BREATH BECOMING A WORD CONTMPORARY GUJARATI POETRY IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION EDITED BY DILEEP JHAVERI ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My earnest thanks to GUJARAT SAHITYA AKADEMI for publishing this book and to Harshad Trivedi. With his wholehearted support a dream is fulfilled. Several of these translations have appeared in INDIAN LITERATURE- Sahitya Akademi Delhi MUSEINDIA KRITYA- web journals and elsewhere. Thanks to all of them. Cover page painting by Late Jagdeep Smart with the kind permission of Smt Nita Smart and Rajarshi Smart Dedicated to PROF. K. SATCHIDANANDAN The eminent poet of Malayalam who has continuously inspired other Indian languages while becoming a sanctuary for the survival of Poetry. BREATH BECOMING A WORD It’s more than being in love, boy, though your ringing voice may have flung your dumb mouth thus: learn to forget those fleeting ecstasies. Far other is breath of real singing. An aimless breath. A stirring in the god. A breeze. Rainer Maria Rilke From Sonnets To Orpheus This is to celebrate the breath becoming a word and the joy of word turning into poetry. This is to welcome the lovers of poetry in other languages to participate in the festival of contemporary Gujarati poetry. Besides the poets included in this selection there are many who have contributed to the survival of Gujarati poetry and there are many other poems of the poets in this edition that need to be translated. So this is also an invitation to the friends who are capable to take over and add foliage and florescence to the growing garden of Gujarati poetry. Let more worthy individuals undertake the responsibility to nurture it with their taste and ability. I see myself as an ant carrying a grain of sugar to the ant-hill that is constructed by the cooperative efforts of other hard working colleagues. an ant-hill is created and sustained with joint effort. The name of our great epic poet of Ramayan symbolically conveys this spirit of collaboration. Valmiki’s name is derived from valmik which means an ant-hill. Over the centuries several poets contributed to create this epic. Similarly for many centuries common people and geniuses have created and refined Gujarati language. Let my contemporaries and future geniuses add glory to this language that has given us an esteemed identity. Holding the hand of English one can say Hello to the other languages of India and the world. Come, let us rejoice together that poetry survives within us all. Dileep Jhaveri 301,WALDORF, HIRANANDANI ESTATE,PATLIPADA, GHODBUNDER ROAD, THANE-400607 e-mail [email protected] FOREWORD Perfect translations and model anthologies are impossible ideals that repeatedly encourage imprudent to rashness. High expectations on the part of the readers and hawk-eyed critics should dampen their spirits but the zealots never say die. This present attempt has many inadequacies but there is a hidden agenda beyond the candid confession. Let better translators be provoked to prove their mettle by working on the poems and poets that are left out. With better quality of translations let yet more focused selections be made. If those making selections cannot translate let them search out the able ones. Wherever institutional assistance is available let it be utilized. Let this happen to Indian languages like Punjabi, Rajasthani, Kokani and others also. With this hope I wish to thank at the outset my fellow-translators Sitanshu Yashashchandra, Karamshi Pir, Dhanwanti, Neerav Patel, Dr. Ganpat Vankar, Kanji Patel, young and ebullient Dr. Hemang Desai and especially Sachin Ketkar. Late Nitin Mehta, Jaydev Shukla, Shirish Panchal and ever dependable Rajendra Patel and Kamal Vora along with several others have extended great help.. For decades we pampered ourselves with the comfortable notion that Gujarati poetry was perhaps the best amongst all the Indian languages. Sheer gullibility and ignorance of what was written elsewhere and fleeting acquaintance with mediocre works (easy, popular and hence rigorously promoted) of other languages were largely responsible for this illusion. Forgotten was the fundamental truth that poetry writing is an exercise for excellence and not competition. On the other hand it is also true that many of the Gujarati poets past their sixties are erudite. They have read Indian as well as European classics. They are acquainted with critically acclaimed contemporary national and international literature. Some are closely involved in other art genres also. Some were deep into classical Sanskrit aesthetics and criticism along with present day Euro-American thinking. None, mark it, none was associated with any political ideology. Some poets from that generation became popular with audiences and remained rooted there. They had no time to read. Their easy path was followed by many young poets. This explains the plethora of lyrics, gazals and comic verses on urban life. What was tragic and contemplative in the poetry of the masters became farcical satire in their works. Devoid of any discretion some journals continued publishing them. To enhance their CVs the ambitious academicians and the journalists pursuing honour continued reviewing them. And a small class of literary socialites continued raving about them. Serious critics continued ignoring them. And that was not the right thing. So a very large space Is occupied by these poets in Gujarati. But mediocrity remains universal! The fallacy was in comparing such similar stuff from other languages with the small body of work painstakingly generated by the best poets in Gujarati. The same injustice is done to the poetry written by Indian writers in English. It is almost a fashion to run it down. But if one reads Jayanta Mahapatra, Keki Daruwala, Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar or from the younger generation Ranjit Hoskote, Robin Ngangon, Mamang Dai, Laxmi Kannan, Menaka Shivdasani – to name a few, one would realise that the achievement of these poets is no less significant in comparison with English language poets from the West. While translating the best Gujarati poets and hoping for yet better translations a realization dawned that in other languages also excellent poetry is written. Inspiring poetry of K. Satchidanandan, K.G. Shankarpillay in Malayalam, Sirpi Balasubramaniam in Tamil; Sunil Gangopadhyaya, Shankho Ghosh and Utpal Kumar Basu in Bengali; Ramakant Rath in Oriya; Nilmony Phukan in Assamese – just to mention a few, is a beacon for aspiring Gujarati poets, inviting to open their sails wider. When one looks at the post modernist women poets in Gujarati, missing are the sensuousness of Jaya Prabha in Telugu, or contemplation of abstract by Pratibha Nandkumar in Kannada or the robust and full blooded poetry of suffering and carnality by Mallika Sengupta in Bengali. Dalit poetry in Telugu, Kannada or Marathi has more muscle than shrillness. So let me repeat that comparing one language with others to establish poetic superiority of one’s own language is a futile exercise. Some friends from other languages have tried to embarrass me by accusing Gujarati writers for not responding to the contemporary events in Gujarat. That Art should mirror Life sounds Aristotelian and unacceptable. Also one must be reminded that poetry is no cure for evil or injustice. A writer has to act as a human being against injustice in whatever capacity he has, and not wash his hands off by writing poetry. Tadeusz Rozewics said, ‘The dance of poetry came to an end during the second world war.’ And his purpose was to create ‘not verses but facts’. But one cannot be parochial about history. To consider one’s time as an end in all is a kind of chauvinism that poetry can do without. Intent upon writing about his life and time Dante placed himself within the compass of his contemporary history but proceeded to relate it with past and extending it to Mythological time. In the end the poet as well as poetry found a place beyond the time. Such freedom is not meant only for the epic poets. Freedom is the precondition for every poet, every artist. And art cannot be created by prescriptions. It is true that life is an important concern of art. But the fallacy is in mistaking the contemporary for life. And human life is not the only form of life! Those demanding poems on communal riots from every Gujarati poet are twice faulted with Aristotelian as well as anthropocentric prejudices. True, Gujarati poetry has some shortcomings like other languages. There is poetry of innocence, full of blissful jubilation for sunrise, sunset, moonrise, sea tide, rains, spring, bird call, breeze or traditionally overrated spiritual experiences expressed in ambiguous terminology of metaphysical words. Poetry of adolescence runs in circles around the first glance, the first touch, the first confession, the first betrayal, the first parting followed by repeated betrayals and permanent partings. These are witnessed by walls, windows, mirrors, birds, flowers, lakes or traditional Gujarati architecture or furnishings, festivals, folklore. Again, the nights, stars, moon, rains, oceans, autumn, deserts, mirages, oases arrive expectedly to give company to the lovelorn. Poetry of complacence merrily keeps iterating romance of Radha-Krishna copied or extended from the overcelebrated verses of Narasimha Mehta, Mirabai and Dayaram from the medieval period and various folksongs, marriage songs as well as seasonal songs. Also can be added to this list the devotional poems for the family where the grandfather is always a pious and robust man, the grandmother is a tireless story teller, the father is aloof but caring and the mother symbolizes everything from sweetness, sacredness, sacrifice to suffering. This ideal family naturally lives in a village with a cowshed and misty hymnful mornings, golden evenings and favourite trees of the childhood like mango, peepul, tamarind or champaka. Never to be left behind is the poetry of grievance, common to every language.