of his unfamiliarity with the developments in this medium over the last few decades, Misra himself remains skeptical about whether his writing can be represented graphically. I had thought about a graphic collection of some Misra stories set in Calcutta. In 2009, I discovered the work of the manga artist, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, and was overwhelmed. I saw Tatsumi as the Japanese Misra in graphic form, or Misra as the Bengali Tatsumi in textual form. I remain hopeful that Misra's stories will find graphic representation and would be happy to join hands with artists towards that end.
This translation project has been a significant experience for me, a process of learning and personal growth. That is very satisfying. As someone who has lived and grown with books from childhood, I was very happy to formally enter the world of literature as a translator of a writer like Subimal Misra. On a recent visit to Brazil, I was fortunate to learn the name of the great writer of that nation, Graciliano Ramos, thanks to my friend João Carrascoza, the writer, who gifted me a copy of Barren Lives. Reading this, I could also see in perspective Misra's art, work and place in the world of literature. As this book goes to press, I discovered the monumental book, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq, by Hassan Blasim, translated from Arabic by Jonathan Wright. The title of the book and the cover design immediately brought Subimal Misra to mind. Once again, reading this helped me
see Misra in perspective in world literature.
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