Amit Shankar Saha
Ananya Chatterjee mentions, in her “Translator’s Note” to Abhijit Palchoudhuri’s book Moonstruck Pilgrim, the beautiful Bengali phrase Kobita Japon. She writes that she had to live with Abhijit Palchoudhuri’s poems inside her before being able to translate them from Bengali to English. She says that this process of selecting and translating poems from three Bengali books of Palchoudhuri has been a journey for her where she discovered echoes of her own soul. This reminds of Sri Aurobindo’s theory of translation where he says that after the “nama” (meaning) and “rupa” (form) stages of translation, a translator has to grasp the “swarupa” (soul) of the poem to render it successfully in translation. And Ananya Chatterjee experienced it.
Moonstruck Pilgrim, published by Blue Rose Publishers, is beautifully designed and is divided into four sections. A few lines of a poem selected from each section will give a flavor of the translated poems. Here is from Section-1 titled The Pilgrim.
And I follow the firefly
in my hunt for the luminance. I race through the night –
like bygone days of innocence. (“My Father’s Paramour”, p. 7)
These poems have a story-like narration quality along with the abstraction of poetry thereby giving them easy access to meaning and depth. Here is a line from Section-2 Moon Drenched.
The mole beside your lips is a moon that sprinkles showers of gentle light.
(“Silent Feet”, p. 24)
The imagery is striking here and so it is in the following lines from Section-3 The Journey:
In the digital age, a postman waits
In the forests of Autumn – Waits in eternal exile.
He’s now a wordless tree. (“Postman”, p. 39)
Equally striking is the intonation and rhythm of the English translation. I will conclude with these lines from Section-4 The Poet.
The wailing heart is a marked criminal.
Don’t let it ever escape. Don’t ever set it free.
It’s better you tear the poem instead. (“Shredded Verse”, p. 51)
If the translator engulfs the poems within herself in Moonstruck Pilgrim, the poet himself hides in his poems in How to Burn Memories Using a Pocket Torch published by Tristoop Books. The title of Kushal Poddar’s book is itself a poem. And inside the book he hides:
I hold my neonate, still unworldly,
thought now I would comprehend my father
through an epiphany… (“Understanding the Blood”, p. 25)
These lines are too personal and yet eternally universal of being a father. In his poem “Non-existent” Poddar writes how his backyard of memories merges with the meadow of worldliness.
On his left wrist a vintage Seiko
and on the right one a crow
named Echo, my father haunts
the unkempt backyard we let
sprawl to meet the meadow. (p. 31)
Between the mentioning of his child and his father, is the unacknowledged poet hiding between the lines. Just like Palchoudhuri evokes the past in his line “like bygone days of innocence”, Kushal Poddar does the same but through the memory of his mother here:
Sky reminisces. Our bygone pillow fight
reoccurs out of blue…
…
…My mother
opens up like a door. I see the sky
around her heart…
…
…I cannot remember
my playmate. It is the sky, always,
that blinds me as I scatter in her bosom. (“It Rains Somewhere”, p. 39)
The pleasant memories of dead parents haunt the poet and all he has is a pocket torch to burn their recollections with. But in the burning of memories, the poet is also there hidden, getting scalded.
Someone burns something,
always, in this city.
…
My throat reminds me of my mother
struggling to end her life. (“Twilight Evolution”, p. 101)
This issue of EKL Review is devoted to parents and at the poetic level Kushal Poddar’s parents become all of our parents as a contrapuntal universal condition of all humankind.