Akhand Sphota
Amarjit Chandan ____________________________ [Born in Nairobi, Amarjit Chandan graduated from Punjab University. As a result of his active involvement in the Maoist Naxalite movement in his youth, he was imprisoned and spent two years in solitary confinement. Chandan has edited many anthologies of world poetry and fiction, including two collections of “British Punjabi” poetry and short fiction. Translated into Greek, Turkish, Hungarian, Romanian and various Indian languages, his work is included in several anthologies in India and abroad. He has participated in poetry readings in England, Hungary and at Columbia University. An active translator, he has translated work by Brecht, Neruda, Ritsos, Hikmet and Cardenal, among others, into Punjabi. There is a silence in Chandan’s poetry — a deep sense of the unspoken, and more accurately, the unspeakable. This is, no doubt, intimately connected with his years of solitary confinement in an Amritsar prison. In an interview (not included in this edition) he declares that his belief in “violence as a midwife of change” has long been buried. But what is not so easy to bury is memory: memory of torture, sleep deprivation and of the interminable hours in a prison cell, in which time frayed his nerves “like chalk screeching on a blackboard. You count your breaths, lose count and start again . . . I’m a poet, yet there are no words to explain these feelings, this loss of spirit.” ] _________________ The history of the unequal relationship between English and Punjabi goes back to the early nineteenth century, when William Carey, a shoe-maker turned Baptist, published a ninety-nine-page Grammar of the Punjabi Language in 1812 in Calcutta, then the capital of British India. In 1849 the East India Company’s army occupied the sovereign state of the Punjab, the land of my ancestors. The Punjab came under the control of the British Crown government in 1858. Seven years earlier John Newton of the Ludhiana Christian Mission in eastern Punjab had published the first-ever Punjabi translation of The New Testament, entitled Anjeel (after the French – évangile), along with a new Grammar of the Punjabi Language. The three-pronged process of politics, religion and linguistics was in full swing, though the African formula of the Bible and the Land had not been charted exactly in India. The religious conversion was negligible and the linguistic one was enormous. The British left India in 1947 dismembering the Punjab, but English still rules there; so much so that the Punjabi syntax, now mirroring the English sentence structure, is changed forever. With the steam locomotive came the colonial locomotive that was full of a new class of western-oriented Indian gentlemen, better known as baboos. Careerists – the offspring of Lord Macaulay’s agenda of educating Indians to craft a nation of petty clerks – soon learnt to take pride in attaining glibness in English. Lord Macaulay had said that ‘a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India’. In that belief, Indian schoolchildren of future generations were made to cram Shakespeare’s sonnet ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds…’, Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ and Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, ignoring their own linguistic and literary heritage. The loss was total. There was a blessing in disguise, however. Thanks to English, a window on the world of knowledge opened. The Punjabis studying abroad in the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London and California established contact and interaction with Western thought. In the early twentieth century Puran Singh (1881-1931), the poet, was writing on Nietzsche in Punjabi; Kahan Singh (1861-1938), the great lexicographer, was collaborating with Macauliffe (1837-1913), on the English translation of the Sikh scriptures for his six-volume magnum opus The Sikh Religion; Dharam Anant [Singh], the Greek and Sanskrit scholar, worked on Plato, and Santokh Singh (1892-1927) introduced Marx in Punjabi. Two collections of Puran Singh’s poetry, and Dharam Anant’s treatise on Plato and Sikhism were published in London by J.M. Dent and Luzac. Mulk Raj Anand moved in the Bloomsbury literary group. Khushwant Singh, Ved Mehta and Zulfikar Ghose made their mark on English literature in the latter half of the last century. II On this sundry background of gain and loss, I started writing at the age of twenty in my own language Punjabi, which I had learnt simultaneously with English. I cut my literary teeth in a real Punjabi milieu. My father, a carpenter turned photographer and communist trade unionist, wrote poetry as well. My mother was illiterate. So my home language remained unadulterated. I rarely write poems in English. The ones I have written were for my loved ones who did not know my language. When I translate such poems into Punjabi, I put the appendage sheepishly – ‘translated from English’. Of course Punjabi is my mother language. I think, feel and dream in it. I live in it and I will die in it. No wonder, working with English poets, I could translate only one fourth of my original poems into English. Kundera, in his novel Testaments Betrayed, sympathises and bemoans Leoš Janáček’s determination to write his operas in Czech, thus limiting his audience. I feel that I am of his tribe. The word for ‘translation’ in Punjabi is anuvaad. It is derived from Sanskrit Anu, meaning: which follows, close, near, corresponding, at the same time; and vaad is the idea behind a sound. The sound is the uttered word. The written word is silent. The poetic creative process can be defined in so many ways. Maybe the idea underlying the word anuvaad equally applies to the birth of a poem. Here an imagined reality takes shape in words. Perhaps my most recent poem written in English could relate that experience. To Father As you taught me to write the first letter of Gurmukhi – the Punjabi script holding my nervous hand in yours You taught me to hold the camera to focus on faces in the pupil of the eye and to press the button holding my breath As if it were a gun loaded with bullets of life.
As Ores Run Through Rock Veins.
Cyprian Kamil Norwid _______________________ Cyprian Kamil Norwid, one of Poland’s most outstanding and original poets, was also an artist, dramatist and sculptor. Besides, he also used to write exquisite and elegant letters. Norwid led a tragic and poverty-stricken life (once he had to live in a cemetery crypt). He experienced increasing health problems, unrequited love, harsh critical reviews, and increasing social isolation. He lived abroad most of his life, especially in London and in Paris, where he died. Literary historians view Norwid’s work as being too far ahead of its time to be appreciated,possessing elements of romanticism, classicism and parnassianism. Following his death, many of Norwid’s works were forgotten It was not until the Young Poland period that his finesse and style was appreciated. Here are some of his poems and drawings: *** But Just to See But just to see a chapel like this room, No bigger: there to watch Polish symbols loom In warm expanding series which reveal Once and for all the Poland that is real. There the stone-cutter, mason, carpenter, Poet, and, finally, the knight and martyr Could re-create with pleasure, work and prayer. There iron, bronze, red marble, copper could Unite with native larches, stone with wood, Because those symbols, burrowed by deep stains, Run through us all as ores run through rock veins. Fate Mischance, ferocious, shaggy, fixed its look On man, gazed at him, deathly grey, And waited for the time it knew he took To turn away. But man, who is an artist measuring The angle of his model’s elbow joint, Returned that look and made the churlish thing Serve his aesthetic point. Mischance, the brawny, when the dust had cleared Had disappeared. Recipe for A Warsaw Novel Three landlords, stupid ones ; cut each in two; That’ll make six: add stewards, Jews and water Enough to give full measure: whip the brew With one pen, flagellate your puny jotter Warm, if there’s time, with kisses: that’s the cue For putting in your blushing gushing daughter Red as a radish: tighten up: add cash, A sack of roubles, cold: mix well, and mash. Those of Love A woman, parents, brothers, even God Can still be loved, but those who love them need Some physical vestige, shadow: I have none. Cracow is silent now that its hewn stone Has lost what tongue it had; no banner of Mazovian linen has been stained to prove Art obstinate ; the peasant’s houses tilt ; The native ogives of our churches wilt; Barns are too long ; our patron saints are bored With being statues ; partitioned and ignored, Form, from the fields to steeples, can’t command One homespun wand or touch one angel’s hand. Tenderness Tenderness can be like a battle cry, Like the murmur of a hidden spring And like a funeral dirge… * And like a long braid of golden strands On which a widower hangs His ancient silver watch What did you do to Athens, Socrates What did you do to Athens, Socrates, That the people erected a golden statue to you, Having first poisoned you? What did you do to Italy, Alighieri, That the insincere people built two graves for you, Having first driven you out? What did you do to Europe, Columbus, That they dug you three graves in three places Having first shackled you? What did you do to your people, Camoens, That the sexton had to cover your grave twice, After you had starved? What in the world are you guilty of, Kosciuszko, That two stones in two places bear down on you, Having first had no burial place? What did you do to the world, Napoleon, That you were confined to two graves after your demise, Having first been confined? What did you do to the people, Mickiewicz? *** adminhumanitiesunderground.org
I Put Aside The Inspection Of My Great Talent
Devi Prasad Mishra ___________________ POEMS ARE PARAMOUNT Poetry is possible only in the mother tongue so said a poet One should stick to one’s tongue then lest one forget it Also that one may never forget That fathers are the first dictators And as I said before the first communists are the mothers Neighbours have never assured us they will not turn fascists At the very start of the Allahabad to Delhi rail journey A person proposed we exchange seats And then what else there was to possibly exchange I said I will not exchange my chaos with anyone One gets paid well for idiotic films that lie he said getting off The protection that a poet must get from the Constitution is given to the cow I commented before I left He was chewing paan and he laughed Some of the spit came right on my face Poems must be written lest poets be reduced to a moral minority Poems must be written to remember Muhammad Ali as boxer That Vietnam ,is a nation Palestine worth settling in Being Rohit Vemula means being human Only poems register the passing Of seasons and sisters, and falling of leaves and men Poems must be written because only poets return awards And they know the solitary art of crying while writing a poem on Akhlaq. (Translated by Asad Zaidi) *** I COVET MY RUINATION TO ENCOUNTER TRUTH About others I cannot say But my trade goes on fine without Arnab Goswami I covet my ruination to encounter truth— No harm if hair too is included in the grand Einsteinian disarray Che’s visage and Stephen Hawking’s body Fassbinder’s soul and Ritwik Ghatak’s black & white For a few days I put aside the inspection of my great talent Rest of the time I make do with my audacity and irreverence I feel assured by the empty hall during my poetry-reading session Three people had appeared during Ismat Chugtai’s last rites During the funeral services of Raghuvir Sahay there were a few more I too was there but people did not know me then nor do they know me now There was no facebook then and now there is but I never knew how to be on it I used to carry a strange and crabby mien As if after drawing a semi abstract charcoal portrait of a perennial dissenter The artist ran away with his lover In a society where Sunny Leone, Modi and Amitabh Bachchan tweets receive the highest like-followers Talking to oneself at 1 am in the morning And to be sleepless because One’s nephew in Singapore is a Modi supporter is quite dry and desolate an opponent I shall die of exploding veins It is only a sign of how each of us shall die Which means the culture minister shall die of the poison within Come, before we depart let us complete the ritual of asking why people watch the films of Shah Rukh Khan at all? And pray, why are numerous IPL matches and the lost countenance of Rajiv Shukla embroiled within it? If you remember I have said many times that no love is illicit And contempt for the tyrant is the most romantic work-load. I am getting late abdicating this world But to quit my lover’s bed I am forging a few excuses All right, let us consider this poem to be over at this point And you all please collect subscriptions for my quitting Delhi I don’t know for how long I shall remain with this thought That how can a fascist be named Ramakant Pande? (Translation: HUG) *** कविताएं लिखनी चाहिए जैसा कि एक कवि कहता है कि मातृभाषा में ही लिखी जा सकती है कविता तो मातृभाषा को याद रखने के लिए लिखी जानी चाहिए कविता और इसलिए भी कि यह समझ धुंधली न हो कि पिता पहला तानाशाह होते हैं और जैसा कि मैं कह गया हूं मांएं पहला कम्युनिस्ट पड़ोसियों ने फाशिस्ट न होने की गारंटी कभी नहीं दी इलाहाबाद से दिल्ली के सफर के शुरू में एक आदमी ने सीट को एक्सचेंज करने का प्रस्ताव रखा फिर उसने कहा कि और क्या एक्सचेंज किया जा सकता है मैंने कहा कि मैं किसी को अपना कोहराम नहीं देने वाला जाते-जाते वह कह गया कि झूठ पर फिल्म बनाने के बहुत पैसे मिलते हैं मैंने गायब होने के पहले कहा कि जो संरक्षण संविधान में कवि को मिलना चाहिए था वह गाय को मिल गया पान खाते हुए वह हंस पड़ा और उसका सारा थूक मेरे मुंह पर पड़ गया कविताएं लिखनी चाहिए ताकि कवि नैतिक अल्पसंख्यक न रह जाएं कविताएं लिखी जानी चाहिए ताकि मुक्केबाज के तौर पर मुहम्मद अली की याद रहे और देश के तौर पर वियतनाम की और बसने के लिए फिलिस्तीन से बेहतर कोई देश न लगे और वेमुला होना सबसे ज्यादा मनुष्य होना लगे कविताएं लिखनी चाहिए क्योंकि ऋतुओं और बहनों के बगल से गुजरने को कविताएं ही रजिस्टर करती हैं और पत्तों और आदमी के गिरने को कविताएं लिखी जानी चाहिए क्योंकि कवि ही करते हैं वापस पुरस्कार और उन्हें ही आती है अखलाक पर कविताएं लिखते हुए रो पड़ने की अप्रतिम कला *** सत्य को पाने में मुझे अपनी दुर्गति चाहिए औरों की मैं नहीं जानता लेकिन मेरा काम अर्णव गोस्वामी के बिना चल जाता है सत्य को पाने में मुझे अपनी दुर्गति चाहिए — आइंस्टीन का बिखराव जिसमें बाल भी शामिल हों तो क्या हर्ज चे का चेहरा और स्टीफन हाकिंग का शरीर फासबिंडर की आत्मा और ऋत्विक घटक का काला-सफेद मैं अपने प्रतिभावान होने का सर्वेक्षण कुछ दिनों के लिए टाल रहा हूं — बचे समय में मैं अपने दुस्साहस से काम चला लूंगा और असहमति से मैं अपने काव्य-पाठ में खाली हॉल से आश्वस्त हुआ इस्मत-चुगताई की अंत्येष्टि में तीन लोग थे रघुवीर सहाय के दाह-संस्कार में कुछ ज्यादा थे मैं भी था लेकिन मुझे लोग नहीं जानते थे अब भी नहीं जानते तब फेसबुक नहीं था और अब है तो मुझे उस पर होना नहीं आया मेरे पास अजीब झुंझलाया चेहरा था कि जैसे किसी सतत असहमत का आधा अमूर्त चेहरा चारकोल से बनाकर कलाकार अपनी प्रेमिका के साथ भाग गया हो जिस समाज में सनी लियोनी, मोदी और अमिताभ बच्चन के ट्विटर पर सबसे ज्यादा लाइक-फॉलोवर हों उसमें रात एक बजे खुद के साथ खुद का होना और इस बात पर नींद का न आना कि सिंगापुर में रहने वाला आपका भांजा मोदी समर्थक है काफी अजीब और बियाबान विपक्ष है मैं अंदर-अंदर ही फटती नस से मरूंगा — यह केवल संकेत है कि कौन किससे मरेगा मतलब कि संस्कृति मंत्री अपने भीतर के जहर से मरेगा आइए अब चलते हुए पूछ ही लेते हैं कि लोग शाहरुख खान की फिल्में क्यों देखते हैं और आईपीएल के बीसियों मैच और उनमें फंसा राजीव शुक्ला का बहुत खाया चेहरा अगर आपको याद हो तो मैंने कई बार कहा है कि कोई भी प्रेम अवैध नहीं होता और अत्याचारी से घृणा सबसे रोमांटिक कार्यभार है पृथ्वी छोड़ने में मुझे देर हो रही है लेकिन प्रेमिका का बिस्तर छोड़ने में भी मैं कई तरह के बहाने करता रहा हूं चलिए इस कविता को यहीं खत्म मान लें और मेरे लिए दिल्ली छोड़ने के टिकट का चंदा इकट्ठा करें मैं पता नहीं कब से यही सोचे जा रहा हूं कि एक फाशिस्ट का नाम रमाकांत पांडे कैसे हो सकता है *** [ The poems first appeared in the October 2016 issue of Pakhi magazine] adminhumanitiesunderground.org
95 Theses
Charles Bernstein ___________________ I am retiring in 2019, so take this as something of a swan song, or, anyway, duck soup. I leave the remainder of the theses to be filled in by you. Professionalism is a means not an end. Less is more. Professors are better off when they professionalize less and risk extinction when professionalization is primary. Professionalized scholarly writing often seems to play off a list of master-theorists who must be cited, even if the subject is overcoming mastery. A modest proposal: In your next essays and books don’t make any reference to the ten most cited authors in your field. Apply the death of the author to the ones that authorize that idea. Don’t cite authors, become an author. Then undo your own authority. If you write you are a writer. It is as simple as that and no amount of research, findings, conclusions, proposals, projects, and laboratories will change it a whit. Writing is a laboratory for the mind, its experiments are in syntax as much as analysis, arrangement as much as argument. Frame Lock was not built in a day. Tone jam is not a marmalade. Contradiction is closer to truth than consistency so don’t consistently emphasize contradiction. The truth is not the end of the essay but its point of departure. The fragment is more important for criticism today than for poetry. Not fragments: constellations. Positivism is as rhetorical as negativism. Reason abhors a rationalist. Which does not mean anything goes: anything is possible but only a very few things get through that eye of a needle that separates charm from harm. And often what appears as harm has got the charm. We’re better with alternatives to STEM Than when we go on imitating them. A recent Digital Humanities lecture presented both a fount and a font of information about a poem’s unusual digital typeface but not a word about the font’s meaning or ideology or how the visual display affected the interpretation of the poem. This was New Criticism with close reading not of the words of a text but the technology for generating its letters. Distant reading without reading is not reading. Close reading without toggling frames is myopia. Information everywhere but not a drop to drink. The question for macro and distant sociological approaches in the humanities, digital or otherwise, is not just what happens but also so what? and what for? “The fact you tell is of no value, but only the impression.” —Emerson on Thoreau (1862) Criticism, scholarship, and poetry are all fonts of rhetoric. The aversion of rhetoric is an unkind kind of rhetoric. There is no formula for avoiding formulas. Sometimes what appears as unformulated is just new jeans with fashionable rips. Not that there is anything wrong with that. One size doesn’t fit all. (Each to his own goo, be true.) Not interdisciplinarity: non-disciplinarity. (Call it pragmatism.) If we want to emulate the natural sciences let us do by stressing speculation and collaboration (through multiple author essays). Expository writing needs to be balanced by non-expository writing. I don’t want trans-national studies I want non-national studies. Non-national studies would look at language-speaking groups and conversations among languages and across languages not based only on nation states but affinities, immigration, refugees, the displaced and diasporic, the nomadic, the national-non-conforming. Examples would be born-digital arts, poets writing in English irrespective of their national or first language, Yiddish, or to give a more historical example, the Medieval and European cultures approach of David Wallace here at Penn that looks not at discrete national literatures but rather “sequences of interconnected places.” Nothing suits us like our union suits, as the old ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) ad put it. Don’t mourn: unionize. There are no themes, histories, ideologies, ideas, terms, or categories uninflected (uninfected) by the often fractal, fractured, and fraught signifying practices that make them so. Ideas bleed re(a)d blood; the imaginary weeps wet tears. The real is no less so minding the body than embodying mind. Language is never more than an extension of reality. Form and style are not ornamental to meaning. No flapjacks without eggs. Impersonality is the hobgoblin of frightened prose. Autobiography and personal narrative is not a prophylactic against formulaic expression of received ideas. Contentious rhetoric opens dialog more than professionalized prose. But contentiousness as a mode of dominance is tyranny. Denunciation and defamation, even in the name of a good cause, destroys dialog. All professional rhetoric is pre-professional. The real cannot disappear. Even the appearance of disappearance is real. The absence of expressed identity is a form of identity. The expression of identity is, also, a mask. The poetry and poetics I read and write are not a product of the world financial system but of the world semantic system. Whenever you walk on a new road, you can be sure no one has spoilt it yet. —Menachim Mendel (Kotsker Rebbe) Whenever you think you have walked down a new road, you can be sure others have been there first. Try to find and acknowledge them. Feeling superior to the self-righteous makes you that. Taking pleasure in piety is piteous. The good longs for us but we are unworthy. Recently, a dean at my college declined to allow a class for a “diversity” requirement even though the syllabus included poetry in a dozen languages from the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa. The dean saiddiversity needed to focus on only one group, one language. Diversity without uniformity is poetry and don’t count. For the colonial mind, decolonization is a new frontier to settle. It never hurts to add a joke. You know the one: three Jews four opinions? What you don’t hear is that two of them, the schmucks, have the same opinion, while the third … To write prose after Auschwitz is barbaric. “Away then with all those prophets who say to the community of Christ, ‘Peace, peace,’ and there is no peace.” My concern is more What is false? than