Tell us about Aria—an impressive volume of translations by you that recently won the A K Ramanujan Translation Award and has been on the Best Books of the Year lists in leading newspapers and magazines like Outlook, The Mint/Wall Street Journal, and others.
Aria is my first volume of translations (though I had earlier published a chapbook of translations called In Another Tongue). Aria gathers poetry from well-known and lesser-known poets from Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu as well as Hebrew, Macedonian, Persian, Danish, Spanish, Portuguese, and others.
William Radice, one of the foremost Tagore translators, pointed out that this volume is quite a departure from what I have been engaged in in the past. I have enjoyed this relatively new process a lot. Translation is at the same time very different and similar to writing original poetry. But the dynamics and energies are completely unusual and difficult to quantify when translating. My introductory essay in that book explains the process and impulses behind my parallel life as a translator.
One of my favourite pieces of translation include Jibanananda Das’s poem “Banalata Sen.†Clinton Seely, the authority on this poet, commented that this is one of the best translations of the poem he has seen to date.
I especially enjoyed translating from Bengali and Hindi—languages I know well. Growing up in Delhi was truly trilingual—Bengali, Hindi, and English are the languages I use (but I understand quite a few northern Indian languages—Punjabi, Rajasthani, Urdu, even Gujarati, and Maharastrian from western India). When I am in the West, it is predominantly English that I am using—though in non-English-speaking countries, one realises that English can be so redundant, and thank god for that.
Let us talk about Postcards from Bangladesh, a lavish, 300-page full-colour coffee table book—elegantly written, beautifully photographed and designed. It is really a high-calibre literary book in the guise of an illustrated book!
It is a unique and personal account of Bangladesh as seen through the eyes of three creative professionals—Tanvir (a Bangladeshi photographer), Kelley Lynch (an American designer), and me. The book revolves around the idea and metaphor of a postcard—snapshots, snippets of life in one place that capture a moment in time—reflecting something larger about the culture as a whole. It is not meant to be encyclopaedic or all-inclusive. Rather, it portrays what Bangladesh means to us from alternate focal points—things off the beaten track, aspects left out of final frames, unused notes scribbled in the margins—all forming the glue that binds the book together. Postcards from Bangladesh traces journeys that are both interior and exterior using prose, poetry, and photography to create a poetic documentary—a film in freeze-frames.
The heart of Bengali culture—its sensibility and charm—is underscored in chapters that highlight the essential Bengali diet and livelihood provided by rice and fish; the six unique seasons of the Indian subcontinent, especially the monsoon rains; crafts and artefacts like rickshaw paintings; indigenous clothing like lungi and sari; the great rivers—the Padma, Meghna, Jamuna, and Buriganga; the nuances of religion; the bricks and mortar that form the country’s backbone; and Bangladesh’s popular music and culture. All these seek to give the reader a sense of the country that is outside the purview of development manuals, disaster media stories, and government tourist guides.
Postcards from Bangladesh is the first book published in that country to creatively fuse literature and art, photography and documentary, travelogue and dialogue, prose and poetry into an organic narrative whole.
Among your newer work is a major book-length poem, Distracted Geography: An Archipelago of Intent. It is a highly unusual and inventive work, a tour de force. How did it begin? Tell us something about its form, and the journey itself.
The book-length poem—Distracted Geography: An Archipelago of Intent—began on a wet August morning, as I sat in an half-sunken basement space of a partially restored fifteenth-century mansion: Gartincaber in Doune (near Stirling, Scotland). Almost drunk under the spell of this space, both interior and exterior, dactyls were dictated to me by photons in the surrounding electric-charged air. It was here where my journey began.
My journey continued, leaving a winding trail of footsteps, pug-marks I tried to hide, but could not. It is still an uncompleted journey, a journey that cannot be completed … perhaps, it is part of one’s own fallibility. This journey has infinitely long lines and many miles left to traverse, but I know my blood’s inadequate crimson may prevent such an ambition. So, I take all this as a gift, a dream. I feel constantly grateful that I have been allowed such a dream.
Along the way, I have been coloured by many sources, interests, passions, and obsessions—some obvious and others oblique. Among them, there are overheard phrases, paintings, photographs, fragmented images, films, music, memory, poems, women, fluids, and the intoxicated air.
My alter-ego wanted to be an architect and a cartographer—I have a more than part-time interest in science—all these must have, in some way, influenced this poem.
I reread many of my favourite poetry books at the time—classics like Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal; volumes by contemporary masters like Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and others.
Walcott’s Omeros, Brodsky’s To Urania, Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares, Donald Hall’sThe One Day, Jaan Kaplinski’s The Same Sea in Us All, Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri, Dom Moraes’s Serendip, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Middle Earth, and A K Ramanujan’s Collected Poems especially kept me company. I have used fragments from many of these poets’ work throughout to punctuate the narrative, so that readers can get some sense of their world as parallel asides, just as it did for me on my journey.
I was also immersed in Gray’s Anatomy, Encarta’s BodyWorks, Louis Kahn’s Sounds and Silence, Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot’s essays, John Frederick Nim’s Western Wind. At the time, I relied on my grandfather’s trusted old compass that helped navigate my way, imaginatively plotting a course through my National Geographic map collection that lay in disarray. My memory provided calm, as I struggled, translating Jibanananda Das’s “Banalata Sen†to re-create its music and passion. All of them have been guiding companions—and so, the journey went on.
The sparse elongated structure of the poem partly reflects the strength and surety of the human vertebra and spine, much like Neruda’s Odes that reflect the long, thin shape of Chile. The sections and subsections join together like synapses between bone and bone. The titles are translucent markers or breath pauses, not separators.
The short two-line couplets echo the two-step footprints, a pathway mapped on the atlas. The 12 sections correspond to the 12 bones in a human ribcage, the 12 months in a year, the two 12-hour cycles in a day. There are 26 bones in the human vertebrae, and the 26 parts in the poem slowly assemble themselves from a montage of tenuously strung lyrics. The 206 pages in this book match the exact number of bones in a human body.
This poem leaves a footprint from a perennial walk that meanders through public and private spaces—making sense of the vicissitudes of our loves, losses, wants, desires, inadequacies—as it maps the matrix of living and dying.
