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POETRY

Many in one

The title poem is a perfect opening gambit for the volume. It gives us a telegraphic run-down of Chitre’s wide ranging concerns as mirrored in a bewilderingly variegated world that is nonetheless supported by a mythical serpent (Shesha):

Here is birth here is murder here is love/Here is reason blackened by labour/Here is the essence of garlic the odour of asafoetida./Busy transactions in its crowded lanes/Riders on the hurricane highways./ And underneath it all like Shesha I am. (Shesha)

These lines, taken together with the ones listed below, give a clue to Chitre’s poetic credo: A poet suffers from a lack of explanation/In a circumscribed world he looks out for a gap/ That may help his articulate escape from emotion. (Ethiopia 5)

This may seem reminiscent of Eliot, but Chitre is the very reverse of the Eliotian impersonal artist. His poetry is intensely subjective. And his well-thought out strategy is to break down conventional syntax in an attempt to get through to shesha, also Marathi for ‘residue.’ This translates into a person’s signature. The 91 poems that Chitre has himself rendered into English are nothing if not quests for his poetic DNA. Like Pablo Neruda, he seems also to recognise that readers have the ability to give an afterlife to the poems (“It’s an inner world comprising a multitude of inner worlds”).

Admittedly, some poems fare better than the others. This reviewer felt inclined to settle for the ones that are more communicative either by having a narrative element, like the Ethiopia poems recording a slow unfolding of self in its meeting with the other in an alien culture, or by an intensified doubling back on the speaking self, such as “Pronouncing the Great Mantra”, the longest in the book. There are some that read like abstract and esoteric language games. These did not interest this reviewer despite their magical and mystical aura.

Poetry does not always have to be concrete in order to affect readers. The famous “Half-truth” poems, for instance, are anything but concrete in their deep inward turn and sharply felt existentialist concern. Poetry never was as hauntingly direct and simple as it has been in these. Take these final lines from “A Half-truth-1”: Will everything be equal/In the light of the final judgement?/In one arm of the equal-arm balance, impotence,/ Heroism in the other/And on the point of its scale/An exact half-truth?

Having heard the Marathi original recited in the 1983 cult film “Ardha Satya”, I am able to say that Chitre is a fine translator who moves easily and well between Marathi and English. It has to be said, though, that the cultural resonance of ‘chakrabyuha’ gets diluted in its plain English rendering as ‘circular battle-trap’. This is probably par for the course for any translation from an Indian language into English. As if to pre-empt this Chitre has fashioned a writing style that will resist the levelling force of the dictum: e pluribus unum. His poetry grows out of and reflects India’s multilingual mosaic; and his translation reflects and enacts this multilingualism.

This is most evident in the series of poems set in Mumbai and seemingly intended as odes to the rooted presence of Islam in the cosmopolitan fabric of that great city. The keynote is struck in the first, “Magic Muhalla”, a coinage in what is now being called ‘chutneyfied English’.

Chitre, of course, holds steadfastly to a secular, pluri-cultural ideal, as he asserts in the book’s foreword and afterword. Besides being thematically diverse, he offers his own verse as the last utopian space for the co-habitation of religions, cultures and languages. Shesha is a wonderful record of the many in one.

The writer is a Professor of English, Utkal University, Bhubaneswar.

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