& çâÌæÚUæð´ ·¤è ¥ôÚU Îð¹Ùæ ÁæÚUè ÚU¹ð´ ¥ÍæüÌ ¥ÂÙð ÜÿØ ÂÚU ŠØæÙ ÚU¹ð´Ð ãæÚU Ù ×æÙð´, €UØô´ç·¤ ·¤æ× ·¤ÚUÙð âð ¥æÂ·¤ô ©gðàØ ·¤è Âýæç# ãôÌè ãñ ¥õÚU ÁèßÙ ·¤æ ¹æÜèÂÙ ÎêÚU ãôÌæ ãñÐ ÖÜð ãè ÁèßÙ ×ð´ ç·¤ÌÙè Öè ·¤çÆÙæ§ü €UØô´ Ù ¥æ°, çÁ™ææâæ ¥õÚU ©ˆâæã ÕÙæ° ÚU¹ð´Ð ŠØæÙ ÚU¹ð´, ÜÿØ ã×ðàææ ¥æÂ·Ô¤ Âæâ ãôÌð ãñ´ çÁ‹ãð´ ÂæÙð ·Ô¤ çÜ° ÂýØæâ ¥æÂ ·¤Öè Öè àæéM¤ ·¤ÚU â·¤Ìð ãñ´Ð

Eastern Voices in a Norton Anthology of poetry

Khademul Islam
The new Norton anthology of poems, titled Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond published in April of this year casts a wide net. It consists of over 400 poets from 61 countries and/or territories ranging from Afghanistan to Oman, from Sudan to Korea, as well as in the diaspora in Australia, Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
It has been edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, all of them fairly well-known poets themselves. Tina Chang and Ravi Shankar, as is common among American poets, are also academics, while Nathalie Handal is active in the theatre. In the Preface the editors say that this anthology was born out of despair. In the wake of 9/11, Tina Chang and Ravi Shankar were confronted anew with their hyphenated identities in America, "How could we respond to the destruction and unjust loss of human lives while protesting the one-sided and flattened view of the East being showcased in the
media? What was the vantage point we could arrive at in order to respond on a human level, to generate articulate dialogue, conversations that did not fall into the rhetorical fallacies of us vs. them?" An answer was to join forces with Nathalie Handal, who had just then published "the groundbreaking anthology The Poetry of Arab Women and was herself of Arab descent” and bring out an anthology of poetry that would reflect "an alternate vision of the new century" consisting of “voices converg(ing) in the dream of shared utterance."
There is a practical side to this collection, too, as explained by Carolyn Forche, another well-known American poet, in her elegantly written Preface. Even through the 1980s, she says, “there were very few anthologies of international poetry available in the > 9 United States", and that this new Norton anthology therefore is one that very much will fill the gap. She praises it as “imaginatively constructed and...sweeping...wherein we read through poetry unknown to us one poem at a time, through nine realms of human experience: childhood, selfhood, experimentation, oppression, mystery, war, homeland and exile, spiritual life, love and sexuality.” What she is referring to is the anthology's structure, with the poems organized not in the conventional anthology manner of alphabetical listing, or by country and region, but grouped into nine sections according to certain common themes or threads running through them, allowing them "to speak to each other." The title of each of these sections (Slips and Atmospherics, or Buffaloes Under Dark Water, etc.) is a line from a poem within that section. Each of these nine sections also is headed with a personal essay by one of the three editors. The latter is a device that may work for some, while others may find it a little too intrusive, the editorial presence a little too heavy.
It is natural that most of the poems are translations, though it does contain, especially in the case of the Indian poets and those living in the diaspora, original English language poems. Bangladesh is represented by ten poets through translations, among them Kazi Nazrul Islam, Rafiq Azad. Syed Shamsul Haq, Al Mahmud, Shamsur Rahman, Taslima Nasrine and Mohammed Rafiq It is doubtful whether the editors were aware of, or made aware of, the fact that poems arc written in the original English by Bangladeshis, which Ls a major oversight The translations, Hepting the ones of Mohammed Rafique (reproduced here),
Taslima Nasrine, and Syed Shamsul Haq, are not particularly satisfying. In Al Mahmud's poem 'Deathsleep', the lines -
My wife though, didn't want
To reach any decisions about me
The reliance that grows out of living together fifty years
She does not have it.
- which, even allowing for the fact that, in Carolyn Forche's words, when considering "poetry in translation, we consider the transmission of sensibility and the expressivity of content rather than the music, cadence, sound and wordplay"-- read like just plain bad prose. If I was Al Mahmud, 1 would wince and never open this anthology again.
Another example is Rafiq Azad's famous poem 'Bhaat day, Haramjada'. Here the title is 'Give me Bhaat, Bastard', which in the Norton anthology looks ludicrous. One knows that the term 'bhaat' has no equivalent in English, and that the translated 'cooked rice’ is too cumbersome for poetry, and that just plain 'rice' does not quite convey the full Bengali meaning. Still, a compromise should have been made. After all, the word bhaat' here is a synecdoche, a figure of speech in which the part stands for the whole, as in the prayer "Give us this day our daily bread”, where 'bread' stands not just for bread alone but for the meals taken each day. So too bhaat' here stands not for literally cooked rice, but also for food. And so here 'rice' or 'food' or some imaginative variation thereof could have been done instead of this...this...well, words fail me! To be shortly followed by these two dead lines in the body of the poem:
Given twice a day two fist-full meals, demand comes for nothing else
If I was Rafiq Azad, I too would join Al Mahmud in wincing and never open the damn thing again. But this was Norton's choice, and they have to live with it.
The range of poems and poets here is admittedly enormous, and it'll take weeks, months, to really go through the poems and poets, and come to know them. Or arrive at any definitive conclusion about the anthology as a whole. What one can say at this point is that nearly all of them are major poets within their cultures and lands, and it really is a privilege that Norton is extending to us by providing such easy access to such a multiplicity of voices and bards. The book is beautifully produced, with a lovely, clear font and spacious layout accompanied by a thorough indexing of poets, languages, and countries. Wisely enough, it was published as a paperback, which lowers the burden of cost and makes for ease of carry.
But (and there's always a but!) there's one thing that needs be said, and here I have to be careful to try and get it right. It is the persistent feeling that some of the products of the diaspora poets, especially those living in the United States, come across as artificial and contrived. It is a condition akin to what Timothy Brennan labeled as the "new cosmopolitan writing” in the context of his critique of the postcolonial critical industry (At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now), where he points out that postcolonial literary studies, criticism and readings have begun to spawn a new literary genre (upsetting the natural process of literature first and criticism later) dictated by the conventions generated by that particular criticism and reading. As he put it “several younger writers have entered a genre of third world metropolitan fiction whose conventions have given their novels the unfortunate feel of ready-mades." Diaspora poetry, too, has by now evolved certain conventions whose lineaments can be clearly discerned, and there arc poets who readily succumb to it, thereby stripping their poems of shock, originality and well.. .genuine poetry. The editors would have done well to be more aware of this development.
But all said and done, one has to wish die editors and Norton well, that may their hopes of putting forward an alternate vision of the new century', at least for the anthology's readers (American or otherwise) succeed beyond their fondest hopes.
No One Belonging to Me
Mohammed Rafiq
(Translated by Carolyn B. Brown)
with the meeting of the Bhaleshwar and the Pashur in his heart the man floats till he reaches dry land *
Mehendigang market, Char Baisha's shrine
half-broken voices, rain-soaked footsteps, whispers among potatoes and onions in shuttered shops and warehouses hurricane lanterns' smoky glow like muddy water at high tide
faces look familiar, bangles and laughter jangle
thatched roofs are slick and mossy in the moonlight
a flirtatious sari slips off a head, everything is dripping, dropping
in Banishanta village nothing moves under the man's gaze market stalls, narrow path obliterated by water and mud paddy on both sides, shaora bushes—father and grand-
father, come back, son —cold touch of people you don't belong to shadows, odor of shrouds and incense rises from the graves a sickle of light crosses the fields on the moon's twelfth night
suddenly, a circus tent touches the body and takes flight
arthritic sleep, miserable horse's hoofbeats, dead tiger's rib cage tendons—but the man's illusion hasn't shattered
with only the meeting of the Bhaleshwar and Pashur in his heart he floats till he digs into the bank one night
knees smudged with dirt, palms smelling of scum and fish scales.
Envy (Yerance te)
Medakse
(Translated from the Armenian by Diana Der-Hovanessian)
Lights
Taurq Rafat (Pakistan)
The car whispers down the hill road, its lights gouge out a shifting hollow of brightness
except at the turns where they wander off into unsure space
But wait!
What lights are those pricking the distant mountaintops each one alone?
Starlight and a thin mist deepen the mystery.
One is tempted to call them elfin
for what kind of men
would struggle up those backbreaking slopes all their maizebread goatmilk days to achieve such loneliness?
1 envy the cling of the shirt you wear that, even in daylight, can be indiscreet and trace your torso's outline and dare to wrinkle coquettishly with pagan heat. Imagine envying an innate thing, and losing my senses like a flaming wing of a meteor? Does a shirt have feelings or soul that I die to hold what it can hold?
What does it care that a woman desires to wash it because it has felt the fires of your body and wants to inhale the warmth of the collar, even the stale earthly memory of wear and weave of a sleeve?
What does it care that I envy the clasp of its pearly buttons that measure the time of our short lives with their upward climb, dressing and undressing you, unasked, leaning against your beating heart, while I who envied no other's lot stand silent, apart and jealous of cloth.
When People Rise from Cheese
Statement#!
Duo Duo
(Translated from the Chinese by John Rowland and The Beliot/Fudan Translation Workshop)
Songs, but the bloody revolution goes unnoticed August is a ruthless bow
The vicious son walks out of the farmhouse Bringing with him tobacco and a dry throat The beasts must bear cruel blinders Corpses encrusted in hair hang From the swollen drums of their buttocks Till the sacrifices behind the fence Become blurry From far away there comes marching a troop Of smoking people
One Evening in a Cafe
Amjad Nasser
(Translated from the Arabic by S.VAtallah)
When thoughts don't take you far and you sit silent tremulous
staring at the veins in your hands;
when the chariot of your imagination
won't carry you to passageways lit with glimmers of insight and you sit silent
tremulous
gazing at the smoke encircling your wrist:
when you do not answer the woman who greets you
as she lets her shawl fall
into the vacuum of the evening
and you sit silent
tremulous
staring at the fateful events written in your coffee grounds;
when the new dmigr^s stroll by
arm-in-arm with their adorned ladies
chattering on about how time flies
and you sit silent
tremulous
gazing at the mysterious wood of the table;
when you don't keep anyone's company
and can remember nothing of the war but a horseshoe
or bullet holes in a curtain;
when, one evening in a cafe
faces pass before you like a copper fog
and you hear cymbals clashing in a distant desert
or walls crashing into hypothetical canals;
when, one evening in a cafe
that blind singer's album
starts to play,
and everyone suddenly sighs;
then you rise and walk To where the hatchet leans against the tree.