Viren Dangwal
[Translations: Ashok Pande]
Defining the poet of our times, Nazim Hikmet once remarked: “The real poet is not engaged in his love, his happiness or pain. In such poet’s poems his people’s pulse must beat … The poet, in order to be successful, should, in his poems, shed light on the material life. One who escapes from real life and thus treats of unrelated subjects, is destined to burn like straw.”
Probably the most innovative and the most daring among his contemporaries, Viren Dangwal treats the ordinary world with intense objectivity and skillfulness. He has turned the most mundane things like cows, elephants, tables, papayas, flies etc. into themes for his unique form of poetry. Attempting this requires immense compassion and audacity.
Critics and poets alike have time and again emphasized that Viren has ardently followed the tradition of great Hindi poets Nirala and Nagarjun. Part of this is true, but what makes Viren Dangwal a unique poet is his modernity and awareness. His socio-political convictions were vociferous and underline his unassuming loyalty to common people. Constantly challenging the evils of the new world order, he dares to experiment with hitherto unknown forms and themes, constantly making us aware of the threats and vulnerability that we are exposed to.
His poetry encompasses love, hope, struggle, irony and above all life – life that is simultaneously trivial and enormously full of possibilities. Summing up his vision, he observes:
Down these very roads tyrants have kept coming
Down these same roads
One day
Our people will come too.
(From the Preface of ‘Its been Long since I Found Anything’ – Translation of Viren Dangwal’s poems. Published by Adharshila Prakashan, 2005)
________________________________
P.T. Usha
Dark youthful gazelle
Flies on her swift long legs
Daughter of my impoverished country
Still alive in the brightness of her eyes
is the modesty recognizing hunger
Therefore there is no Sunil Gavaskarsque
splendor on her face
Don’t ever sit P. T. Usha
in that Maruti car you received as prize
Giving yourself airs even in your thoughts
Rather, put your feet up on the seat
when you travel in the airplane
Does your mouth make sounds while eating?
No worries
Those who regard silent jaws as civilized
are the most dangerous gluttons in the world.
***
Allahabad : 1970
1.
I carry you along
As the water carries the bank along
A roguery, a nostalgia, a mischief,
A panic, a suffering, a turn around, a crumpled hat,
A hard kick on the bum,
Scratching of a closing door with the wretchedness of paws
Life is a strange riddle
As soon as one thinks one belongs
And spreads out the towel, ready to breathe easily
One is thrown out mandatorily.
2.
Scores of girders come crashing down
Under them there is a man still alive
His pupils are turned upwards
From the corners of his lips a line of blood trickles
But he is still alive, that man.
His sleep is a chariot
To take him to the dream that glimmers
A thousand light years away
3.
Groping in the dark for a matchbox
Fingers find
The unfamiliar feel
Of well known things
Knowing full well that I should have
I still didn’t fill the stove
Last evening
Go, lethargy
Stay, love
Get, job
Wife, be
Make some khichri and chutney
Loneliness
Don’t stick to my neck
On the crumpled pillow
Like the sweat of May.
4.
One personal gloom
Two sandals getting worn out
Three dogs barking
So passed even this too, this day
How wonderful would it be
On opening the door to see
Four or five letters
Lighting up the darkness
5.
I read it from the very beginning
There were so many mistakes
It was impossible to amend them
Life was a book printed in a cheap press
So many prescriptions for health
They had themselves become disease.
6.
A poet is fortunate to be read
Just as to be eaten is the good fortune of a guava
Yes, it tastes good and is healthy too
Maybe, something else would flash in the mind
As someone else lives in some other place.
7.
Slowly, after the taste of failure fades away
Envy would come.
You will remember fixing
The strap that keeps slipping off
Of your rubber chappals
You will not remember the sharp
Taste of a firm guava
The glittering sharpness will terrify the depressed
Heart
Goodness will taste bitter
Shame will not leave the heart
Those companions will meet like half-acquaintances
With whom one learnt the lessons of life
With success will vanish
The sorrow of losing, the bliss of finding
Then will come envy
Blowing the trumpet of greed
8.
The sorrow of passion, adolescence
Pennilessness, a dosa a luxury
In the coffeehouse some petty men
Some supermen
Two Che Guevaras
The human being with me was Ramendra
He had Four and a half Rupees
9
[Gaffar]
A talkative smile on the face
Like a xylophone the catechu-pot
All this comes only with experience
The shirt will always be sparkling too-blued white
The knees will ache of course
If you have to sit for sixteen hours in this tiny place
“Now it is not like the old days, Sahib,
Now every Tom, Dick and Harry
Comes to study in the university,”
In this contempt is hidden
A unique brand of flattery
All this comes only with experience.
“My own son, Ekram at any rate
Never got beyond the sixth grade”
This much is certain that Gaffar
Never was insulted by any student leader
But neither did he ever
Give anything on credit to a feeble customer.
***
Manner
Yellow tinged verdant
Leaves have come up.
Abundant.
Glittering.
Trees have
Just this one way
To tell
They too love the world.
***
Shamsher
The night is my mirror
In whose hard coldness is also hidden the morning
Bright, clear
The seven sages, wetting their beards in the lake
Point at me and smile at each other,
Just because I loved
I had to suffer such revenge
Loneliness was the evening star
Solitary
That I swallowed
Like a sleeping pill but couldn’t sleep
Winds, may I dissolve
Streams, spread me out to dry over the broad shoulders of waterfalls
Leaves, let me keep up, like you, night and day
-A soft, trembling stubbornness
Workers, may you be able to say – ‘This too is us’
Immortality, may I disappear in you
Sticking always in your heart
Like a sweet splinter.
***
The Big Gun
The big gun of 1857
Is kept at the entrance of the Company Garden
Just like the Company Garden received in inheritance
It is maintained very carefully
And polished twice a year.
Tourists come to see it every morning and evening
And this gun tells them
I was very strong
And made mincemeat of even the greatest warriors
In my time
Now, at any rate,
If it is free after children have ridden it
The birds sit upon it
And chichat
Sometimes they mischievously even enter it
Especially the sparrows
They tell us
That actually however big a gun is
Its mouth has to be shut one day.
***
Poet
I am the brilliance of summer
And like a seed
The hidden warmth of winter
I am the pleasant lonesomeness of spring
Munching leisurely
The monkey nut found deep inside the pocket
I am the check-design shirt
When surging clouds abrade each other
I am their articulated rage
Desires come to me in various guises
Every need of mine I recorded with them
All my weaknesses in one inventory
They even know
When I would become quiet and hang my head
But I still keep going
Always holding on to language like a rope
On the path of my comrades
What else can a poet do
Except trying to be right.
***
The Hawkers’ Calls at the Station
Only the passengers hear them
Even when they are asleep
Those who alight don’t listen to them
This is really too much
Even not listening
Proves
You have reached.
***
Papaya
Its shapeliness is a deception
Like a wound its suppleness
Though genuine its colour seems false
Even on the tree it has a hung face
Aloof from all when sold
Bought without joy
Ready to be squashed at the slightest bump
A difficult burden for the bag
Its hard to eulogize about a papaya
If you are not wearing
Pant and shirt.
***
Tamarind
Tamarind is very strange
The way it fruits secretly overnight
The leaves that are yellow-green
And soft beneath your teeth
Those are the new ones
The others are just while their time away
When you pass by a tamarind tree
And from it see a flock of parrots flying for its life
Or see schoolbags resting against the trunk
Don’t go that way. Understand?
***
Shirt
Shirt
When you lie there
One is sure
One can do nothing more with you
When you are hanging
According to the peg
You are hung on
Sometimes you look desperate
As though you have been kicked
By the whole world
Idiots
Keep ironing you
And wearing you out
All their lives.
____________________________
