HUMOUR
Nonsense gone-sense
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`Abol Tabol is satirical in nature but contained within the subtle and often obvious humour, is a vast tragic vision.'
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The stork told the tortoise, "Isn't this fun!... ... ... ... we are second to none!"
AS a writer of verse ironically termed "nonsense", replete with complex metaphysics as disarmingly offered as the quality of childhood, Sukumar Roy was certainly second to none. Language for him was not a creature of whimsy or mere wordplay. Abol tabol in Bengali means nonsense but there is little of the intangible in his combination of the stork and tortoise that make a stortoise or the unhappy hornbill with no horns who merges with a deer and no longer mourns. His ideas move with amazing swiftness and these poems and illustrations are alive with a potent vibrancy like
... the other day the whole night thrusomesome
Was it you who snored so gruesome?"
Even when Pagla Dashu in "Dashu the Dotty One" quietly refrains from reacting, the atmosphere is charged with anticipation. There is a sense of pulsating energy very integral to his creative process. It is fantastic in its characterisation with personalities like Woody, "Kathburo" in the original, who lives on boiled wood and can discourse on the varieties and flavours of different kinds of wood and "Pumpkin Grumpkin", originally "Kumropotash", whose various moods have terrible repercussions. Satirical in nature, contained within the subtle and often obvious humour, is a vast tragic vision. The use of sound, incorporated within the rhyme scheme, forms the essence of his poetry and is therefore more than just the poetic tool of onomatopoeia and draws an instant response. The humour is never black and the simplicity never forced for life is all but waiting to happen and of course things can be "A hanky one minute, a cat the next!" Published just nine days before the author's death, Abol Tabol is actually an adult world of chaotic disorder where a child can slip in with ease because it is "not a shoe, not a clue, nobody and no one am I!"
The best thing about Abol Tabol is the translator Sampurna Chattarji's seeming effortlessness in maintaining to a great degree the flavour of the Bengali original. The rhythm so essential to Roy's poetic creed is bought out and the rhythmic beat is well maintained. Savour this — The parrot faced lizard felt rather silly,
Must he give up insects and start eating chilli?
In the Translator's Note Chattarji says, "Now a crackling pun in one language is often more than a damp squib in another." This represents the chief difficulty any translator of works of this kind will face. The poet has suited the language to create word pictures of fantastic episodes in his mind like in the piece `Wordygurdyboom!'— "Whack-thwack boom bam, oh what a rackers/ Flowers blooming? I see! I thought they were crackers!", which is difficult to transmute to a translation. So it lacks the easy colloquialism of the original. Sometimes it is too literal like the title "Gibberish, gibberish" for what can be called the introductory poem, "Abol Tabol". Often, while the transmutation of a title or character's name is done based on the gist of the poem, the literal would probably suit like "khuror kol", which means "Uncle's machine" rather than "Uncle's contraption". Mostly it is quite smooth like "Greedy Guts" for the original "Khai Khai". The translator's efforts are to be lauded because the names of the characters are often as impossible to explain as the personas themselves. Those who have grown up with Abol Tabol as most Bengalis worth their salt would have, this might not satisfy but little prevents it from being a truly good effort.
PAROMITA PAIN
Abol Tabol: The Nonsense World of Sukumar Roy, Puffin, p.172, Rs.199.
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