Characters: Buddhadeva Bose, a Bengali poet (1908-1974)
and Hannele Pohjanmies, a Finnish translator; the narrator of the story
Time: Phalgun, the end of February 2012
Scene: An open shore
One afternoon at the end of February I saw Buddhadeva Bose walking on the shore. The sky was pale reddish above the ocean.
“Hey!” I shouted to him. “Isn’t it Phalgun again?”
He looked absent-minded, but he stopped. “Yes,” he said. “In fact it is. Why?”
“You see, we met once before and it was in Phalgun, too, but it was far from here, in a forest. We were talking about Rabindranath Tagore.”
“Why yes, now I remember,” he answered. “You are the translator from Finland, you were excited about translating Tagore’s poetry.”
He looked at me for a moment.
“How come you look so solemn this time?”
“I have been translating your poetry now. That makes me solemn,” I answered.
“Really? Did you not like my poetry?”
“Like! What a pale word! I was flying high in the universe while I was translating Tagore – but you have dragged me down onto the hot streets of Calcutta. I am not the same person I used to be, I have faced the reality and death and come to know the depths of the ocean – and rage and everything. How could I look cheerful?”
He looked at me inquiringly. “Are you my translator then? Of what language?”
“I translate into Finnish, from English. I wish I knew Bengali. I translate poems that someone else has translated into English first. Actually, I mean Ketaki, mainly; she has translated an extensive collection, but I have found some other poems on the Internet – even a few in your own translation. But above all I am grateful to Ketaki, you know, Ketaki Kushari Dyson.”
“Ketaki?” Buddhadeva smiles and gazes at the sea. “She was always so bright, I remember. So she has translated my poetry – how exciting! That’s magnificent!”
“She is like a satellite. She has reflected your poetry through the universe and projected the rays on my desk. If only I had known what I would be stuck with when I bought that book – The Selected Poems of Buddhadeva Bose, Translated and Introduced by Ketaki Kushari Dyson.”
“So you translate them into Finnish then? In that country far away in the North? With lots of snow?”
“That country is very much like the one in your poem ‘Prayer of A Winter Night’:
‘in a black, black, cruel burial
life gets lost – under dazzling snow.’
For a Finnish reader there are far too many lines in that poem, many unnecessary verses! It would’ve been enough if you had just once said, ‘It is winter.’ Finnish people live in that darkness half the year; they would have known immediately what it’s all about.”
“It was not so familiar to me,” he says. “Winter is different in Bengal.”
“But it’s a fine description of winter in any case,” I say. “This, for instance:”
‘The night deepens. The thin moon is in tatters.
The darkness is wolflike.
Gangs of witches ride the wind. The cold is as keen as
an assassin’s knife.’
It’s a remarkable poem as it is, no matter what I said about the winter lines! You have a peculiar idea of death. You seem to think it’s possible to experience it several times during a lifetime:
‘It is in the hands of this death
that all those moments of deception will be rent asunder.’
And then you write that man must die again and again if he wants to survive…”
“Yes, but what about Finland?”
“Yes, Finland! There are three poems published in the poetry magazine Tuli & Savu, ‘Fire & Smoke’ – ‘Calcutta’ and a couple of others, and now there is this collection. I think Finnish people would like your poems – they are so gloomy, with lots of humour.”
He looks amused. “So you have picked up on that?”
“It’s essential in them! The sarcasm –
‘the horse-speed of my own hopes has trampled me under its hooves
and sped off – ‘
Of course, there are many beautiful poems, too, so tender and fragile, for instance ‘Moon’ – it’s fascinating:
‘Yet that exquisite, exquisite girl
will perhaps twine around my sleep tonight
like a dream,
will clasp it like memory –
maybe, maybe.’
And many others, I find them enchanting. They remind me of the colourful decorations in the mane of a gypsy’s horse in a film I once saw – so wonderful, glistening flowers, hanging like garlands.”
He looks surprised. The waves of the ocean are deliberately watering the shore.
“But I think Finnish people wouldn’t have a problem understanding your sarcasm,” I say. “We understand even Russians better than many others and laugh at their jokes and millions of anecdotes about their hard life; they have been collected into books and published in Finnish, also. I’ve thought about them quite often while I’ve been reading your poems; there is some affinity between them.”
“Decorations of horses? Russian anecdotes?” he exclaims. “Never before has anyone said anything like this about my poetry!”
He starts laughing.
“Hey,” I say. “The Russian anecdotes represent the most vibrant oral tradition of the world!”
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” he says, and keeps on laughing.
How lovely to hear him laugh! Then he starts coughing, though.
“And someone said that Russia is the subconscious of Europe,” I go on.
“Will you stop, I am suffocating,” he says, and goes on coughing.
“But really – there is so much compassion in those anecdotes. The stories are really fun; the Russians can really laugh at themselves. It’s an important part of their culture. They couldn’t have survived without it, with all the hardship they’ve faced. ‘Shirokaja natura’ – ‘wide nature’ – that’s how they describe their character, meaning an open and a kind of loose attitude towards life. This makes me think about the ecological aspect again: how does the natural environment influence the human mind? The Russians live in an enormous country. The relationship between the environment and the mind is discussed even by the writer who has collected Russian anecdotes and published them in Finnish.”
I gaze at the sea. Another wide open view.
“Which shore is this, by the way?” I ask Buddhadeva. He wipes his eyes, still smiling.
There is a café higher on the beach. The sun is going down, the sea is flecked with red.
“Hey – I know, this is the shore from ‘Anuradha’,” I say. “Isn’t it? From that poem where it says:
‘Short our lives, and ancient time
is immeasurable,
yet the passionate motion
of a single rushing vehicle
churns to froth seas, islands, cities,
mountain-ranges, woodlands,
even the Milky Way’s far atom-clusters
in their braided brilliance.’
The asterism of Anuradha, protecting all travellers! What a beautiful idea! And a beautiful poem, too!” I exclaim.
“Wistful, though,” he says.
“Maybe this is where you come close to Tagore, viraha and abhiman…all yearning. Wasn’t Tagore’s Anuradha also fugitive, forever out of reach? Ketaki has written about it. It is always so great to get mail from her. She has travelled around giving lectures on you, talking for instance about your travel poetry.”
“Yes,” he sounds delighted. “I wrote a lot about my journeys.”
“Sometimes I’ve felt that I ought to translate your poems on a fast-speeding train. But on the other hand, I find that the poems where you don’t move at all, are absolutely essential; they might even be of deeper importance. They make me think of a little child who is not capable of moving anywhere. In your poem ‘Everest’ there is a motionless mountain speaking:
‘– Is this for ever? Is this a dream?’
And in the poem ‘Only by Holding on to You’ I find these lines:
‘Imprisoned in impotent screams, I always hear the sound of water;
I am my anguish, yet that fountain-head isn’t far.’
Do you remember this? Or this line in the poem ‘From Another Land’, where in a rain-obscured night on the pavement lies a heart –
‘sensing by touch, increasingly well-informed.’”
Buddhadeva looks serious. He is drawing something on the sand with the tip of his shoe. He does not say anything.
“That Baudelaire,” I say to him. “Whom you found so close. I think you both shared the same fate – you were born hypersensitive. It is not easy to be a helpless little child, but if you are hypersensitive, it is much more difficult.”
“How could you know that?” he asks anxiously but in a low voice.
“But of course, I am hypersensitive myself, that’s why! I’ve been pondering the difficulties of childhood a lot. I realized something as I read the translator’s introduction to the first Finnish edition of Les Fleurs du Mal. He wrote that Baudelaire was nervous as a child and already then felt the horror and the ecstasy of life in his heart: ‘Baudelaire did not choose his fate but the fate chose him. His fate was born together with him. It was based on his innate psychosomatic structure and his childhood experiences.’ I think there are some childhood memories living in your poetry, too.”
“How strange, I have thought of Baudelaire as my kindred spirit – it could mean so many things,” he says.
“Yes, I think I can guess what the heart feels when it is sensing through touch. It is a magnificent poem, ‘From Another Land’, I mean, but among your poems there are many others I find very intimate, for instance ‘Magic Desk’. Have you heard, by the way, that in a big crowd two villains recognize each other as soon as their eyes meet?”
“That’s possible,” he says with a laugh.
We walk slowly along the beach – the sunset beach. There’s some distant music, perhaps from the café; someone is playing ‘Lullaby of Birdland’.
“Your poetry has been carrying me for a long time,” I say. “I am scared… when the collection is finished, what will I do then? ‘Your familiar landmarks are lost’ – I am not the same person I used to be. The world of your poetry has settled down in me. Like those animals in the primal portico of your ‘Song of a Man in Love’, the huge buffalo and the mongrel with graceful eyes, and others.”
We remain silent for a long time.
“There is a Swedish poet, you know…his name is Dan Andersson, and he was born in the nineteenth century. He lived among the Forest Finns in the ‘Finn Woods’ in Sweden. He was very poor and wrote about people whose daily life was a struggle. He had devoured Tagore’s writing, and he translated some poems by Baudelaire into Swedish. I have translated some of his poems into Finnish.
“So was he my kindred spirit, too?”
“Yes and no, he was such a butterfly. You take much more responsibility for other people. But he writes that he is a fiddler and plays in order to forget that he exists; in the pitch-black night his bass strings cry out of the depth of the human soul, and the pink light of the moon is obscured by the clouds. Perhaps you have not seen any of his poems?”
“If I had seen…it sounds like I could have translated them into Bengali, my mother tongue.”
“Poems in other languages are like treasures buried in the ground until they are translated into your own language! Translating a poem is digging it out of the earth, to be seen! Only then it finds its way to the deep layers of my being. Once I read one of your poems in English and laughed, then I translated it into Finnish and burst into tears!”
“I understand that completely, that is what I have always said!” Buddhadeva exclaims. “The meaning of the mother tongue is infinitely deep! It is indispensable! The language of dreams and the unconscious is the mother tongue – not any other language that you have learned later!”
“Yes, this is something that I have understood through my own experience. I was surprised when I read these things in your essay ‘Language, Poetry and Being Human’. Ketaki has translated it, too, and attached it as an Appendix to your Selected Poems.”
He stops and listens carefully.
“I included a long quotation from that text in the introduction of your Finnish collection. It is about the life of dreams and the unconscious, without which no one would be fully human, and how you can bring jewels from that life into the consciousness only by using your mother tongue – and that a poet acts there as a go-between, giving form to our chaotic dream self and bringing our consciousness into contact with the dreams. I like the way you say it: ‘- - where literature is creative, the entire inner world of a human being becomes active – not only his intellect, his sensory perceptions, and his heart’s impulses, but also his unconscious mind, the hell and heaven dwelling in his soul, the grey clusters of memory inherited from his forefathers.’ I chose these quotations also because, even though I admire the courage of your poems and the way you take death by the horns, I like this connection most of all – how you dive into the dreams and the unconscious.”
“That’s why it is important to translate poems, too,” Buddhadeva says.
“Yes! Maybe that’s why you wanted to translate poetry into Bengali yourself. Poems fly across borders like birds! Ketaki has done a lot to make your poetry known in other countries, and there are many others who admire you. They arranged festivals and tributes on the centenary of your birth.”
He looks at me disbelievingly.
“Especially your daughter Damayanti has been very active in all this; she even made the Indian Postal Services to issue a stamp with your picture on it. But you know – your poems haven’t gone out of date at all, even though you wrote them long ago and the world has changed a lot. In ‘Other Germs’ you describe the American way of life in the 1960s, but it could be a critique of the globalisation happening in the 21st century.
‘not a needle-point crack on any of the gleaming walls –
so in what hole would secret lizard-eyes hide now?’”
Buddhadeva picks up a little stone and throws it into the water.
“By the way, what is the name of this ocean?” I ask. “An ocean of dreams, I suppose.”
“It is just an ocean,” he smiles. “The eternal ocean.”
“When I’m finished with your poems, I am going to miss you,” I say.
He looks me in the eye. “You always have to say goodbye,” he says.
“Oh, you, who have danced those wolves,” I say:
“‘His constant companions – lust and rage, two handsome wolves,
whom he had danced in and out of the alphabet’s hoops of fire –’
What a magnificent sight! I love these lines! And this boldness:
‘Because we lose all our loved ones, constantly piling the absences
within our inner vaults, the demand for compensation arises.
We feel we must fight, fight with the divine – at least have a dialogue.’”
“You just have to try to be brave,” he says.
“That’s exactly what I have learned from you,” I answer. “Your poems have taught me something that you say Calcutta taught you.”
“What will be the title of that Finnish collection?” he asks.
“Kalkutta ja muita runoja – ‘Calcutta and Other Poems’,” I answer.
The sun is sinking beyond the ocean. The outlines begin to blur. There is a lump in my throat.
He is gazing into the distance, at the horizon he so often wrote about. And I think about his poem ‘My Tower’:
‘My tower is built
of an infinite vulnerability.’
But also:
‘As sly and deceitful as a spy,
as invincible as a spider on a cracked wall,
as perennial as grass under snow
is this tower.’
From somewhere beneath the waves rises also a memory of a Tagore poem:
‘You have moved from my world, to take seat at the root of my life …’
“Thank you so much,” I whisper. “Take care.”
“You too,” he says.
And the ocean is growing dark, and I watch him silently walking away from my sight.
