Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Tradaptations
I have been conditioned to believe that we Indians have always been belated romanticists, modernists, post-modernists and all the ‘ists’ that rolls in and out of the Western Literary Factory. The need to evaluate our literary tradition in terms and categories, defined and codified by the ‘Other’, is an obsessive, compulsive, colonial circumscription. As an ‘art, craft, or industry’, translation too is overshadowed by the omnipotent presence of English as the normative target language.
Nonetheless, the business of translating into English has provided a customized dashboard to share, view and appreciate our distinctive multicultural and multilingual identity.
Call it imagist, surrealist, post-modernist, anarchist or whatever you wish, the poetry of Nilmoni Phookan is compelling and labyrinthine. His interaction with European, Japanese or Chinese models of poetic construction is a self-conscious borrowing with which he has experimented and enriched the Assamese poetic tradition.
The poem is in the form of a series of rambling thoughts and shifting impressions as the dead poet persona clings on to the remnants of his earthly consciousness... following his own logic of association before being charioted away to the other world. Following the original, the translation has been left largely unpunctuated, except when inevitable. Hope it captures the spoken-heard form of the poem.
Do not ask me how I am
do not ask me how i am
i haven’t asked that of myself
down the Kalang flows
a headless girl
what was i yester-night…
king hermit peasant laborer
lover naxal poet
a tiger in search of water
after a hunt…
i have forgotten what i was.
do not ask me what I am
after all i’m not alone
even after that last meal
i couldn’t bid farewell
nor could I take my leave…
since Auschwitz
i haven’t laughed
haven’t cried either.
for where would i go
i have forgotten from where i came
the day lives on vomiting blood
the skulls and bones
go down the evening path
with a wry smile…
for in the shop’s show case
a pair of dogs in coital frenzy…
at Bhootnath is a blind Kali
wearing a girdle of male genitals
around her waist
for everyone has the same fear
even the dead –
to say or to act
to open the window or the door
for waiting since then…
lies sham pretence deceit
youth cruel kind.
do not ask me how I am
for it is dark
now even it flickers
now even it shimmers
on the trail of
misfortune adversity distress
the banner of man’s blood.
for in my pockets I carry
two forbidden hands
in my bosom
a bullet reddened in flight
for it is silence all around
the terrible clamor of peace.
Do not ask me how I am
Down the kalang floats
A headless girl
For forty-two hours
My corpse lies
In the foothpaths of guwahati
For even now I have my eyes open
My death too is open eyed
For in ditches and pool
River and lake
Forming swarms the fish …
O you my ambling horseman! Kalang: A river that flows through the Nagaon district in Assam.
Bhootnath:Situated on the banks of the Brahmaputra, Bhootnath is a famous temple and cremation ground in Guwahati
Posted by Samarjit ::