Author with Anusha Hariharan. Photo credit: Anannya Dasgupta
Geeta Patel
Prologue
I had arrived in Chennai hoping to work at the Tamil Nadu state archives, trolling them for any information I could cull on what was likely the first private-public pension fund, the Madras Civil Fund, argued vociferously for in the late 1700s by East India Company employees associated with Fort St George. Very little is known about it, it sort of disappears in the annals of all the work done on pensions by scholars all over the world. What is striking about it is that it was initiated by employees who expected to fade away from the archives, people of no account who knew that they would die indigent, corpses left by the side of the road, living their lives out in debtors prison or as vagrants hounded by the state that they served; which is probably why only one or two people in recent years mention the fund in a throwaway line or two. Anyway, these people got together to fight for their own protection, asking for money to be held from their salary and invested in various places. And my sense was that they learned their tactics from local agricultural workers and weavers who were striking all over the region on and off for many years demanding that the East India Company hold to contracts that were more amenable for workers.
I had a senior Fulbright-Nehru excellence award for research and so had come to Chennai just to case the archives for 5 days, staying with my friend Anannya Dasgupta in a flat by the sea. I imagined that once I got a sense of what was available, and introduced myself, I would return later in the summer for a more extended period to finish up whatever I could. But before the five days were up, it was clear that corona virus was already in Chennai and planes were one of the worst places to be if one didn’t want to get sick, so I extended my stay. But by the time I was to leave lockdown was declared and I am still here, by the sea, having not left the flat except to venture to the roof each evening to look down on the ocean’s changing palette, and the sky’s variegated moods.
In the meantime I met two poets, one was my friend Anannya, a wonderful lyricist, who is also a professor of writing at KREA, a photographer, fiction writer and scholar of Shakespeare, the other was an incredible local poet and translator, writer and scholar, professor at IIT Madras, K Srilata. To help along people stuck in various countries, in cities, in homes, pining for something that would help them alleviate the ennui of being home and also manage the incredible anguish of having privilege while so many people were suffering, hungry and without the advantages of those who had a home and food and relative ease, Anannya proposed reviving a practice she had initiated many years before on a blog, Daily Riyaaz. Except that the riyaaz was composing poetry, one a day for the 30 days of April. Now, I regularly translate, and was envisioning translating or reworking previous ones—of the poetry of Miraji (1912-1949) a marvelously fecund, promiscuously generative Urdu modernist, critic, lyricist, essayist. So, I agreed to write every day, uploading translations.
I’ve thought of myself as primarily a translator—I had been translating from several languages since the early 1980s. My poetry began and ended when I was about 12, with some embarrassing ventures that I have, fortunately chosen to forgo. Most of them, to the best of my memory, and I may be making some of that up, as memories are wont to do, are on time. So, I have oriented my aesthetic inclinations, my love of language, its flows and music, its unexpected bricolage and juxtapositions, its plush metaphors to tarjumah, to anuvad.
Anannya and I have a morning routine: when we drink coffee, we read aloud. Our book, our tome is Derrick Jensen’s A language older than words (2000). Jensen is spoken of as the poet-philosopher of the environmental movement. Daily Riyaaz was a day or so away, and as I listened to the Jensen, something entirely unexpected happened. It was as though I were channeling, open to who knows what sense somewhere beyond one’s immediate prosaic everyday awareness, somewhere apart from the small routines that orient one’s life in an approximate calendar, and words began to flow.
Crap, I thought to myself, sitting at the dining table across from Anannya, it’s a poem. Writers often speak of being overtaken, describe how it feels when words just happen upon them, flow through them into pen, or through the clack-clack of fingertips tapping phrases out. Well that’s how it has been for me. I continued to translate, but interspersing those truly lovely, intoxicating lyrics of Miraji’s, would come a poem. I never had to search for it. And now that I have finished more than 30 days and Daily Riyaaz is over, for I started early, I realize I never had to scrounge, or fight words through a morass in my head, never had to say to myself, “What should I write about today.” They came as they wished, as they willed, and I was merely their recipient. I have written about waiting to be hungry under these circumstances, about the raven who has decided to adopt me, written about my childhood, about the closeness of death, and the creatures and other lives that gave me solace. This practice has released those deep abrasions, so hidden away that I had lost them from view. It has brought me to language that I never knew I had, it has brought forward something that evades words, that belongs to a place before words, to paraphrase Jensen, giving it the tenor and delight that only working with words shaped in lyric, massaging them, sculpting them, sifting through them for those that gift the sensibility, the nuance, the pliability I wanted, can bring. And here they are.
Riyaaz is an Urdu word that means practice, usually in the context of training in classical music and dance. Poetry too demands riyaaz; so “Daily Riyaaz” is our attempt to tempt our muse with practice: one poem a day each day for the month of April 2020. I intersperse my own lyrical voice with that of the Urdu poet Miraji’s. It’s as though mine was found through his.
******
Thursday April 30, 2020
METAMORPHOSIS: Lesson left over from Daily Riyaaz
Having grown up in a childhood
Anyone would balk at belonging to
Where waking up was terrifying
And holding oneself from sleep
Seemed the only viable option.
Then and even now I
Never thought to myself:
I wish I were not here
If only I had been brought into something else.
All I wanted then, as
I skimmed my hands
down a banister readying
for flight as I hurtled down stairs
Was to open a secret stash of papers
Crumpled in the back corner of
My parents desk drawer
That showed me
I had been extracted from an orphanage
And these people who took me away
Rather like kleptomaniac fairies (I was poring over tales of other worlds)
Who had edged into a bustle of children
A bit shop worn
and surreptitiously stashed one away in a backpack
when the warden’s attention had wandered (I was reading Dickens).
But I do have to admit
that now
I sometimes want to call
out to the universe
Hold my hand perpendicular
Like a traffic policeman
In the middle of a Delhi intersection
With honks, and hoots and sudden zips
Piling up haphazardly and say
Stop, just pause for a spare minute
Can’t you let one, just one
lesson in at a time
Keep a few in reserve
Until I am ready.
Quite unfortunately lessons for those
who need them, after
what childhood begot them,
and left behind,
primers that tweak, just that little bit
Are like koans
Enigmas, mazes
That catch one’s attention
And you have to go over them
Again, and again
And yet once more
Until you see that slender wedge
Where something clears out
And you can run through to some
light
But often, they pile up
capriciously
In twos and threes
And sometimes who knows how many,
When you get to the point
in a way that you didn’t even
Ever imagine.
What you become you hadn’t the
Words to describe
Until you do.
——————
The final poem pulled out of me by our Jensen morning reading. And in some ways so much what Daily Riyaaz has wrought — metamorphosis.
With thanks to Anannya for getting me into it, Srilata for helping lead me as well and all the riyaazers whose wordcraft has been such an inspiration.
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
Translation of Miraji’s “Uncha Makan” Soaring Building
Soaring Building[1]
Eyes painted in thousands on your face,
you stand as a mausoleum
guarding civilization
your flesh is moonlight
and turbulence
that wells up in human minds.
In the surges that slap
is the fury of songs of tyranny
a keening dirge
that lingers on in the shadow of mourning
words that voice without dreams.
Is a soul lamenting restlessly in your heart?
Your singing wanes
Its eddies subside. And I begin to notice
the dregs that cloud pungent wine in a splintering cup
Euphoria blurs my vision
why does night’s spilling dusk terrify me so?
while your eyes that glint do not
perhaps I’ve lived in darkness deeper than this
In the dark that hovers in my soul, stars sliver with heartache
forgetting that they too sometimes loose such ecstatic scudding flames
which hurl themselves, arms opened wide like melodies from your windows,
Drawn into the shawl of space
are tears which spill over like desolate flames of joy
But it was merely fancy, one my own incandescence ignites in
the wings of my imagination, a bird maimed, trembling helplessly.
All my limbs held me taut, away from living, and
were my curiosity to release me on a gust
my only remorse when my grief was appeased
and the chains that bound me came undone,
would be:
I mislaid the darkness in my soul, my qualms soothed
and I came to
gauging the pinnacle on which you have settled,
your thousand eyes iridescent.
I’ve been told such startling fables about you
your pregnant body houses a bed
on which a succulent woman reposes
her loneliness chafing at the tastes that come to her mind
and yet she is restless as she anticipates
that the curtain will tremble as it unfastens
and her dress flit away like a cloud
when someone she doesn’t know appears at her doorway
She doesn’t care
if she finds him amenable or not
because she wants only one thing from him
that he trace out a flawless portrait of a building
composed from sinuous nerves
whose form and flesh she finds repugnant
and quickly turns her into an adversary
and the night’s callous onlooker begins to notice a
sensuous woman, artless,
unimpeachable, with no desires
Though her music is exhausted in an eye’s abrupt flicker
she’d dismantle that building like a castle of sand, its walls
caving.
These stories are fleeting fragrances
which dance as they will
through my mind.
I look now at those myriad eyes
And see but one
Are any flames of joy flickering in it?
I want to seal that eye with my hand, now.
——————
[1] Miraji ki naz:men, 72-75. One of Miraji’s more elliptical poems. He calls it mubham, nuanced, philosophical, speaking to the process of creating and composing and not amenable to easy parsing. Is the woman also the poet? Also worked on originally with Steven Kossak.
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
Raven visitations in a time of covid
Raven visitations in a time of covid
It began probably about a month ago…
Time has such an odd way of fading into increments
Wayward memory snippets
in this time of covid
Bobs and bits, which can’t anymore fit
into a calendar, days ordered
in prim squares on lined paper
So that one can say of them– here, this is the date when it happened.
So, it began at some point
my tryst with the raven
or more properly his or her acknowledgement
of mine and Anannya’s presence on raven rooftop
but one of those days, raven was there
hopping sparingly on claws
Almost tap dancing,
big beak tilted, eyes glancing askance
catching me as though I were –
I’m not sure quite what.
How does one talk to ravens I thought, almost
absently to myself.
And began a truly embarrassing ricochet of
throat gurgles that Indian men make, it’s only men I have heard do this
in another place, at another time
Breaching early mornings
with hawking and broadcasts
that strangle throats, rising and halting precipitously.
After this, sort of inauspicious introduction
I met with raven each time I came
When there was light enough
clouds and eddies lacing and paling into stillness
Raven would land, never strut like the crows
make one quietly inclined head at me
Raven-talk a bit
tumble into air to soar. Each time,
every time on the roof.
One day on the verandah
sheltered in trees raven came, sat
Didn’t loiter quite long enough
Until today,
Today the day after Anannya had taken
The best green chip-clip off an
ant swamped folded into plastic
bag of banana chips, she had set out on the verandah as our
tithe to any creature who happened by
Anannya said that raven swooped in
to claim them.
Monday, April 27, 2020
Translation of Miraji’s “Ba’ad kaa uDaav” Unscheduled landing
Unscheduled Landing[1]
He’ll kiss her. What gives him the right?
D’you see how far he flew?
Brashly black, pitch dark, kohl-black…
If I weren’t a man, I’d curse him.
Hair jostled over a shoulder
her bindi, a shooting star, at rest
as though someone had paused unexpectedly while walking.
In the bathroom, I saw
that finger stained red,
it foretold the star’s arrival
and like a pale footprint on night’s path.
It trailed a story in its wake.
So charged a hearer might exclaim,
” That note needs no tremolo”
I’d heard that same tone once
when a trembling dress slithering
to the floor, snared,
dangling from the bedpost
where the curtains were tied.
“Don’t bother, let it be, leave it.”
She closed her heavy-lidded eyes again
covering them with a hand suddenly
if she opened them now, for a moment
those eyes
that had refused to look at me:
I wonder what they would notice
I wonder what she would clasp.
Perhaps the moment when
Eternity and emptiness mingled
Were without beginning and came to no end.
When her bindi looked
like
a comet.
It traced that fable
along night’s course
which drew a listener to exclaim:
That note needs no tremolo.
I can’t see the shivering dress any longer
no longer do my eyes need to.
A miracle in a night-storm that had receded
What a tempest!—A blind deluge.
As it calmed, I remembered Noah
Noah, who’d said to his sons:
“Open the cage, release her, let the dove go
It’ll find land for us.”
It quickly flew back—a failure
In its preordained fate.
Next a crow was let loose—”He will find land.”
Do you see where he alighted?
What gives him the right? He’ll kiss her.
brashly black, pitch dark, kohl-black…
Originally retranslated with Steven Kossak, impresario and friend.In his honour.
——————
[1] Miraji ki naz:men, 99-101.115-117 in the printed version. Poem from 1941.
Sunday, April 26, 2020
Ushering death in
Ushering death in
My Nani taught me to usher someone into death
I asked her—
when she first told me that this
was something I was to do
on a somewhat regular basis—
Whether it was like going to Woodlands for Sunday dosas
where the man in the front would walk us to a table and
seat us with steel water glasses set down carefully
and we would all quickly order paper dosas and idlis
because by then we were really really hungry.
Was I to be that man,
Inviting everyone to their places
when they were already way beyond ready?
She laughed, and of course
Most of the time it was not like that at all.
She would bring me to sit with people
And breathe with them, follow it in and see it out
until it began to fade, each breath a wisp
Each pause between
Lingering so long almost
as though the next would not come
until the pause was all that remained.
But there was this one time
When I dreamt.
Leading people as it were to where they were
headed
It was after my Nani had herself died
She came to me in a yellow metal school bus
The American kind with hard long seats
She was so tiny, I could see only the very tip of
her head hovering
as she maneuvered peering through the steering wheel
Along a street striped every so often
With white zebra crossings where children could walk
And in the way one does sometimes in dreams
I thought to myself: but it’s the wrong country
And
She’s never come to me before, why not? I miss her
She doesn’t know how to drive.
I was standing at a bus stop
Next to a sign with blurred letters
she pulled up, gestured me in
and said, we have three
you’ll have to take them onwards
and then it jumped, the dream I mean
from one stop to another, each man
standing just as I had
where a bus might rest
Each of them my uncles
And before the dream jerked me awake
She had dropped me off with a quick
“show them the way”
And all I could say to her
As dreaming peeled away, was
when can I see you again
will you come back.
Saturday, April 25, 2020
On Juhu’s shore. Translation of Miraji’s “Juhukekinare”
On Juhu’s shore[1]
Dense clusters of boats strung
haphazardly along the horizon.
Those closer in are loaded down with light,
as they venture out their profiles fade into fog.
Each is scattered in stillness, plump with peace,
silence closing around them—sails billowing tepidly.
But each seems to take its place will fully
combing the hush lackadaisically
as they drift on life’s freshening breath
along the far horizon where boats cluster by chance.
2.
The skewed circle of the coast’s uproar seems so close
As each wave’s disquiet washes up against eternity.
No boats appear along the verge of the sky
and grief’s sharp surprise collects like driftwood from someone’s soul.
3.
Oyster pearls lace the water’s hem in fluted shadows.
Suddenly clouds gather in folds,
the sun briefly curtained
boats swiftly secluded without a trace
and lingering along the water’s curve, oysters cupped open nakedly.
——————
[1] tiin raNg, 108-109, Manuscript. Also in sah aatisaah, 141-142
Friday, April 24, 2020
Summoning the spirits
Summoning the spirits
As far back as I can remember,
maybe even when I was three
My family relied on me to call up its ghosts
As though I were a tuning fork
Tinging away when I was turned
In the right direction
So that ‘they’ could sense me
What they were no one quite knew
Spirits, absences in time’s sequence
Empty spaces
Don’t you feel them sometimes as well
A rush in the very far corner of your eye
As though someone was
a visitor hurrying by to somewhere else
But when I was oriented just so
those that were still hanging around
would fold themselves into quiet corners
answer questions that had not quite made it
to one’s tongue
so even the person listening for their own
voice might not know what it was
they had caught sight of
The final time it was my mother
I was asked to buzz her up,
By a bevy of cousins, aunts, brothers
just as if summoning her
could be done on a cell phone
dial spirit 911
But she was ornery
Refused to respond
came and went as it pleased her
until it was clear she had done her bit
seeded the trouble she needed to induce
and nothing anyone could beg
would beckon her back
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
Still waiting for a response
Still waiting for a response…
In these last weeks,
so many people have been left
hanging
On promises made or
Promises that ought to have been made and held to
On money that was their due
On even one thali with small mounds
Of rice, of a vegetable
Of one chapatti or even two
everyday fare
Here, in this small room
Two brothers stand beside
mattresses rolled tight
backed against the corner
there is only
a cupboard so slightly askew
tacked up on a wall
And inside half a cup of dal
A few tablespoons of rice
A kilo of potatoes
Some salt
And the camera angles down to catch their voices
“he has to share with his younger brother”
“we will die hungry, how many days will we manage”
And more than a week has already gone by for Surendra Shah
——————
For Srilata, whose found quotes poem was such an inspiration, and broke my heart yet again.
Monday April 20th
Passion’s unforeseen eddies (Translation of Miraji’s “Ras ki anokhi lehren) [1]
Passion’s unforeseen eddies
I long for the world’s gaze to trace me, as though
eyes were lingering on a curve
languorously along a tree’s graceful branch
But with its leaves tossed off
Tousled on the earth with heaped bed clothes
I long to be swathed in gusts
that tease me playfully with whatever comes to mind
pause diffidently,
and
pull themselves together
in a passionate palette of whispers
I long to walk on, running suddenly
a breeze skimming waves
which flows rustling without rest
Should a bird sing,
its melody will tattoo humid ripples on my skin
turn back again and again, echoing ceaselessly
The sun’s fervor, gusts so tender,
Words cascading seduction
Each a color that froths and fades into spilling air
Let nothing stop briefly in the joy that loops around me
Even as its circle narrows
a field opens out into wide wheat
the sky, my tent, dressed up as an uncommon bed
draws me to it with passionate, eloquent innuendo
Eddies slapping resolve into bird song
slip away paling from sight, eluding one’s gaze
and
I’m left sitting, unaware
That my hair is naked
Joy’s circumference tightening around me
Enough. Let nothing else enter its circle
——————
[1] Miraji ki naz:men, 152-153. This was written in the voice of a woman, plays with Mahadevi Verma’s verse and its lyrical allusions to becoming one with nature. https://poshampa.org/ras-ki-anokhi-lehrein/ is the Nagari version
Sunday, April 19, 2020
A forest of mourning
A forest of mourning
I sensed that trees clasped memories,
Bits and pieces of so many lives lingering along stem
Littering the soft earth, mashed into the absent fall of leaves
But when I found them cradling genocide
The staccato of a child’s heels rising and falling away
An abrupt knife closing in on a heart
That day in Missituk,
I couldn’t have known that soundlessness
No birds whose whisper flight
No flowers whose slow bow
Might trace the spoor of death after death, as
Silence so hollowed out
So utterly empty
——————
In memory of Pequot killed; so many Native communities were subjected to brutal massacres, this is merely one of those instances that left their memorial in trees. Kath and I went to this forest for a walk and were stunned at what we felt, the utter emptiness, somewhere that ought to have been filled with peaceful sound. Mystic is the Anglicization of Missituk or great tidal river.
For Kath who is my heart
Saturday, April 18, 2020
Translation of Miraji’s philosophical proof poem YAGANAGAT—Solitude
YAGANAGAT—Solitude
Time isn’t corrupt, there’s no harm in it
it’s only a ceaseless easy-going wash.
and all I need say is this:
I’m neither evil, nor am I time
I’m not even a stream’s tranquil eddy
Though I’m unable to say much about time, I can tell you:
everyone who lives alone, reaches for oblivion
Evil, good, time, a river—These furnish eternity’s residence
I don’t live at home, I live alone, a stranger to myself
The houses, these jungles,
these flowing paths and oceans
these mountains,
tall buildings glimpsed by chance
desolate tombs and a mosque caretaker claimed by death
children washing into laughter
a dying traveler cuffed by a car
tenuous breezes, chunky greenery
a few clouds floating back and forth
here and there
What are they?
They are time’s belongings, they
are a river’s ease
These houses, these jungles
byways and rivers
buildings, a mosque caretaker
breezes, foliage and clouds soaring across the sky
all these, each takes a seat in my home.
I too am that time, with every breath
the river sluices, ebbs
But there’s no evil, no harm in me.
How do I tell you this:
time commencing, its conclusion,
endless and empty
death and the forever live on in me.
Friday, April 17, 2020
Story of bees, or it’s a bee’s life
Story of bees, or it’s a bee’s life
Surdas is full up with bhramara
bees buzzing
Humidly at the cusp
of petalled walls
Love’s nimble kiss
We usually envision them singly
sturdy yellow stripes, a tad hairy
but so many fall away from our dreaming
floridly plump bumbles
slivers of almost translucent repose, a honeybee
and more and more
each tumbling
in huddled eddies
as we venom the earth.
——————-
In honor of Sheba Chhachhi’s installation Winged Pilgrims: Bee Tables
Thursday, April 16, 2020
My translation of Miraji’s translation of an Elegy for Baudelaire (and perhaps for us as well)
My translation of Miraji’s translation of an Elegy for Baudelaire:
“Ave Atque Vale”
Oh, my brother
in the old season of your songs,
you saw in those secrets, in that grief, in the anguish,
which is denied us,
the austere tautness of love’s knife flame.
At a place at night
where no one has dared breathe till now
the petals of sweet love’s poisonous buds
bloomed for your elusive gaze.
No one else even glimpsed them.
The clandestine treasures of time’s ripe fertility
its faults which have no astronomy
those things leached clean of happiness,
two places, where with the eyes of a grieving soul
as it turns in sleep, turns from the dust motes
of strange dreams and weeps,
on each face you glimpsed a shadow so
you saw that what people gather in a garden
blossoms only as thorn.[1]
——————
[1] “caarls baudela’ir,” 182. Algernon Swinburne wrote an elegy for the French poet Charles Baudelaire. Miraji translated it into Urdu for his essay on Baudelaire. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45275/ave-atque-vale-56d224b50fa53
Wednesday April 15, 2020
Where my arm swung loose …
Everyone I knew had imaginary friends.
Given I had only a few that I knew (friends I mean and not the imaginary kind),
and each of them as mad as I,
we could count on our visitors easily.
Anjali had a cat dressed up in a flutter of wings
that suspended her buzzing willfully
just behind Anjali’s littlest finger;
Geeta had a squirrel that tarted itself up
In a tutu, pink froth standing smartly (like an accident waiting to flop)
just in front of its tail; and
I, well I had death.
I’d seen pictures of course, all of us had, hovering
Over calendar photographs we were supposed to
learn our western art lessons from –
grey bones and that scythe hanging back waiting.
But mine had no form, no shape
she, for me death was a she,
felt like a whiff of dust
just behind my left shoulder
where my arm swung loose.
——————
Tuesday, April 14, 2020, Monday April 13, Sunday April 12 (I translated this poem over three days)
Translation of Miraji Translation of Miraji: A clerk’s love song “Klark ka naghma-e muhabbat”
A clerk’s love song [1]
All night long
I labor away
in dreams and sleep
Morning shows up
in the guise of a goddess
and I rise off my bed to wash
I bought a slice of bread yesterday,
Ate half and left a wedge aside
for today
My world is awash in marvels
In front of me lives a man who has a woman at home
On my right, a single-storied now barren house
at my left a hedonist and his mistress
And among all this I sit,
I sit without you.
You and I. I with every comfort and
only one thing amiss
the perfume of your jumbled hair.
On the way to work
I disentangle myself from breakfast, slip out of the house
trudge the road to the office,
and on the way pass the town’s elegance by,
a horse carriage, two cars,
children traipsing toward school,
what more do I have to say about those buggies: Let’s see,
Cars are spark lightning,
And the hauteur of those carriages that leave me behind is unbearable
This is the largesse from the houses of proper gentry, this
is mere illusion, mischievous, innocence pausing
but as I walk the road, my fate is unhampered, thinned with
sorrow.
electricity’s sharp smile illuminates carriages
in the amiable modulation of conversation
and this recognition hangs back awaiting:
Does God have no compassion?
everything lives close by but for you,
and I,
I whose eyes can no longer grab at the courage to cry.
The road cuts back and forth, the prison passes by.
Unless I embrace it, I will lose my heart to work
I carry that heart slowly into the office
My unassuming, foolish heart, a child—given away elsewhere,
And the river of work pulls me into its eddies, my senses damping.
At the office: The denouement:
When half the day has angled by, lost in its time,
our office-head saunters in from home
dispatches his peon to summon me,
I am his to call at will
he talks forwards and then sidles sideways,
his conversation quite without worth.
I tire of his words,
Abandon them for a moment to come back to my room
to find a file,
a fire sparks my heart: Were I like him, an officer
my house would be at a remove from the town’s dirt,
the town’s dusty streets far away, and I
I’d have you
but I’m merely a munshi, and you:
you’re the queen of wealth, a purveyor of fame
and this,
this merely the story of my desire, more seasoned than the earth.
———————
Here I have sometimes chosen rhythm over complexity,
This is the Urdu modernist poet Miraji’s rare foray into realist lyric. It’s very spare, very playful, about love’s longing but also deeply political. Its exquisite unfussiness makes it brutally difficult to render well enough in translations. Even as I get ready to post it, I find myself tweaking, words, lines, phrasing, rhythm. I will translate a segment of this particular poem every day until it is done, in such a way that I can still hold to the sense and structure of it. I last translated it for the late Meena Alexander’s collection of love lyric. I am retranslating it in honor of her, because she really loved it.
The poem offers a counterpoint to the poet Faiz’s occasionally much more overwrought political verses. Faiz had such deep respect for Miraji that though the two differed in so many ways, Faiz often, like many other poets of that time, asked Miraji for salaah or advice and wrote the introduction to one of Miraji’s volumes.
Saturday, April 11, 2020
Last day out
Last day out
That last day out
I had learned to step so sparingly
that my toes were a mere smidgen on sand
And it was as though crabs could trust
That I would let them be
wayfarers flicking their
claws towards the absent-minded plankton
only they discerned
In rumpled eddies that pooled
That last day out
I had perhaps
learned to begin walking nimbly on the earth
——————
Inspired by Anannya’s lovely meditation on Derrick Jensen
Friday, April 10, 2020
Bhūl gayā: The maqta
Bhūl gayā: The maqta
Where the poet shows up as his signature
Should someone ask you about the poet
who persuaded you to give up your heart
Tell them this:
That having spoken Miraji repented
and then,
mislaid his voice
Thursday, April 9, 2020
Bhūl gayā: The 10thsher
Bhūl gayā: The 10th sher
As I turn to look at everyone passing by, I find
They all nurse one simple reproach:
Why, when I can recall everything so fully
Has my time forgotten me?
——————
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
Bhūl gayā (Miraji): The 9th sher
Bhūl gayā: The 9th sher
The world that passed by has waned
As my heart annulled my life
I paid out my lot in laughter and forgot
To mourn, to grieve
——————
Tuesday, April 7, 2020
Requiem for the earth
Requiem for the earth
The thing is this
PTSD,
putsd, ptsad in cadences that tickle my ear
is mostly really sneaky
it doesn’t whup you
with a loosely balanced sanctimonious ruler
across your offered-up palm
that the nuns in nursery school meted out
when we had worn our grey rubber erasers to bits and pieces
and scrubbed away at pencil streaking uneasily across smooth paper lines
with a surreptitious finger
No.
Ptsad
can happen upon you wrapped
into a wave’s frothy unsteadiness
shoot a ruffled frisson
Along one muscle, just one
and your upper arm
stalls, jamming
The thing is this
All those ptsd parables
we can diagnose
promise a luscious dastan,
veritable epoch-making fables scrambled
scrabbled from epics
A pistol’s sharp snort
and huff in dank nights
Those tales that gift a sort of repose
The thing is this
Ptsd
is a heap of
everyday happenstances
that Hannah Arendt might have called banal
Toothbrush bristles turning slightly wonky
A voice’s routine thrum, syncopating askew
The thing is this
ptsd
Has no simply discernable causes
And almost no cures
——————
(in honor of quaranteam-mate’s coffee-morning Derrick Jensen readings)
Monday, April 6, 2020
The marbles in her pocket
Amoebae were among my early companions,
After she caught my eye (for she was a she)
As I absently fluttered through the encyclopedia
Then I began nestling along pseudopods,
sniffing out sorrows a child may have tucked away, quietly
jostling the marbles in her pocket
——————
Sunday, April 5, 2020
Bhūl gayā 8 (Miraji)
Bhūl gayā
The 8th sher
Laughter inside laughter
Play within play
Conversation awash
As color fades away
Once I had a heart
And now
I forget my seeping wounds
——————
Saturday, April 4, 2020
Turning back to Miraji Bhūl gayā 7 th Sher
Bhūl gayā
The 7th sher
It’s not a question of comprehension
I am tipsy on delight
I lower my head in the water to drown
And the sea slips by, unheeded
——————
To my LMW
Friday, April 3, 2020
Crow Chronicles 1: Pedagogies for this time
Converse with crows
This is how it all began
And like all beginnings it is fable,
Fallacy and truth
We had a nanny whose thrill was thorn
That she lashed
crimson scent beading fine wire on flesh and bone
A crow plummeted in
Sat poised
And then, another, and another and on, and on
A raucous melody, queuing to the rise and fall of
Whooshing switch until it trickled to silence
And they coasted away
Thursday, April 2, 2020
The whisper back (I am in a break from Miraji)
The whisper back
When I was little
I spoke with everything
They always responded
Ants strung out in wending byways known only to them
My cheek pressed so tight against the dank red cool of floor
Eyes squinted flat
To trace wandering lines
And the whisper back
———————————-
For Kath
Wednesday, April 1, 2020
Bhūl gayā 6thsher and Note on Miraji (+ Bhūl gayā sung by Ghulam Ali)
Bhūl gayā
The 6th sher
A glance so brief, it’s
Breath
cording my waist
As the light from one look fades
And the moment passes by
I forget
Ghulam Ali singing Bhūl gayā:
Bhūl gayā in a music video from the film Manto:
Some of you might be puzzling over who exactly this ‘Miraji’ I am translating was.
Miraji (1912-1949) is probably one of the best modernist poets in any Indian language, partly because he was so promiscuous in trying out new forms of lyric as well as prose. He translated voraciously from pretty much every Indian language including Sanskrit and, given his name, was translating Mirabai as he died. He also translated widely from poets all over the world as well as from many different eras, including his own time (Alun Lewis, Anna Akhmatova, HD, E.E. Cummings, Stephen Vincent Benet and such). But his focus was often on poets who had been exiled over and over from literary canons, or consigned to the garbage bins of history, then dusted off and revived, or dumped again, or simply poets who were misplaced, forgotten. Here we can include, among many others that he wrote essays on, Japanese women poets, Sappho, Korean women poets, Charles Baudelaire.
Miraji was self-taught; his schooling was in libraries. He felt that we needed to usher back those who had been left out of our textbooks as an antidote to colonial holds on our sense of what mattered and on the compass of our imaginations. Miraji believed that we could repair the grief that colonialism left when it abraded our tongues, by turning to poetry, and through not just what we wrote, but how we wrote.
Miraji settled for a time in many places, he was a musafir. But the cities in which he began to find his craft and his practice of poetry conclaves (by composing together, by offering islah to everyone who sent him work, by framing essays on single poems written by his compatriots), as circles or Halqas, as assemblies or jama’at, were Lahore, Delhi, Bombay (where he died on the electroshock therapy table at 39). The Progressive Writer’s Association (the Urdu chapter was the first of many) did not know what to do with him, they called him insane, and kept on tossing him out, but he kept on coming back.
He was known as an extraordinarily generous, gentle, subtle, tender reader and as an essayist, whose musings on other poets changed the entire form of the essay on lyric or the lyrical essay. It was considered an honor at the time to have him agree to write on your lyric–every major Urdu poet (Faiz Ahmed Faiz among them) mailed verse to Miraji asking for it. And he introduced the recitation of contemporary poetry and forays into essayistic translations to All India Radio, Delhi, in the 1940s, where he worked for a short while.
He lived like a Sufi or a sadhu, with a few clothes, a thaila of papers, folders calligraphed with his own lyric, giving away pretty much everything he earned to those in need.
He drank every day, but only in the evenings. Every day, all day, until 5, before he began to drink, he was absorbed in the riyaaz of crafting lyric.
——————
Tuesday March 31, 2020
Bhūl gayā 5th sher
Bhūl gayā
The 5th sher
I circumambulate memory
My heart so pummeled, I mislay
The enigmatic chemistry of an idiosyncrasy
as abstruse as alchemy
elation in melancholia, anguish in euphoria
——————
Monday, March 30, 2020
Bhūl gayā 4thsher …
Bhūl gayā
The fourth sher – doublings, two more literal, the next two not, playing with the rhythms of meaning a sher might inveigle as it is recited. There are so many more, to envision and sound out.
A ray hangs back, peering
sheltering coyly in the dusk
Reminiscence blurs her face
A silhouette mislaid
A ray hangs back, peering
sheltering
coyly in the dusk
Reminiscence blurs her face
A silhouette mislaid
A ray hangs back, coyly sheltering in the dusk
Reminiscence blurs her face
A silhouette mislaid
A ray hangs back, coyly sheltering in the dusk
Reminiscence blurs
her face, a silhouette
mislaid
Sunday, March 29, 2020
Bhūl gayā 3rd sher
Bhūl gayā
The third sher
Days and nights that flow by
Words that impale
My mind now a child’s, let slip
Its reverie on love
Saturday, March 28, 2020
Bhūl gayā 2ndsher
Bhūl gayā
The second sher
Why ask how
you renounced memory, what was it that fled
its source was not an ethical lapse,
imagine it like this instead
he simply forgot
Friday, March 27, 2020
Bhūl gayā
Translation of the Urdu poet Miraji’s Ghazals (comments welcome)
I have kept to Miraji’s own practice of translation, as I translate him. He would turn a ghazal into free verse, grow lyric fragments into trees. He wanted to keep to the sonorousness and sense of the words, even if that sometimes broke their form open to intervention and invention.
Bhūl gayā
Matla’ (the first sher)
Wandering from town to house, a wayfarer
misplaces the road that gathers him home.
That which was once mine
and your belongings,
both foresworn from memory.
Mine and yours no longer known.
Thursday, March 26, 2020
Nary a notice
No one told me that my words may wander away
Go walkabout
Like a slightly pouty lover whose coffee I mislaid
The lanky sun eyed cat, bedraggled black, shimmying its butt at me
Stalking off
Do words stalk? I think to myself
Except something left,
It’s only ‘something’ for now
Because there’s barely a gape where the whatever must be
I am a word con—I can smith my way in circles, mazed so tight
That you, listening to me would never feel your way through to a center so
Blank
Not even blind fingers running over the ruffle of my word net
Ghalib calls it daam-e shanidaan
Would know there was no fish wiggling, impatient, to flurry away
Yesterday, I think, or was it the day when the sun filtered grey
What was it – that brings you -umm- I into a tandem, to tango
My heart thudded through my feet,
Google helped
AND – came back
Workbooks pondered with my mother, when reading frayed,
words not stick to my gaze
– jack AND jill, went up the hill
AND – a grammar lesson I repeat, holding it so tender, clutching it in the
closed fist of my head
Capitals in thick black pen lines, pinned on the glisten steel of my
refrigerator, butterfly word,
AND it slithered away, blurred slippery, isn’t memory always, my lover
cautioned
flighty
Yesterday, or was it today, it flew back
Settled oh so lightly on my tongue
******
Geeta Patel is Professor at University of Virginia’s Department of Middle Eastern &South Asian Language and Cultures. Her work spans gender, colonial history, poetry, feminism. She holds three degrees in science and straddles an interdisciplinary world of science, finance, cinema and media as well. Some of her notable publications include Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings on the Urdu poet Miraji and Risky Bodies and Techno-Intimacy.
Geeta Patel on Miraji in The Beacon
Queer Hauntings of a Vagrant Heart: Miraji’s Poetic Visions
Also read:
Portraits of Unspeakable Anguish
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