Speak English Or Die!!!

Every Hour

2008-03-27T08:40:00.000-07:00

Singer, lyricist, composer, music director - Zubeen or more popularly Zubeen Da is a cultural icon of modern Assam. Known better to the rest of India for chart hits like Ya Ali, it is the rich blending of several folk elements from the North-East and Western style that distinguishes his music. The disillusionment, desperation and resentment that we all have felt during these decades of violence, turbulence and upsurge finds brilliant expression in his songs through metaphors of angusih and fragmentation.

Every time, every hour
every moment cries out today
recollecting every pain,
every grief, every rage's worth
every dawn, every wound
pierces every heart today

In every mind, every corner
every fear's image blazes
In every eye, every tear
every day's chronicle today
Every autumn, every spring
every hope's grave today
In every blood, every drop
every age's remains today

In every heart, every anger
every hatred's endless picture
In every step, every day
every night's exhaustion overflows
In every mind, every chamber
every love's lamp dampens

Every rupture, every void
leaves jolting every way today

Recitations from The Gita I

2008-03-11T07:47:00.000-07:00

The following is the first from a series of 'tradaptations', modern renderings you may say, from the Bhagvata Gita by Bipuljyoti Saikia. Saikia is a nuclear physicist by profession! But in his heart he is a philosopher, poet and a horrible driver! The first time we met, he proposed to take me to Anwesha-a literary hub and bookstore i like. THat 6 km ride could have been my last odyssey on earth! But his poetry is thought-provoking, metaphysical yet contemporary. He has made a immense contribution to the Assamese literary heritage by publishing an anthology of translations into English. I hope he adds mine's to the list too!

When the night of time ceases -
emperor or saint, man or bird
river or earth -
into my bosom everything retreats.

I preface the dawn of time, illuminate the universe.
I am the Supreme - the origin's end, the end's origin.
I am eternal and infinite.

Even though I am with you, as your charioteer
I am free, ye Partha -
free like the endless void is my wandering.
Though near you I be, I am beyond touch.
Though with you I be, I am beyond count.
I am uncontained, I am unchained.

Storm

2007-11-13T21:58:00.000-08:00

the dreary evening lay spread out like a table

the electric wires' silvery pylons had kept the sky

pinned to the bosom of the earth.

Amidst the skies then, a few maddened egrets

-like torn paper- went flying hither-thither

...petitions sent to an absent-minded god.

(trans. from Hari Barkataki's 'Dhumuha')

Tradaptations

2007-08-07T02:41:00.000-07:00

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