POETRY
The importance of sound in verse
RAJI NARASIMHAN
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The poetic fling of thought, imagination and imagery are truly breathtaking.
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Selected Poems, Jibanananda Das, Translated by Chidananda Das Gupta, Penguin, Rs. 150.
TO read these fine translations of Jibanananda Das's poems, done by Chidananda Das Gupta, is to realise anew the importance of sound in poetry. Take the short poem "I Will Leave It All", where the poetic fling of thought, imagination and imagery are truly breathtaking. He will turn into a tree, the poet declares. He will peel off his human skin, rub the scent of the bark on his body, walk down the mountain path and wrap round himself the look of wonder on the mountain's face.
The rage, frenzy and sane violence present in this image for disclaiming ties with the world are recurring emotions in the poems. Complementing these main emotions of violence are those of forbearance and humour. This duality gives the poems their special fibre.
Raging anger
In "City", for instance, where Jibanananda rages that the deceit, desolation and debris of the cities have `entered my head/And got cremated there'. He also says, `Yet I have seen the sun rise/Above the same cities'. In "Starlight", he asks the evening star where he should go to escape `enterprise, enthusiasm, dreams, thoughts' — the deadly viruses that have wiped out the `scent of rice fields' from life. The star replies `with a sly smile', `... keep lying on the grass, loving my beauty... ' The translation captures with fidelity — both of the main skein of violence and its complementary aspects.
Lines such as the foregoing, where a sharp change occurs in the line of argument, are important in the overall form of the poem. They divide it into two distinct segments, without impairing poetic unity. But this division and the instant abolishing of the division give the poem a dramatic and reverberative depth, a stature all its own. We register this. We note the simplicity of the words. And we wonder at the depth of meaning thrown up by these simple words. Conversely, we mark the un-English tone of the English. It is felt most in the similes and metaphors. In "The Windy Night", stars shining in the dark are likened to the `dew-moist eyes of the/Love-laden kite upon the banyan tree'. `Kite' and `banyan tree' are simply not words of everyday thought in, let's say, White English. In `Loving You I Learn', the metaphor used for the fusion of the primordial force and the individual being is the lotus leaf and the drop of water on it. This is classic Indian metaphor, as is the idea of a primordial force.
Disjunction
The fine translation only emphasises this disjunction between theme and language. And involuntarily we wonder how the poems sound in Bengali. Would the grim drama of the split in the poem due to the change in the poetic argument seem less grim, somewhat more colloquial, in Bengali? How would the star's saying `keep lying on the grass, loving my beauty' sound in the original? Or the line about the debris of the cities entering the head and getting cremated there? Wouldn't sense and sound fuse into an organic whole in a language native to the thought, making us hear the poem as well as appreciate it?
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