Literature No Longer Impresses Me
Like the lighthouse glowing red–Lal Singh ‘Dil’ (stills from the film Kitte Mil Ve Mahi–Where the Twain Shall Meet, directed by Ajay Bhardwaj) ___________________________________ *** *** [listen, we must first pay tribute to Sant Ram Udasi] *** [i am a rogue poet who drinks and defies all norms] *** [but carries the weapons in the vanguard of the struggle] *** [these are noble poets–Udasi, Paash and Shiv Kumar Batalvi] *** [if they are songs sung by crusaders for freedom] *** [some thoughts cannot be erased] *** [why do you cry your eyes out] *** [why are you always humiliated thus] *** [you are unique o shining one] *** [your incandescence everywhere] *** [some thoughts cannot be erased] *** [if they songs sung by crusaders fort freedom] *** [why do you cry your eyes out] *** [why are you always humiliated thus] *** [you are unique o shining one your incandescence everywhere] *** [like the lighthouse glowing red] *** [that shows the way out of darkness] *** [an arm severed, a strange pain] *** [when our friends…brothers die] *** [it is as if we lose our arms] *** [the pain of losing arm] *** [an arm severed, a strange pain not a sigh, not a reflection] *** [who is there to stem our tears if we cry] *** [there is more to come in life ahead] *** [they who do not stand up for their rights] *** [live like donkeys slogging, hogging and dying] *** [those (who stand up) are suns showering rays of light] *** [one darkness, the other light an eternal war between them] *** [where the moonbeam does not stand guard] *** [there darkness camps forever] *** [when many suns die your era will dawn…isn’t it] *** *** [this is dedicated to Sant Ram Udasi] _____________________________________ adminhumanitiesunderground.org
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