Indo-Anglican Lamentation

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W.B. Yeats once wrote in an introduction to a Rabindranath Tagore book written in English, “These prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years.” Tagore is Bengali, one of India’s most famous poet, if not the most famous poet; he wrote the Indian National Anthem. He wrote mostly in Bengali, but not always.

However, Yeats comment was mere public relations; he would admit later in a letter, “Damn Tagore…because he thought it was more important to see and know English than to be a great poet, he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation.” His attack was not personal, however. It was prejudice, as he continued, “Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English. Nobody can write music and style in a language not learned in childhood and ever since the language of his thought.”

Yeats wrote in English, but his childhood language was Gaelic.

In The Concise Encyclopaedia of English and American Poets, edited by Donald Hall and Stephen Spender, there is an entry for Indian poet Buddhadeva Bose, who once wrote, “As for present-day Indo-Anglicans…it is difficult to see how they can develop as poets in a language which they have learnt from books  and seldom heard spoken in the streets or even in their own homes.”

And so the stage is set for Jeet Thayil, editor of 60 Indian Poets. This book, sold only in the Indian subcontinent, is a nice collection of sixty Indian poets writing exclusively in English. I am only a third of the way through the book, each poet three to ten pages each; as with all anthologies, I have found poets whose style suit my tastes and others I don’t care for.

Vijay Nambisan’s “Dirge” is one nice poem. I read a lot at night before the lights go out; I was too tired to understand the subject matter behind the poem, but when I am that tired, I know a good poem when I read one because it is the music that speaks to me when the brain can’t focus on topic and theme. I turned the lights out after reading it, and when I was alert and awake, read it again.

Nambisan writes about the struggles, if you will, of his own profession, and where he stands in it. He uses a beautiful combination of end and internal rhymes, and the long lines mirror the emotion felt. He ends the first stanza, which reads like a symbol for the entire book, by saying there’s more to life than fame.

The poets die like flies but I am lying slightly to one side,
Contented in my Spain or Siam, content too to keep my hide.
How well they wrote, those friends now fettered, how the Indo-Anglican tongue
Allowed them to be lovely-lettered, their lives lived when the world was young.
I’ll live and hold my word in, for I am wearied of hypothesis;
And, in place of getting glory, kisses take from my missis.

The first line is chock full of I’s: die, flies, I, lying, slightly, side. In line two, we have Siam rhyming with any one of those words, but the true rhyme of I am/Siam can’t escape the ear. We also have the internal rhyme of  fettered/lettered as well as the internal/end rhyme in the final line of kisses/missis. And don’t forget all the L’s in the entire stanza: like, flies, lying, slightly,well, (Anglican), allowed, lovely-lettered, lives lived, world, I’ll, hold, glory. I think I got them all.

At first I thought the poem was written with iambic feet: the POets DIE like FLIES but I am LYing SLIGHTly to one SIDE, but when I scanned it I decided the poet merely seems to put seven accents on each line: alLOWED them to be LOVEly-LETTered, their LIVES LIVED when the WORLD was YOUNG.
My own Indo-Anglican offspring

And yet, fame can come, as seen in stanza two:

Then the world shone, by their showing; then publishers seem to care;
Then calls for cheques of last year’s owing did not fall on empty air.
Then newspapers asked them for pieces; and printed them unchanged; and paid;
But now there are so many wheezes which make the craft a thrifty trade.
In a wilder whirl of weeklies, tabloids titting on page threes,
I will shirk my duty meekly and kisses take from my missis.

Here again are the internal rhymes of showing/owing, pieces/wheezes, weeklies/meekly; and also the end rhymes, including the near rhyme threes/missis. Of course, now we also see a pattern forming in the last line of each stanza: “kisses take from my missis,” and in both stanzas “missis” is only a near-rhyme. There is also the alliteration, such as: “pieces/printed/paid” and the more obvious “wilder/whirl/weeklies.” Using punctuation instead of enjambment at the end of a line is a technique for slowing down a poem, add to that long lines and lots punctuation marks within the line, where all those cadences are, really provide a nice slow read. Sure, you could speed it up anyway, but it doesn’t sound right.

They did not care much what the world said: they taught it instead how to speak.
They did not, when a poem pleaded, to meetings go in Mozambique.
But I will stay my poems, spending strength now with a shriller pen.
My theme and language both defending, to live fourscore years and ten.
And if it prove my time is over, if I’ve no chance at worldly bliss,
Why I will spurn so false a lover and kisses take from my missis.

Quite the odd stanza in some ways. Of course, we have the internal rhyming, the cadence, the last phrase and near rhyme “kisses take from my missis,” etc. However, there are also things like the not-very-often-used time measurement “fourscore years and ten”, and the inverted “to meetings go in Mozambique” — why not say “go to meetings in Mozambique?” A signifier of bad poetry is inverted lines to capture the rhyme, but this inverted line makes no difference to the rhyme. A signifier of good poetry is inverted lines to mirror the theme or topic of a poem, such as warped time or something. But then it comes as a poem’s constant, not a one-time deal.

The poem ends:

This hand once penned those poems; never shall I find so true a friend.
I’ve a thirst for all forever, but the lines come to an end.
So Arun and Dom and Nissim — I will shun their hard-earned grief
And much though I will always miss ‘em, in softer shadows find relief.
And when I’m ninety and young writers ask why I wrote no more than this
I will answer, ‘But you blighters! I kisses took from my missis.’

I do not know who Arun and Dom and Nissim are, but I am guessing Arun Kolatkar, Dom Moraes and Nissim Ezekiel, elder popular Indo-Anglican poets, also featured in this anthology. I find the lines are not the only thing that comes to an end; he speaks of something higher, something more than that. As much as he loves to write, he is throwing in the towel.

Throughout the poem I would have made different choices had I written it — I would have said “miss them” instead of “miss ‘em,” for example, and spared the forced true rhyme; however, all in all this poem speaks to me in many different ways, and truthfully, if I were the author I would not have written it to begin with.

I find it interesting that the title is “Dirge,” because a dirge is traditionally a mournful song; this is not mournful, though it starts out that way, and sort of finishes that way too, I personally would say mournful is too strong of a word. However, the fact that a dirge is a song, or a poetic lament, speaks to the poem: there is music in it everywhere, and why I read it a second time to begin with.

Revolution’s Habit

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I was in one of those small intellectual bookstores about two months ago — you know, those small business ones where they shelve their books with natural history and economic reform and a customer can’t find a romance novel anywhere — when lo and behold I found a book of poetry in with other titles about regional affairs. (As an aside, I was in Nepal, and due to language barriers, when I asked for books on poetry, the clerk took me to the section on poverty. It wasn’t until I said “poems” instead of “poetry” that she understood my intentions.)

Kaifi Azmi was an Urdu poet who became so popular he wrote songs for Indian films as well. He was both a poet of love and a poet of revolution. He was a spokesman, and a member of the Communist party. He was all these things, but he was not an ideologue. His beliefs were fluid and he refused to be pigeonholed. Later on he left the Communist Party in part because of this.

His poems are all passionate. It was easy for Pavan K. Varma, who translated his poems in Penguin Poetry’s Selected Poems, to combine his love poems with his revolutionary ones because they all work; one subject is not better than the other. They are driven by passion, and so his political poems are never didactic. You can see love in his politics and politics in his love.

“Habit” is such a poem. It reads like it was a based on a dream; it is a metaphor of people’s rights and inequality, and one person’s own personal experience thereof. My father-in-law read this poem aloud in its Urdu form after I had remarked on its imagery. In its original composition, it’s a very haunting poem indeed.

The poem begins with an introductory quatrain of medium to long lines:

For aeons, I was imprisoned in a blind well
I kept beating my head, kept muttering to myself:
I want sunlight, I want moonlight, I want life itself
The sunlight of love, the moonlight of friends, the freedom of death.

Notice he wasn’t blindly imprisoned in a well, or blind and imprisoned in one, but imprisoned in a blind well. I’m not sure what that means. But in the fourth line, I find it interesting that it is the sunlight of love and the moonlight of friends, not the other way around. Moonlight of love is cliche, but cliche for a reason. So we have two images, one in the first line and one in the fourth, that seem to be opposite of what I’d expect.
“I want sunlight, I want moonlight, I want life itself”

He then goes on to expand on this in dramatic passion, leaving his emotions at bay for a bit. The entire middle of the poem is one long stanza.

Day and night I heard only my voice
And gradually I came to believe
In this lonesome world
In the disloyalty of friends
In the lap of the gallows
There is no sunlight
There is no moonlight
There is no life,
Life is one long night
The world an illusion
Man transient
People dwarfed
Towns, citadels of envy
Villages even worse.

These are not happy times. The narrator is sitting in a pool of bitterness; his world is depressing. Something has to change. Some force must catapult him into action. And something does — with it comes longer lines; emotion has returned, and drama remains.

When this darkness had completely crushed me
The well, suddenly, ejected me
From its depths it expelled me.
I saw before me a million Egyptians
There were a million bazaars
Not one aged Zulekha there was
God knows how many buyers there were
Yusuf’s price constantly rose
And people were willing to be sold.

Yusuf and Zulekha refers to an Islamic story I am not familiar with; however, its Biblical counterpart is that of Joseph (Yusuf) and his master’s wife (whose name is never mentioned). The master’s wife wants Joseph to lie with her, he refuses several times, and when he flees from the house, his garment drops into her hands. She claims foul play, and Joseph is imprisoned. The lines make reference to biblical slavery and injustice.

Suddenly, everyone’s luminous faces were unveiled
Their silken sheets were cast away
No eyes blinked, no glance was lowered
Fingers, marble-white, were cut aside
If a hand came close to a garment
The body was dismembered, scattered wide.

And then the stanza break, and the quatrain that finishes the poem. The narrator does not act, after all; the fight for justice does not happen, the revolution is silenced. Fear takes over.

Afraid, I jumped back into the well
Began to beat my head with the same agony
I began to grovel again with the same pleading:
I want the sunlight, I want the moonlight, I want life itself.

Varma in his translator’s note  believes the book would be a successful project if it inspired more readership of Azmi. Hopefully, this blog post will also help with that cause.

—————
“Marvi well” photograph courtesy of Kash_if with some rights reserved.

Youthful Yevtushenko

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Recently I perused the poetry shelf of a bookstore, disappointed in the selection it offered.It was a large bookstore (Oxford Books), so it surprised me, but it was in India, so it didn’t, in that the usual names I expected to see weren’t there, and that at least in this bookstore, the theory seemed to be stock more copies of fewer books.

One book it did have, and I picked up, was Penguin’s Selected Poems of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by Robert Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi. Not only had I never read his work, I never heard of him. With this thin collection of his early works, I was in for a sweet surprise.

Yevtushenko (I know next to nothing about the Russian language, but from what I can tell, it seems the Y is either silent or barely vocalized — let me know if you know better) was born in 1933 in Zima (accent on the second syllable), Siberia; he was a boy during WWII. Youth and war play a huge part in so much of his poetry.

“Zima Junction” is one of his most popular works, and for good reason. It is a long poem, and although it comes first in the collection, I saved it for last. Levi wrote

“The first quality of the poet as narrator is youth, and in ‘Zima Junction’ comes near to being the subject of the poem. The narrator looks at the external world with directness, at nature with fascination, and at social and industrial circumstances with curiosity, but at the same time his eyes are the introspective and analytical eyes of the young.”

This theme of youth is evident close to the beginning of the poem:

So there stood youth and childhood together,
trying to look into each others eyes
and each offending, but not equally.
Each wanted the other to start talking.
Childhood spoke first, ‘Hullo then.
It’s your fault I hardly recognized you.
Once when I often used to dream about you
I thought you’d be quite different from this.
I’ll tell you honestly, you worry me.
You’re still in very heavy debt to me.’
So youth asked if childhood would help,
and childhood smiled and promised it would help.

This passage borders on the didactic; however, put in the context of a long poem, it doesn’t seem out of place at all. Then, six pages later, our narrator encounters an old man, who has a thing or two to say about “today’s youth”.

The worse thing is — and you can contradict
if you want — you don’t think like young people
and people are the same age as their thoughts.
There are young people, laddie, but no youth.
…
Questions? Honest disagreements?
Oh, youth isn’t what it used to be.

One of the better poems in the collection is “The Companion”, a wonderful little poem about childhood innocence in wartime. The narrator begins the poem with him seeing a girl in shock after a tragic accident where they lost their respective grandmothers after an air raid.

She was sitting on the rough embankment,
her cape too big for her tied on slapdash
over an odd little hat with a bobble on it,
her eyes brimming with tears of hopelessness.

A few lines later he decides to do the responsible thing, and we quickly learn his view of girls.

I’d no idea what I could do about her,
but doubt quickly dissolved to certainty:
I’d have to take this thing under my wing;
- girls were in some sense of the word human,
a human being couldn’t just be left.

She accepts his offer of companionship, and they leave the train wreck and the sounds of war die down. As they start their difficult jouney, he continues his rant of the female sex. Of course, by this time we know the narrator is only a child himself. But then the table turns, and it is her turn: she puts him in his place.

She had galoshes on and felt boots,
I had a pair of second-hand boots.
We forded streams and tramped across the forest;
each of my feet at every step it took
taking a smaller step inside the boot.
The child was feeble, I was certain of it.
‘Boo-hoo, ’ she’d say. ‘I’m tired, ’ she’d say.
She’d tire in no time I was certain of it,
but as things turned out it was me who tired.
I growled I wasn’t going any further
and sat down suddenly beside the fence.
‘What’s the matter with you? ’ she said.
‘Don’t be so stupid! Put grass in your boots.
Do you want to eat something? Why won’t you talk?
Hold this tin, this is crab.
We’ll have refreshments. You small boys,
you’re always pretending to be brave.’

And so they travelled, in a silent understanding of themselves and their world.

So on and on
we walked without thinking of rest
passing craters, passing fire,
under the rocky sun of ’41
tottering crazy on its smoking columns.

Translations are funny things. This having been the only translation of Yevtushenko’s works, it’s hard to know which decisions were the translators and which were the poet’s. The only thing I wish the collection had is the original work to go along with the translation. I enjoy looking at the original, even if I don’t understand it. Originals provide clues. One thing I have noticed is he tends to write, at least through the eyes of the translator, really without stanza breaks. In a really short poem, there will be none. In a poem that’s more than a page but less than three, you might see one or two “stanza” breaks. I find this interesting in two ways.

  1. In my studies of writing poetry I have learned that the biggest reason to not use stanzas is if the poem is so fragile (in theme and/or topic), that to provide a stanza breaks will make the poem fall. While I can see this theory taking place here (youth in war is a fragile thing), upon reading it I do see where a stanza break could be inserted. And where there are stanza breaks, it seems a bit random, yet purposeful.
  2. I was skimming over another translation of another of his poems, and the lines were not left-justified like in all the other poems of this collection, but bounced all over the page. There are the occasional lines that start where the previous line left off. This is found in metered verse where a line is truncated and the next line finishes the metrical feet requirement. Just read Shakespeare for this. However, From the translation perspective, Yevtushenko’s poems are not metered. Nothing is mentioned about this in the introduction, but it seems that perhaps Levi was trying to convey Yevtushenko’s patterns without making it difficult to read. I don’t know and I can’t say.

One thing Milner-Gulland does say about the translation:

“[Levi's] approach to translation was instinctive rather than theory-based…[Levi's instincts] can be summed up in the words that the critic Hugh Kenner used for Ezra Pound: ‘Translation does not, for him, differ in essence from any other poetic job; as the poet begins by seeing, , so the translator by reading; but his reading must be a special kind of seeing.’ Out of the window went the idea of imitating thumping rhythms, brilliant half-rhymes or other formal features of the original, save where they could correspond with what Peter felt to be a poetic idiom true to his own talents and feelings…Other translators have subsequently taken different approaches, but I stand by what we did: at least we were not disposed to produce what Robert Lowell succinctly called ‘Stuffed Birds’, examples of taxidermy rather than poetry.”

Personally, I couldn’t agree more.

Poem Flow

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A couple months ago I was checking my e-mail messages on my phone when I saw one from The Academy of American Poets (poets.org), about a new iPhone app called Poem Flow. The idea seemed really neat. After purchasing the app for a buck, a poem a day is sent to me, and everyne around the world who bought the app is reading the same poem at the same time. Turn the iPhone to profile, and you can read the poem, turn it to landscape, and it presents itself in a slideshow format.

Pretty cool.

However, it wasn’t long after I installed it that I was quickly disappointed. The great vision was not executed in a very user- friendly manner.

The portrait view, the one where you can just read the poem, is too narrow. Thus almost every line of any poem takes up at least two lines in this format. Sure, the tabbed convention is used, but it is still cumbersome, not visually appealing, and makes for a lot more scrolling.

The landscape view has the opposite problem. Each line break in the landscape view is a cadence break, so if there is one cadence in a line of poetry, then it is two lines in the slideshow. Initially, this makes sense, but the slideshow becomes very jarring, and timing becomes crutial. In my experience, the timing of a line is off more often than not.

It seems to me, if nothing else, the slideshow would be better in portrait and the poem itself better in landscape.

I think people must have complained, because an update soon came out that allowed the user to control the speed of the slideshow. The problem with this is although it is nice to control the speed, it doesn’t solve the problem of timing while reading the poem. In other words, it controls the speed of the poem as a whole, but not within the reading itself. The other problem is the speed is controlled by tilting the iPhone, and too much time is spend doing this that you can’t actually pay attention to the poem. They should just have a slow medium and fast setting.

What’s cool about Poem Flow is that you accumulate a nice little library of poems. The dollar you spend is not for the app per se, but for a collection of twenty poems. So if you want more than twenty poems, you pay another buck. The problem here is not that I am cheap, but that you can’t delete poems. In the twenty poems I first received, there were two or three I already have, one I read for the first time and loved, and the rest didn’t speak to me. So really, I got one poem. I would have liked to delete the other nineteen, so that I keep getting more, keep deleting the ones I don’t want, and then by the end of it, twenty poems for a buck would have been an excellent deal. Alas…

So here I am, disappointed in the app, yes, but even more so disappointed in poets.org, a reputable advocate for poetry, and yet, seems to have completely missed the mark on the poetic experience for the reader. If they fix these shortcomings I will be happy, but missing the reader mark will be something they can’t fix. It should have been caught in the initial design stage of the application, but never was.

Concupiscent Ice Cream

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I recently read The Emperor of Ice Cream by Wallace Stevens for the first time. I love the first stanza, but I do not get the second.

As are other poets, Stevens was also a philosopher; however, I read once that the difference between Stevens and those like him is that Stevens was first a philopher, then a poet, whereas it was vice-versa with the others.

The best of evidence may be his Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. His poetry is philosophy-heavy, oftentimes so much so it almost seems incomprehensible.

But I read “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” and loved it so much I re-read it numerous times right away.

And still, the second stanza eludes me. But one thing I know, this is where his philosophy comes in. It must, right?

The first stanza is quite simple: call Dad into the kitchen to make some ice cream for the boys and girls around him. The whole idea at face value is so Norman Rockwell. Every line in the first stanza can be a separate Norman Rockwell painting, from the cigar-smoking father figure, maybe sitting by the fire, to the serving of the sweet stuff. But if that were all it was, it wouldn’t be much. He adds to it a theme that is so much more than that, and yet so simple:

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.

At first I thought it a little odd that the girls were considered wenches, and why are the boys bringing flowers? Concupiscent was a word I had never heard of before. I read it and pronounced it more or less correctly, because I surveyed the words that came before (and a little after) it: bid, kitchen, cups, one, whip, muscular, curds, him. The only thing I got wrong was the second syllable is pronounced cyoo not coo. But it was in the definition that the entire stanza came together thematically. It means lustful, sensual, (sexually) desirous. What lover of ice cream will deny its orgasmic quality? Of course the boys are carrying flowers. Of course the girls are wenches (sexually active girls, historically).

Then comes the proclamation: “Let be be the finale of seem.”, and then the bottom line: “The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.” I first read the proclamation like be-be, but it is actually more like “Let ‘be’ be”, with a pause between the two words. As a proclamation, it is so much more than what’s on face-value: the pursuit of ice cream. I am not sure I completely understand the intention behind this line in the ice cream context, but I have an idea, and I can’t argue with the generalization behind the statement. It may be one of my favorite lines of poetry ever.
“Let be be the finale of seem.”

Then there is the second stanza. It appears to be a complete turn from the first stanza. No longer about a father serving ice cream, but something else entirely, a bit more philosophical. We have a dresser, with odd knobs, that holds a sheet, which was personally embroidered, and for some reason placed over a body, including the face, but with the bare feet sticking out from under it. The person is cold and dumb (stupid? lacking in speech?), and for some reason the lamp fixes the problem (warm heat?). It has nothing to do with ice cream on face value, but we have a cold body (ice cream?). We have the person who is doing the action (the emperor). It all kind of makes sense, in an abstract sort of way. Just like philosophy. But I am still not satisfied.

Can anyone bring any magic to the second stanza?

“After the Prom” by Norman Rockwell courtesy of his estate and:

A Poet’s Concert

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Of the number of concerts I have gone to, one that stands out as one of my favorites was not of a singer/songwriter at all. Sekou Sundiata was completely unknown, at least to me, when I stepped into that very small local theater (normally a dance theater) in Washington, DC called Dance Place. Sundiata was a poet, and yet what I was about to see was apparently not a poetry reading. I had been invited by my step-mother, a poetry lover herself, and we both entered the house with a friend of hers and wondered what we were going to witness.

What I can best describe is that Sundiata put the spoken word to music. He did not sing. He did not try to speak to the rhythm of the music. He read his poetry, but great music served as an enhancement. Poetry does not music. Music is ingrained within poetry. With songs, on the other hand, the lyrics can hold no music, but rely on the musical instruments to provide it. Sundiata put together a hybrid of the two, where the electronic instruments served not as the music, but as the music enhancer. It was lovely to listen to. SO lovely in fact, the CD was purchased immediately following the performance.

Long Story Short came out in 2000, and I have listened to that CD in bursts ever since. I would forget about it for months, then play nothing but for the next few weeks. I keep waiting for the freshness to die, but it never does. I keep waiting for another year to pass and I find myself too old for that type of stuff, but I never am.

Unbeknownst to me, I recently learned that Subdiata passed away in 2007, at the young age of 58. But before he passed away, he managed to get interviewed in Bill Moyers’ (PBS’) The Language of Life. The interview was great, as they usually are when Moyers is the one asking the questions. Sundiata was not as famous as a Maya Angelou, but in a way, I like that better. I strongly recommend purchasing a CD to poetry lovers and music lovers alike.

In honor of Black History Month, here’s to you Sekou Sundiata!

Photograph courtesy of:

Valentines from Devere

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Unlike popular understanding, science is based more on a process of probability than pure evidence. History is not really any different. While no one knows for absolute certainty, the general thought is Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. But when you bring in the process of probability instead of evidence or fact (Shaksper = Shakespeare), the authorship question tilts as far away from Shakespeare as it can get.

Based on probability, I find it very difficult to believe an uneducated man who could barely sign his own name, never traveled outside England, and never came into contact with the royal court, could have written plays with such poetic precision about the royal court both within England and in faraway lands.

The plays are one thing; the sonnets are an entirely different animal. When you know about Edward Devere’s life, once again the probability of him writing these little poems is pretty easy to see. Shaksper-on-Avon? The probability isn’t even close.

These poems of love are a testiment to the author’s against-all-odds struggle for a relationship with whomever they were written for. And it is this unknowable — the person they are directed to — that keeps the authorship debate going.

I am not even going to try to list the pros and cons about the entire debate. That is entirely beyond the scope of this post. But the debate is quite dramatic, which fits well with the works of the author. De Vere lived quite the dramatic life. Shakesper, to an extent yes, but not so much.

I am an Oxfordian (one who believes De Vere is the true author), and quite a fan of William Shakespeare. I have not read very many sonnets. Quite a few, actually. But they are quite the collection of Valentines. Somebody was definitely loved by a man very capable of loving. And writing. To the recipient of such feelings, whoever they may be, Happy Valentine’s Day!