'Port of refuge'

My father died in April 2017. Last year, I could not be with my family around this time because I was in London. This year, yet again, I am far away in a small town in Haryana about 40 km north of Delhi, where I teach at a university. When the lockdown to check the spread of the novel coronavirus was hastily imposed by the government in late March — which now seems like the prehistoric age — I found myself here. Besides the ubiquitous uncertainty about the welfare of our loved ones (my mother and sister are in Kolkata), my life has been generally very comfortable, if a tad boring.

But it is still a coast not too far for the waves of sorrow to deposit their salt. It came as the news of the death of a friend’s father last week. Thousands of people have died across the world due to Covid-19, but this was the first death of a person I knew. At this time of anxiety, I found refuge in the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011. Of course, I have known about him all these years, but it is only now that I have managed to read his works with any sort of serious engagement.

My friend Arun Sagar, the poet, lent me two volumes of Tranströmer’s works in English translation — The Great Enigma (translator: Robin Fulton) and The Half-Finished Heaven (translator: Robert Bly). Though Bly is the more famous of the two translators, I prefer Fulton’s selection. He presents a chronological path — always so attractive to a journalist — through Tranströmer’s career from his earlier volume, 7 Dikter (1954) to his newer work Den Stora Gatan (2004). There are also a few chapters of his prose memoir Minnena Ser Mig (1993), which translates as Memories Look at Me.

The title of this book inspired American-Nigerian writer Teju Cole to name his weekly column for the Nigerian paper NEXT “Words Follow Me”. In a piece on Tranströmer for the New Yorker, Cole writes: “His poems contain a luminous simplicity that expands until it pushes your ego out of the nest, and there you are alone with Truth.” He also writes that he prefers Bly’s translations and reads Tranströmer usually at night — both of which I disagree with. I usually read Tranströmer in the morning, from Fulton’s book, as the daylight brightens outside the windows of my study and the lapwings take flight while letting out cries of alarm.

Tomas Tranströmer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011

 
 

There are many birds in the housing society where I live — koels, peacocks, owls. The loudest among the winged creatures are lapwings, whose plaintive nocturnal cries have inspired my friend and neighbour Maaz Bin Bilal to compose an English ghazal. There are a lot of birds in the poems of Tranströmer as well. One of my favourites is “Morning Birds” from his 1966 collection, Bells and Tracks: “Through a backdoor in the landscape / comes the magpie / black and white. / And the blackbird darting to and fro / till everything becomes a charcoal drawing.”

Before I knew it, I was feverishly rendering these verses into Bengali. Here I must shamefacedly confess that I have never till now taken up the responsibility of translating — barring a few instances — though, of course, I have been a great beneficiary of it. So, what prompted it this time? There is frankly no way to determine the motivation — perhaps it is unnecessary. Perhaps it was the result of spending Poila Boishak (Bengali New Year) without fish or Rabindra Jayanti without watching a bad performance of a Tagore play in Delhi’s C R Park. Perhaps it was wholly a function of nostalgia, perhaps something else.

In an obituary for Tranströmer, Anisur Rahman writes: “Tomas had read Rabindranath like many Swedish poets.” Perhaps I felt an essential urge to trans-create Tranströmer’s words in Rabindranath’s language. Will I ever publish these translations? I am not sure they are any good; also, this would be a double translation, because I do not know Swedish. Nor do I have any permission. For now, these poems remain in my notebook. Cole, in his article, writes: “(Tranströmer) has been one of my ports of refuge.” This is a sentiment that I share completely. He has been my port, too, in these times of ubiquitous uncertainty.  

The writer’s novel, Ritual, was published earlier this year