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Literary Review
POETRY
Poet of the exiled
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`Ultimately, like many poets of his time, Bose's work is about understanding the "invisible darkness" from where our lives spring.'
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WHEN I picked up the Selected Poems of Buddhadeva Bose, I wanted to keep in mind an image of a young man, barely 19-years-old, ready to plunge into the world of modern Bengali literature with that rare, gleaming initiative to distil language and reveal it for its magical, transformative powers. I wanted to think of the young 20-something, who'd already published a book of verse and went on to found the leading poetry quarterly, Kavita, which would give voice to some of the most thrilling minds of post-Tagore India. I wanted to think of the young husband and father who inhabited the mythical 202, Rashbehari Avenue in Kolkata; an oases for writers, publishers, intellectuals, and artists, to meet over endless cups of tea and execute all manner of exhilarating life-enhancing conversations.
Instead, I found myself having to trudge through a gruelling 48-page introduction, further accompanied by a hefty 20-page translator's testament. Not that background information by way of biographical, historical, social, and political information, and analysis of fellow-contemporaries is out of keeping with a volume of collected work, but in this case the meander proved to be a tedious journey, speedily replacing my image of a young, passionate man, with one significantly aged and deflated. Ketaki Kushari Dyson, writes in her introduction that she was trying to put some "flesh on the bones" to help us understand the poet's work in translation — the result is a meaty, well-researched, deeply felt tribute to a remarkable man. My only real criticism is that poems should speak for themselves, which means it's unnecessary to describe one's own personal interaction or analysis of a poem and probably unnecessary to quote oneself in one's own introduction.
Let us return to the young man though, reading the fiery verses of Nazrul Islam, wearing homespun, moving toward his first love affair, that enigmatic city of Kolkata, writing his early poems that speak of sweetness, softness, ripeness, and "discoloured fear". His writings are a struggle to re-affirm not just the self-renewing abilities of language, but its role in re-affirming life and reconnecting humanity. Love is the ultimate hero. Death, loneliness, separation, the usual suspects. Freedom and recognition, the ultimate goals. A man not unabashed to put the "I" in his poems, not unabashed to say he was "drowning in the surges of loveliness", not unabashed to leave the roar of Kolkata and discover himself in the green lakes of Chilka.
Bose is the poet of the exiled — the various comings and goings, the arrivals and departures, the winters and springs, nights and days, rainy times and parched times — his poems are born in the lines between these times. And there are wonderfully long Whitmanesque lines, where he draws out the refugee from the ruins of fallen places, where "people move, speak, wander around,/ turn corners again and again." Possibly because of his own wanderings that took him to America as a visiting professor, and the political divisions that were splintering India's own geography, his sense of alienation loomed large. "Some turn homewards", he says, in "The Refugee", "Some lucky guy in a long white racing-boat /shoots off into the milky mist like a beautiful arrow". Many of his poems are amalgamations of time and place, search engines of nostalgia where the poet himself is obsessively trying to retrieve certain things. "I have seen their shadows in Manhattan's East River,/ flutter in Bavaria's lakes, and now I see them again/ in Calcutta's overcast sky."
And this is where Dyson allows us to meet the ageing poet, wading through the streets of unknown young men and women. People who gather at the tram station with a solemn resolution to carry on living; a menstruating city, autumnal yards, gang-leaders, sacks of fat and malice, beautiful women, scholars, gazelles, rats, beggars, whores, dust specks, plant fibres; all in that hour of fullness, when none are awake but poets, thieves and sad men. His nights are like glittering festivals of light, a blind man's sky. This is where we have followed him thus far, to be "travellers in unspecified countries", where he is trying to figure out "which darkness begets light".
Ultimately, like many poets of his time, Bose's work is about understanding the "invisible darkness" from where our lives spring. Death looms large in his later years, and there's a good deal of obsession and sermonising about the battle between life and death. But the beauty of Bose's poetry is that it's clear he sees death as a way of renewal. For him, it's possible to die everyday; death is not a permanent thing, neither is life, neither is a sojourn, neither is a separation. He writes, "But I, — under any other sky, my eyes on any far horizon — / will say — Come back." There's always the possibility of recognising the old again, and knowing it afresh. Even when no more "generous evenings descend on balconies", "when all that's left are muted scents and faded addresses, nothing's lost", he says, "everything abides, exists — / the event that's already happened keeps walking with us,/ can even, perhaps, be retrieved."
For Bose, language prevails, never disintegrates, and this is where Dyson has excelled, in what she calls the "dance of approximation". She has chosen and translated poems that have allowed us to tread the margins of Bose's underworld, given insight to his immense scholastic skills, of both Indian and Western myths and ancient texts, his ability to reinterpret them in artistic ways, and his own translations of such greats as Kalidasa, Shankaracharya, Baudelaire, Hölderlin and Rilke, all of which corroborates why Samir Sengupta calls Buddhadeva Bose the most thrilling, most courageous mental adventure in the history of 20th Century Bengali culture.
TISHANI DOSHI
Selected Poems of Buddhadeva Bose, translated and introduced by Ketaki Kushari Dyson, OUP, 2003, Rs.550.
The writer can be reached at t_doshi@hotmail.com
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