What Is Written
(Your Name Here)
What is written on the paper
on the table by the bed? Is there something there
or was that from another last night?
Why is that bird ignoring us,
pausing in mid-flight, to take another direction?
Is it feelings of guilt about the spool
it dropped on the bank of a stream,
into which it eventually rolled? Dark spool,
moving oceanward now — what other fate could have
been yours?
You could have lived in a drawer
for many years, imprisoned, a ward of the state.
Now you are free
to call the shots pretty much as they come.
Poor, bald thing.
কি লেখা
বিছানার পাশে টেবিলে ঐ কাগজটায়
কি লেখা?নতুন কিছু?
না অন্যকোন রাতের খসড়া?
পাখিটা কেন আমাদের এড়িয়ে যাচ্ছে, উড়ানের মাঝপথে থেমে
শরীর ঘুরিয়ে নিচ্ছে অন্যদিকে
সে কি অপরাধবোধে?
ঐ যে সুতো ফুরানো কাটিমটা ভুল করে নদীর পাড়ে ফেললো
যে নদীতে কাটিম গড়িয়ে গেল অবশেষে
গাঢ় কাটিম, ক্রমশ সমুদ্রের দিকে সে
এছাড়া আর কি ভবিতব্য ছিল তোমার?
পড়ে থাকতে টানার কোনে কোথাও
বছরভ’র, বন্দী, আপন অবস্থার কারারক্ষী হয়ে
এখন বরং মুক্ত হলে
নিজের লাটাই নিজের হাতে এলো
আহা, খালি কাটিম ।
Paradoxes and Oxymorons
(Shadow Train)
This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.
What’s a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be
A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the stream and chatter of typewriters.
It has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.
প্রহসন ও বিরোধাভাস
ভাষা নিয়ে এই কবিতাটির ভাবনাচিন্তা খুবই ওপর ওপর।
দ্যাখো তোমার সঙ্গে কিভাবে সে কথা বলতে চায়।
তুমি জানলার বাইরে তাকালে বা ছটফট করার ভান করলে।
মনে হল কবিতাটা পেয়ে গেছ তুমি, আসলে পাওভ্রন।
তুমি ওকে পেলে না, ওও তোমাকে পেল না। একে অপরকে এড়িয়ে গেলে।
এটা বিষাদের কবিতা কেননা সে তোমারই হতে চেয়েছিল, পারলো না।
ওপর ওপর মানে কি ? মানে, এই অর্থ আর অনর্থের
খেলায় মাতা বস্তুসমূহ। খেলা?
হ্যাঁ, তা খেলাই, তবে আমার মনে হয় কি
খেলাটা একটা বহিরঙ্গের জিনিষ, স্বপ্নে পাওয়া তার নিয়ম-নকশা
সৌন্দর্য-বিভাজনে দীর্ঘ, অগাস্টের এই দিনগুলোর মত;
যদিও প্রমান দিতে পারবোনা। তার দুদিক খোলা। এবং তুমি বোঝার আগেই
টাইপরাইটারের বাষ্প আর বকবকানির মধ্যে সে হারালো।
কেউ আরেকবার খেলছে তাকে নিয়ে। আমার মনে হয় তুমি আছো
শুধু আমার পেছনে লেগে, আমাকে দিয়ে ইটা করাবে বলে
এবং তারপর একসময় তুমিও হাওয়া হযে গেলে। অথবা রুচি বদলে ফেললে
আর কবিতাটা? আমাকে তার পাশে সন্তর্পনে নামিয়ে রেখেছে কখন।
সে তখন তুমি হয়ে গেছে।
Some Trees
(Some Trees)
These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance
To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
And glad not to have invented
Some comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges
A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Place in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.
কিছু গাছ
ওরা আশ্চর্য। প্রত্যেকে তার প্রতিবেশীর
সঙ্গে জুড়ে রয়েছে, যেন ভাষা
একটা সুস্থির খেলা যেন
ঘটনাচক্রে এভাবে সাজানো
এই সকালের দেখা হওয়া
পৃথিবীর আজকের অনুমোদন মেনে নিয়ে
তুমি আর আমি
এই মুহুর্তে গাছেরা যা চেষ্টা করছে
আমরা তাই
ওরা যে আজ এখানে, এর একটা অর্থ আছে
আমরাও হয়ত নিজেদের স্পর্শ করব, ভালবাসবো
নিজেদের কথা নিজেদের বোঝাব।
আর আমরা যে কোন পবিত্রতার জন্ম দিইনি
এতেই যে আমরা খুশী; আর পরিবেষ্টিত:
এক নিস্তব্ধতায়, যা এরই মধ্যে শব্দময় হয়ে উঠছে
একটা ক্যানভাস যার মধ্যে ফুটে উঠছে
একটা হাসির কোরাস, এক শীতের সকাল।
ধাঁধানো আলোক্স্থান যা চলে ফিরে বেড়াচ্ছে
যে সারবত্তায় বাঁধানো আমাদের দিনকাল
তার উচচারণই তাকে রক্ষা করে।
যদি পরে অশ্রুকে ছেঁদো ছুঁতোর মতো লাগে
আর এই কঠিন ভয়-করা পৃথিবীর আলো জ্বালাবার
The Sea
(Can You Hear, Bird)
We carry our anxiety about the land with us
when we leave the land to travel overseas.
She shouts: “This is the dimmest
thing you ever did! In all time
was never such lurching, so much rubbing of the chin.”
It’s true: I’d have deserted the land of my forefathers
a dozen times before if I’d thought
I could get away with it.
And a triangular shadow whose apex is my toe
comes to tell me of my rights, warning me
of perjury, in some books the most serious crime of all.
Even the crinkled stars in the meadow
cannot look the other way, forcing me
into my constrained idea of myself.
I must go out with the light, and some day
someone will see through and love me.
I look down at these asters, unsteady,
unsure of what to grab. The tuneless sing to me.
সমুদ্র
আমাদের যাবতীয় দুশ্চিন্তা এই দেশে আমাদেরই পিছু পিছু ঘোরে
এমনকি আমরা যখন দেশ ছেড়ে যাই সাগরপাড়ের দেশে, তখনো।
মহিলা চেঁচায় – ‘এর চেয়ে বোকামি তুমি আর করোনি’।
সত্যি কিন্তু: হয়তো বার দশেক পৈত্রিক ভিটে ছাড়ার পরে
তবেই মনে হত – এতেই আমার কাজ চলে যায়
আর ঐ তেকোনা ছায়া, যার একটা কোণ আমার পায়ের
বুড়ো আঙুল ছুঁয়েছে, বাতলে দিচ্ছে আমার স্বাধিকার
মিথ্যে সাক্ষ্য দেওয়া সম্পর্কে হুঁশিয়ার করছে
একেকটা বইতে এর চেয়ে বড় অপরাধ আর নেই।
এমনকি খোলামাঠের ওপর ঐ কোঁচকানো তারাগুলোও
অন্যদিকে তাকাতে পারেনা, আমাকে আমারই বন্ধ ধারনাটার
মধ্যে আটকে রাখে। আসলে আলোর সাথে বেরিয়ে যাওয়া চাই
একদিন হয়ত ভেদ করে দেখবে কেউ, ভালবাসবে আমায়।
নীচে তাকিয়ে দেখি ঐ আস্টার ফুলগুলো, অস্থির
কাকে ধরবে জানেনা এখনো। অসুর আমায় গান শোনায়।
Vetiver*
(April Galleons)
Ages passed slowly, like a load of hay,
As the flowers recited their lines
And pike stirred at the bottom of the pond.
The pen was cool to the touch.
The staircase swept upward
Through fragmented garlands, keeping the melancholy
Already distilled in letters of the alphabet.
It would be time for winter now, its spun-sugar
Palaces and also lines of care
At the mouth, pink smudges on the forehead and cheeks,
The color once known as “ashes of roses.”
How many snakes and lizards shed their skins
For time to be passing on like this,
Sinking deeper in the sand as it wound toward
The conclusion. It had all been working so well and now,
Well, it just kind of came apart in the hand
As a change is voiced, sharp
As a fishhook in the throat, and decorative tears flowed
Past us into a basin called infinity.
There was no charge for anything, the gates
Had been left open intentionally.
Don’t follow, you can have whatever it is.
And in some room someone examines his youth,
Finds it dry and hollow, porous to the touch.
O keep me with you, unless the outdoors
Embraces both of us, unites us, unless
The birdcatchers put away their twigs,
The fishermen haul in their sleek empty nets
And others become part of the immense crowd
Around this bonfire, a situation
That has come to mean us to us, and the crying
In the leaves is saved, the last silver drops.
ভেটিভার
যুগ চলে যায় ধীরে, খড়ের গাড়ির মতো
ফুলের তাদের পংক্তি আওড়ায়
আর মৌরলা ঘোরে পুষ্করিনীর নীচে।
কলমটা শীতলস্পর্শ।
সিঁড়ি লতিয়ে উঠে গিয়েছিলো
সুগন্ধী মালার ভেতর দিয়ে
অক্ষরের ডৌলে
এক স্মৃতিগত বিষণ্নতা ছেঁকে রেখে।
শীতের আসার সময় হলো, সেটা মোটা চিনির তৈরি
রাজপ্রাসাদে তার যত্নরেখা সহ ধরা পড়ছে
মুখের কাছে, গোলাপিরঙের ছোপ কপালে, গালে
যে রঙের একদিন নাম হযেছিলো ‘গোলাপের ছাই’ ।
কতগুলো সাপ গোসাপের নির্মোক খসে পড়লে
এতটা সময় এভাবে কেটে যায়
বালির গভীরতর প্রদেশে পাক দিয়ে শেষ সিদ্ধান্তের দিকে।
এতোদিন কি ভালো চলছিলো সব, হঠাত কেমন দেখুন
হঠাতই, হাতে হাতে খুলে এলো যেই
এক পরিবর্তন সাড়া দিলো, তীব্র তীক্ষ্ণ গলায়
যে বঁড়শি আটকায় আর সুসজ্জিত অশ্রু
পাশ দিয়ে বয়ে গিয়ে যে অববাহিকায় পড়ে
তাকেই বলে জগতের অসীম।
সমস্তই ছিলো বিনামূল্য। গেট স্বেচ্ছায় খুলে দেওয়া হযেছিলো।
পিছু পিছু ছোটার কোনো প্রয়োজন নেই, যা চাও সবই তোমার। আর
একটা ঘরে কেউ তার যৌবন পরীক্ষা করে, মনে হয় শুকনো, ফাঁপা
হাতের পরশে মনে হয় রন্ধ্রবহুল
আমাকে ছেড়োনা, সঙ্গে রেখো, এক যদিনা
বাহির আমাদের দুজনকে জড়িয়ে ধরে, মেলায়, এক যদিনা
পাখিধরারা তাদের কলকাঠি সরিয়ে রাখে
জেলেরা টানে তাদের মসৃণ ফাঁকা জাল
আর অন্যরা গিয়ে মেশে সেই বিরাট জমায়েতে
বনফায়ার বা অনান্দাগ্নির ধরে, এই পরিস্থিতি আমাদের কাছে
এসে আমাদেরই কথা শোনায়, আর ওই
পাতায় পাতায় ছাওয়া কান্না আমরা জমালাম –
ঐ অন্তিম রূপোলি ফোঁটাগুলো।
*Vetiver is a fragrant extract or essential oil obtained from the root of an Indian grass, used in perfumery and aromatherapy.
Shadow of Pleasance
Because life is short
We must remember to keep asking it the same question
Until the repeated question and the same silence become answer
In words broken open and pressed to the mouth
And the last silence reveals the lining
Until at last this thing exists separately
At all levels of the landscape and in the sky
And in the people who timidly inhabit it
The locked name for which is open, to dust and to no thoughts
Even of dying, the fuzzy first thought that gets started in you and then there’s no stopping it.
— John Ashbery, ‘Three Poems’
I had my first pass at John Ashbery’s poetry during the last of my teen years, in National Library, Kolkata where I had chanced upon a copy of Shadow Train. I don’t remember much of that first exposure except for a faint feeling of ricocheting at the stolid, textual opacity of those poems.
My first serious engagement with Ashbery’s poetry happened one and a half decades later as I was beginning to settle down in South-West Ohio in Cincinnati, which I would later call home. In a bid to understand the workings of post-modern American poetry, first symptomatically, and then spiritually, I chose two poets from the New York School to focus on, in the usual genealogical order – John Ashbery and Ted Berrigan.
What immediately came off the Ashberian bat for me was the so-called crafty street-talk some early critics had dismissed as ‘inconstruable babble’. Because of his early Dadaist (as in Leaving the Atocha Station/The Tennis Court Oath), Surrealist and Abstract Impressionist influences, Ashbery had developed a writing style that was both inviting and impenetrable at the gateway of the poem. Never had I come across a major poet, in the languages I read poetry in, before or after Ashbery, who had drawn so much from the other arts, especially painting. To cut short the long list of such poems, one feels the temptation to mention at least two –‘The Painter’ (Some Trees), which is based on a de Chirico drawing of an unfinished painting by an unknown painter, and the legendary and much cited long poem ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ which is sourced on Francesco Parmigianino’s 16th century self-portrait. Ashbery, however, had once separated poetry from painting: ‘For me, poetry is very much the time that it takes to unroll, the way music does… it’s not a static, contemplatable thing like a painting or a piece of sculpture.’
The carefully planted and often deceiving digression of speech, which Ashbery had sculpted into an art form, began to appeal to me. More things offered pure magnetism as I started reading his books in a non-chronological order. The serpentine journey through street-side corollaries before the hazy theorem appeared or never appeared, ending the tunnel with an illuminated haze, became a personal passion.
A constant de-glorification of the position of the poem was also conspicuous. Naughty manipulations and often self-destruction of a saucing lyric (as in ‘Vetiver’, ‘Hotel Lautréamont’ and numerous other poems) and the childlike mirth of playing with randomly chosen colours, tunes, and muck brought me the courage I needed to pursue directions my own poetry was leaning towards, but with more vigour, surety and determination now.
John Ashbery, in front of his Chelsea home in NYC, 1998/ Image courtesy John Tranter
Most of Bengali poetry, by tradition, is a curry with barely any meat and vegetables in it except for a few rounded potatoes. Opposed to these poetic traditions — which was aggravated more by my cultural exile in North America — the shape and weight of the poem’s content became more important than the quality of textual gravity that mingled language, expression, syntax, rhythm, metaphors — sources of personal flourish many Bengali poets cultivate. I was close to forty by then, had read a plethora of world poetry, published over hundred poems, two books and had been associated for more than a decade with Bengali experimental poetry genres. These were propounded by groups/ magazines like Kaurab, Kabita Campus and Natun Kabita, where I had worked as an editor or associate editor. With a hunger for knowledge and a passion for multi-epistemology, I was leaning in directions where John Ashbery’s poetry had accentuated and catapulted to unreachable heights. The singular ‘modernist’ content I had long rejected, and was beginning to feel that the poem needs be a crumb-can than a smooth, monolithic loaf.
Ashberian poetics was beginning to open up that maze to me as I began to ask,
How are we to inhabit
This space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing,
As in a stage-set or dollhouse, except by staving as we are,
In lost profile, facing the stars, with dozens of as yet
Unrealized projects, and a strict sense
Of time running out
— ‘Pyrography’, Houseboat Days (1977)
The decentralised theme and constant revisitations of sub-themes, carefully deceiving manoeuvers of what I would call ‘derivative themes’ and a widely stretched vocabulary gives John Ashbery’s poetry a quality that remains unmatched in the English-speaking world. There were lessons to learn from everywhere, to get into his poetry, gather the beautiful shells of floral print and then depart in a variety of ways. In a way, for a non-academic reader of poetry like me, who is rooted in another poetic and linguistic tradition, the Ashberian poem offered a porosity though which I could stream my fluids with ease and leave with strange scents and flavour. Later on, interestingly, while going through my first book of English language poems transcreated from Bengali, late night correspondence, some poets close to John Ashbery felt that there was no apparent influence, while my preface writer, poet and scholar Tyrone Williams felt ‘Ashbery’s influence is palpable’.
On what had been the thematic mainstay of Ashberian poetics, critics through generations have appeared vexed with early pessimists banishing it as ‘nothing’ (is what Ashbery writes about) to the illustrious Harold Bloom hailing him as a luminary in ‘the American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens and Hart Crane.’ Many critics of the later years thought ‘poetry’ or ‘writing’ was what John Ashbery was almost always writing about. The poet’s own self-reflection on the subject has been variegated too, until a point in time came when he confessed, ‘as I have gotten older, it seems to me that time is what I have been writing about all these years during which I thought I wasn’t writing about anything’.
For a poet, the more abstract and non-poetic influences get, the more incomparable her oeuvre becomes. Ashberian poetry presented me with rich examples of such departures. Art, music and cinema, especially the former, fermented wide domains of his poetry. Ashbery once famously said,
‘I have probably been influenced by the modern art that I have looked at. Certainly the simultaneity of cubism is something that has rubbed off on me, as well as the abstract expressionist idea that the work is a sort of record of its own coming into existence. The process of writing poetry becomes the poem. This was radically demonstrated by action painters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning’.
The conspicuous presence of the mise-en-abyme in Ashberian poetics has often been highlighted. In an intriguing parallel with ‘art-about-art-making’ much of his poetry was about the conundrum and contradictions of writing poetry. This had become a platitude by the late 1990s. Such tendencies certainly propelled me to incorporate place-holders for brief, critical discussions on the pursued poetics in many of my poems. As several younger poets in my coterie began to imbibe this approach, I became more conscious of it and veered away.
Cinema was another common interest. Movies had been an influence in John Ashbery’s poetry since his early years. D.W. Griffith’s The Lonedale Operator was the loaned title of an Ashbery poem from A Wave (1981). In the august years of his life, Ashbery came in touch with several younger filmmakers – American, Canadian and European, who had been influenced by his poetry and were now weaving that into their own cine-work. Abigail Child, Nathaniel Dorsky, Jorgen Leth and most notably Guy Maddin have all confessed to casting Ashbery’s halo on their work in one way or another. Interestingly, during a 2007 interview, John Ashbery told me about his loose collaboration with Jorgen Leth and particularly Guy Maddin, whose work had been introduced to him by my friend and acclaimed poet Peter Gizzi.
In fact, it was Gizzi who put me in touch with Ashbery sometime around 2005. Introduced late into his work, I was literally devouring John’s work, reading his poetry and critical commentary about his poetics in very oblong and haphazard ways. I remember speaking with John a couple of times over phone about the self-sponsored Bengali translation project I had just begun. David Kermani, Ashbery’s partner and literary steward of many years, got in touch and offered enormous help providing, among other things, key resources from The Flowchart Foundation in completing my five-year-long project. My Bengali book of translation, essay, interview and bibliography Ei Ghor: John Ashbery’r Kobita (This Room: The Poetry of John Ashbery) was published by Patralekha Press, Kolkata in 2010.
It is customary for younger poets to look up to luminaries for unique influences at the beginning of their careers. As we age, however, a waning of such influences ensues and many writers fail to find newer rooting. In the light of this, one thing stands out for me from my 2007 Ashbery interview. At one point, while musing about Frank O’Hara, he said, ‘I don’t read the work of my friends anymore (smiles)… specially my own work, which I don’t read at all… Basically, of late I like to read the more young contemporary poets, many of them have been influenced by me and who have then gone on to write their own and are now influencing me.’
