Vah aadmi naya garam coat pehenkar chala gaya vichaar ki tharah

with Vinod Kumar Shukla... and friends

Sometimes, the mind doesn’t want to form discourse. The response to art need not be nous. Even as poetry is entrenched in language, it is merely the form of a person whose pointing finger maps the inarticulable. Feeling is beyond language, as is sensation. What the poet seeks is a surging, and enlarging; the word turning sky, the body a stone tossed into colour.

On most days, I believe, with unflinching conviction, in the spirit of things; the soul of objects. Life lies rested, under the skin of things, coiled as a snake who dreams of electricity. With the gift of contact, at the epicentre of interaction, on the surface of the touching, a world is born; a movement. How, for instance, a word could trigger a cascade of memories. (I am reminded of “Rosewood” in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. A colour could trigger a world-changing mood). The sound of the chende soars into a clear technicolor vision of a childhood in Mangaluru - of an evening by the coconut thotas (plantations), where the fires were living visions of a boy’s unformed imagination.

Poetry lives in that broadening. It is a tesselation - the spontaneous wedging of imaginative surfaces that plots a continuously moving image. Each word glows with frisson as its skin touches the skin of another word. The twins of meaning and difference are born. The phrase is the unit of imagination, as I like to say (the word- the unit of thought). The poet writes into the skin of this imagination, this spirit. The sensitive reader surrenders, trust-falls into its raving stream.

Sometimes, a poet comes across a line, and realises that they could live forever in that line…

“वह आदमी नया गरम कोट पहिनकर चला गया विचार की तरह।”

translate, first

”The man put on a warm new coat and walked off like a thought”

hmm. of course it is not the same. Perhaps, one could do away with warm.

But do you see what I mean. Picture it: the swishing movement, the invisible gust of the man who puts on a warm, new coat. Pause, to feel the absent breathing of his walking off..like what? like thought. Is that pause memory? Surely not, because it is fervent with presence. Which reminds me of another poem by this poet. Here.

And my clunky translation

Now that you (who didn’t before) know his mischief (only a little bit), perhaps you might be ready for it to trip you into surrender. The wordplay is difficult to translate, and the poetry lives in that impossibility of translatable experience. As a reader, and a writer, my work is not the messenger’s. I seek through translation, to read experience, to become vessel and carrier. I do not aspire to translation of meaning, but transmission through the reverberation inherent in the sound of words. It is a pulse that the poem carries. It is that pulse, that becomes the basis of association - not imitation, not even tradition, perhaps a shared chchand of curiosity. More after you read the poem.

(You could also refer to Mohini Gupta’s translation)

Now, first thing - because I will share, in response only associations not interpretations - I thought of Swadesh Deepak. A Man put on a new coat and walked off like a thought. Poe said he became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity. Maybe Deepak (whose Maine Mandu nahi Dekha is a mind-bending piece of literature) knew something of this. Like the persona in the first Shukla poem I shared with you today, Deepak took some leaving with him when he left that morning. and the leaving that remained, he forgot to take.

The poem, and the images, like transparencies that alternatively veil and reveal - the aphoristic movement whose subterranean river snakes through all of Shukla’s writing - ricocheted off another memory, another poem. Here, shared before on Poetly.

From Shukla’s everyday folded into the event of the ordinary, to Szymborska’s magical unenchanted ordinary. The thought expands, and glows. This gold-dust shimmers on the fingers of the writer writing, what is witnessed. what has never been witnessed before, in this way, in this moment. But across the history of words, and language, in the corridors of art, the echoes linger. Isn’t it marvellous? this opening up of world? The reverberations form their own narratives, mutating in the minds of the readers. I think it is these self-same resonances, these reverberations that settle in the collective social imagination as myths.

The last association, then, The poetry of Alberto Caiero, also shared before on Poetly.

It is strangely thrilling, and grounding, at the same time - the paradox of the ordinary. sthir not stillness. Thought infuses the word with life, and that is what makes us dancers in the shared dark of poetry; as we read, our bodies, like fingers, weave the fabric of a story. It does not matter how it moves us. as long as it is forward.

---

Hope you, and your loved, are finding meaning and the space to create. Do write to poetly@pm.me if you have any questions, queries, or comments. I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

If you like what you read, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.