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Literary Review
Fragile, yet powerful
HIMANSHU S. MOHAPATRA
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Poetry that is refreshingly lyrical without losing a sense of emotional purpose.
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A Fragile World: Poems of Bishnu K.Mohapatra; Ganeshwar Mishra and Jatindra Nayak; Poetry Connect; Rs.250
If ever one saw a perfectly showcased book, it is the one under review. Two of Orissa’s best known literary figures have come together to collaborate on translating the poems of Bishnu Mohapatra, a relatively less canonized Oriya poet. Elegantl
y produced as a hardbound by a publishing house dedicated to publishing English translations of poetry in the Indian bhasas, the book has a promotional blurb from the pen of Amit Chaudhuri. The poetic world of Mohapatra is lyrical, delicate and impressionistic, as the title suggests. Poetry is a way for the poet to catch fleeting moments and moods, to write his emotional logbook. Whatever cannot be fitted into the straitjacket of prose, logic and reason goes down as a lyrical utterance.
But he does not stop short at rhapsodizing; there is a meticulous verbalizing of the emotional response in its various shades, a task the translators too endeavour to recreate in their sinuous syntax. Let me quote a stanza from, “Winter in Paris”, which is the tailpiece of the book:
Black and grey clouds,
Yellow leaves below,
Trees lined up
Naked, like Digambar,
Fog and feeble light,
Gusts of wind on one’s face.
Paris keeps itself warm
In an overcoat.
I am quoting the translated lines, but I have in mind the transliterated lines in the original, although this practice of transcribing the original in Roman script will clearly not work for the non-Oriya reader. There is more to the poem than a neutral rendering; it projects an Indian sensibility onto an alien topography.
Revolutionary rewriting
That sensibility together with the scenes, relationships and events with which it is bound up is tracked in the thirty odd poems that come before. In its native habitat, however, it seems to come across as alienated and ironic. This is hardly surprising considering that the environment the poems map is so low on spiritual capital, so insufficiently furnished as to point in two predictable directions of utility and pseudo religiosity. Many of the poems dwell on images of death and suffering such as a slashed wrist (“All is Quiet”) and a delirious Madhua whose insanity puts him beyond the social pale (“I Have Something to Say”). Mohapatra’s poetry also searches out the most potent tale of hubris (Crumpled sheets of paper/Scrawled with the text/Of our arrogant lives’) which underwrites human suffering, the tale of capital and labour. This in turn calls for a revolutionary rewriting, one that will make the sensitized idiom of poetry the medium of history. The English translation, as expected, is splendid in its attempt at tracking the most befitting word and word order. It does a good job of introducing to the readers a new poetic voice from Orissa which is intense, lyrical and conscientious.
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