Book
Review:
Not in My Name: Selected Poems (1978-2017)
by
Subodh Sarkar, translated, edited and compiled by Jaydeep Sarangi.
Authorspress: New Delhi, 2018, 219 pages, ISBN: 978-93-86722-25-6
Reviewed by Bidisha Pal
Junior
Research Fellow, Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT(ISM) Dhanbad,
Email: bdshpaul6@gmail.com, ORCID: 0000-0001-9816-3841
An anthology of poems is like a bountiful
dish; a feast to the eyes, to the ears and to the heart. According to Dylan
Thomas, “Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent,
makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing,
makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and
suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.” (as cited in Price,
2013, p.94) The present book that is taken for review is the recently published
Not in My Name: Selected Poems (1978-2017) by the Sahitya Academy Award Winner
(2013) poet and president of "Kobita Academy, West Bengal" Subodh
Sarkar and translated, edited and compiled by the ardent poet and translator
Jaydeep Sarangi that drive us to those various emotions with its universal
appeal, a broad range of topical allusions, ease of tonality and thematic
variations. The book is a tribute to Mallika Sengupta, the poet's wife, and
another promising poet after whose death an insurmountable void is left to
Subodh. The poems are, however, a perfect intertwining of both subjective
emotions and objective contemplation. In Blanka-Knotkova Capkova’s words:
Jaydeep Sarangi, himself a poet, presents a
unique translation of selected poems by Subodh Sarkar. Sarkar’s poetic discourse
typically searches for non-traditional expressions- it is far from being sweet
or populistic, often figured in irony (self-irony), paradoxes and sometimes raw
metaphors which thematically connote socially critical issues. The poems
provoke readers to relativise conventional categories and urge them to
deconstruct, together with the author, traditional concepts of hierarchies,
dichotomies and identities.
What could be a better start of an
anthology of poems except with a poem of the poet itself? And that is what
exactly the foreword of the book does. It initiates the tone of the book with a
poem of Sarkar translated by Jaydeep Sarangi. The Foreword section by Sanjukta
Dasgupta perfectly illustrates and prepares the foregrounding of a poetical
journey. The carefully chosen words for the poet and his poetic endeavor make
his comprehensibility even to any cursory pan-Indian reader. It blatantly
expresses Sarkar's story-telling quality of poems that makes his ‘prose-poetry'
unique and rare in academia. Sarkar himself says in an interview earlier
"that many of his poems were anecdotal, but just because they tell a story
is no reason why one should regard them as falling short of poetic."
(Foreward, Dasgupta, 2018, p.7)
Wordsworth (1800) has discussed the
essence and language of poetry in his Preface
to Lyrical Ballads; to him a poet should be able to communicate the
feelings and emotions to re-create the original experience and the language of
poetry should be free from the burden of poetic vocabulary and be of the
language of a flesh-and-blooded common man as he shows in one of his poem
called "Michael" (1800). Sarkar's poems also follow the language of
the very common man; in each of his poem, he gives vent for the voice of the
common men. There are in total 121 poems in the book that are carefully
organized maintaining the veracity of theme and powerful expression. K.
Satchidanandan aptly says, “Here is a set of poems that look at the world with
a child's instinct for mischief, an adult's sense of humor and a philosopher's
sense of paradox. Language here looks at reality with a squint, as it were, and
reality confronts language with a sneer to make sure we live in a post-Modern
world where irony becomes a world-view” (Sarkar, 2018, p.220).
Though denying to
be tagged as "a socially committed poet" (S. Sarkar, personal
communication, July 27, 2017), Sarkar strikes the chord of the crux of the very
surrounding socio-political issues. Koushiki Dasgupta points out in her essay,
"In Subodh Sarkar's poetry the spirit of anger and protest offers a
counter perspective of poetic imageries divorced from the aesthetics of
sophistication. It is here his poetry caters the need of historicity in
post-colonial time when the essentialities of ‘high literature' were in
question" (2018, p. 208). The poems translated by Jaydeep Sarangi in the
first sections deal with a variety of themes like lovelessness, inhumanity,
war, feminism, poverty, man-woman relationship in the modern alienated world
that lends his poems an Eliotesque style. Some poems have striking titles like
"Can I take Your Wife as a Loan?", "One Roti Only",
"Biodata of a Dog", "Chopped Ear", "Burnt Rice",
"On a blind Horse's Back", "Wife or Lover", " Petty
Words through a Petty Mouth", "Ahh", "Mosquito", and
"The New Shah Rukh Khan". Notable in this section poems like
"One Roti Only", "Joke", "Chopped Ear",
"Kiss", "Land", "Night", "Story",
"Burnt Rice", "For a New Woman" and "Blind Horse's
Back" have shorter structures (some of these are four liners, three
liners, even two liner poem) and remind us of Japanese ‘haiku' or ‘limericks'
of Edward Lear. Some set up the humorous tone as in "Kiss":
"Buddha in the Bed Room, so is Lenin, so is Marx, my dear/ I cannot kiss
you; please remove at least one from there" (Sarkar, 2018, p.40) or in
"Gandhi": "Gandhi was standing in the quiet dusk light/ on the
Yamuna/ He has grown thinner/ He muttered, ‘You're not able to give me a patch
of land to stand?/He forwarded two steps left/ Three steps right, then knocked
his stick on the ground/ Then he started walking along dark India, away from
Yamuna." (Sarkar, 2018, p.65) Others are more tragic, grave and deeper in
tone and bring out pathos mingled with satire and irony. While
"Sita", "Sari", "Tista", "See I am growing
up Mommy", "Mothers of Manipur" express the tragic helplessness
of women, "The New Shah Rukh Khan", "Burnt Rice",
"Mussolini", "Ant Eggs" show to what extent the cruel
clutches of poverty can have on men.
Poems in the second section are taken
from Route Map 25 and translated by
Fakrul Alam. Poems in this section combine both prosaic tonality and poetic
aestheticism. Poems like "I am Nobody's Darkness", "Intensive
Care Unit", "The Boy and the Girl", "China",
"God", "I am Feroza, an Indian Girl" and "Gujrat"
have long conversational tone of a story written in free verse and run-on lines
with range of ideas but with a central focus on larger socio-political context.
A number of allusions to Bhagirathi, Baharampur, India, Israel, London, Lahore,
Central Avenue, Kolkata, Howrah, New York, Moscow, Confucius, China, Beijing,
Ahmadabad, Narmada, Russia, Bolivar, Kohima, Kovalam, Delhi, Goa, Punjab,
Bible, Nietzsche etc. tend to concretize the essence. Poems in the section are
spatial in nature but Sarkar's poems surpass the spatiotemporal necessity to
get universalized.
The third section starts with a
lengthy poem "Rambabu" in which Sarkar addresses the mythic hero Ram
as a human being and jokingly says, "If you meet Valmiki/ Tell him to
revise Ramayana/ before the next edition goes/to the press" (Sarkar, 2018,
p.128). Likewise, in Birth of Goddess Saraswati", Saraswati is no Goddess
but a girl who dances. Poems in this section are translated by Swapan
Chattopadhyay and again acquire a story-telling method. Short poems like
"Mother", "Mr. Horizon", "Blind" and
"Subhasda" keep intact the grave sense of the longer poems. There is
a brilliant use of anaphora in the poems "Dust" and "Palestine
Israel".
The fourth, fifth and sixth sections
are polyphonic continuums of translators translated by Carolyn Brown, Sanjukta
Dasgupta, Ashes. K Chatterjee, Subho Chatterjee, Kalyan Dasgupta and Sharmila
Roy are again a play on the varieties of topical allusions. Poems like
"Bread" and "Susmita Sen" throw questions on the vast difference
between fiction and reality. The poems in this section create cross-cultural
contexts between local and global. Poems are mostly longer and deal with
contemporary problems of identity and existential crisis. Steeped with irony
and surrealism, "Sigh", "The Kind of Wife We Want",
"Three Poor Boys and a Butterfly", "Mr. Sorrow",
"Kallu", "Marilyn Monroe in Sealdah", "Cricket",
"Come, Let's go to Afghanistan" and "Hey, You, Shut Up,
Saala!" have the recurring motifs of the ugly everyday faces of poverty,
penury and hypocrisy that lie hidden under the pomp and splendor of cultural
metaphors of society.
The
sixth section is a unique one as poems are translated by the poet himself.
There a lot of inter-lingual and intra-lingual as well as inter-culture and
intra-cultural transmissions take place. The poems deeply reflect the poet's
inner urge and psyche. The poet assumes to be a modern Flaneur who stays and
sees over everything but remains detached; however, sometimes his choric
commentaries come out with the occasional tinge of subjectivity. Most of the
poems are entitled in the name of countries like "Nepal",
"Bangladesh", "China", "Burma" and "Good
Morning, India". Notable in the poems Sarkar replaces the first person
singular "I" with the small letter "i" that manifests his
signature style.
The anthology is rounded up with an
essay by Koushiki Dasgupta and an Interview with the poet- sections that tend
to make the poetic journey complete. The book is a brilliant reading and
provides food for thought for a beginner of Sarkar's poetry. It seems to
re-create a revolutionary zeal of the second generation Romantic poets.
Mallika, his wife has her unseen presence in some poems like "India
Pakistan", "Ahh" which reveal deep-seated emotion of the poet's
heart. In poetic translation, Singh shows in his article, "language is
used metaphorically" (2014, p.11). This book seems to be a well-knit
outcome of a vested mutual interface between the author and the translators who
have done a commendable job. Translation makes the "spoken rhythm"
(Frost as cited in Foreword, Dasgupta, 2018, p.10) of Sarkar's poems alive no
in any way marring their aesthetic and free flowing of the verse of the
originals. As Dasgupta says, Sarkar's poems are "pleasantly translator
friendly" (Foreward, 2018, p.10). Some Words like Rajbanshi Ma, Roti, Dhoti, Saala, Raja, Ganesh, Bidi, Swami, Charyapada, Khaini are
left untranslated; some of them are glossed and explicated in footnotes for the
comprehensibility of the foreign readers. In a way, it carries the flavor of
both domestication and foreignization of language and culture. Dasgupta says
that Sarkar's poems bring together "the dreamer and the doer through lines
that provoke the reader to think and read between the lines, either in the
original or in translation" (Forward, 2018, p.11). There are some printing
issues in the spelling of some words like ‘whim', ‘Smokv', ‘pu6liciv', ‘mv'
that do not carry any proper sense and secondly, some poems ("China",
"Palestine Israel", and "India Pakistan") are repeated
twice. Except for these minute mistakes, the book does not suffer from any
typographical error as such. The anthology is one of the rare collections of
modern Bengali poems in translations that are so slender in number and should
be a must-read for everyone who loves poetry and takes pleasure in reading
poetry.
Reference:
Dasgupta, K. (2018). Poetic of resistance:
Locating Subodh Sarkar's poetry of power. In J. Sarangi (Eds.), Not in my name: Selected poems (1978-2017)
(pp. 203-210). New Delhi: Authorspress.
Dasgupta, S. (2018). Foreword. In J.
Sarangi (Eds.), Not in my name: Selected
poems (1978-2017) (pp. 203-210). New Delhi: Authorspress.
Price, S.D. (Eds.). (2013). The little
black book of writers' wisdom. New York, NY: Skyhorse Publishing.
Singh, A. K. (2014). Translation studies
in the 21st century. Translation Today.
8(1), 5-44.
Wordsworth, W. (1800). Preface to lyrical
ballads. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems.
(2nd ed.), (pp. 1-14). London: Printed for T.N. Longman and O. Rees by Briggs
and Co.
Sarangi, J. (Interviewer) & Sarkar, S.
(Interviewee). (2018). Hunger for me was a Holocaust Conversation with Subodh
Sarkar [Interview Transcript]. Not in My
Name: Selected Poems (1978-2017) (pp. 211-218). New Delhi: Authorspress.
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