The Word as Sanctuary

January 18, 2006 SC: Over the years, from your first book to your latest one, how much has your writing changed, how much remained the same?

JG: I have changed, and my writing has changed. In fact, with every book, I have tried to do something completely different from what I have done before. If I felt I was going to repeat myself, I have not written. Once a writer creates a language that he likes to think of as his own, that style or that kind of writing gets institutionalized. Then the poet feels safe. The poet starts writing to suit mass expectation. As Constantine Cavafy said, the poet who knows his audience is limited is truly free to write.

You see, my writing has been closely linked with the life-stages that I’ve passed through. As you know, I am a high-school dropout. My mother was the headmistress of a mofussil school. She ran the house, my father having died when I was very young. When my mother passed away, I was 29, unemployed, and my only reaction to what was happening was deep depression and rage. Somehow that trauma strengthened me and I wrote. I kept writing, for myself, for the little magazines. At the age of 31, I fell in love for the first time. It didn’t last very long. It was only when I was 36 that I suddenly found celebrity-hood being thrust upon me. This happened because I won the Ananda Puraskar for Ghumiyechho, Jhaupata. Suddenly, people who had not given me a second look would stop me in the street and want to talk to me in our small neighborhood. I wondered, what would be my real identity? I felt I was standing in front of a void. Like Picasso said, the canvas was a void and you had to plunge into it. I wrote a long poem ‘Aaj jodi amakay jiggesh koro’ (If you ask me now). Meanwhile, I had begun working, my first job was at the age of 37! There was routine in my life, there were commitments. And suddenly, in the midst of all this, the words started coming again, like a storm, new forms, images, words, sounds, I was confronting the unknown but this time I was ready.

SC: You speak of words coming to you. Is that how the poem first takes shape in your mind – as a word? Or as a line, a picture, a moment you have seen and recollected?

JG: For me, the poem always shapes itself first as a line. That can happen to me anywhere. Earlier, when I was living my vagabond life, it was easier to be always there, ready for the line when it came. As a householder, with a wife and a daughter, with friends dropping in at any time, it is harder for me to hang on to the line when it does come, unexpected. If I am surrounded by people when a line arrives, unannounced, I find the press of conversation and voices unbearable. And so I retreat to the only place where I can be alone, the bathroom, and I run the taps. Safe behind the screen of sound that the running water makes, I utter the line as it made itself known to me, and I repeat and retain it for the time when I will be able to put it down on paper. For me, carrying the line around from the time it occurs to me to the time when I will finally write it down becomes an act of preservation. I rescue the line from the babble around me for the moment when it will become part of my poem. Surjo-Pora Chhai in fact was largely written like this, on the move, in the head.

SC: Could you talk a little more about how Surjo-Pora Chhai was written? You mention in an introductory note to the poems that the poems are untitled, nor have they been numbered, was there a specific reason behind this?

JG: No reason really, it was more a giving-in to the impossibility of titling the poems that finally made up Surjo-Pora Chhai. When I wrote it, I was 46 years old, I had about fourteen or fifteen books of poetry behind me, and also a couple of collections, ‘selected works’, that kind of thing. The year was 1999. A lot was going on that was affecting me. The Kargil war, Kosovo, images of millions of refugees fleeing . . . I was also fleeing in my own way at that time. I would be crisscrossing the city, by tram, by bus, and these poems would float up into my mind. You will notice that the poems in Surjo-Pora Chhai are very short, and have very short verses, one line, space, two lines, space. That was really dictated to me by the rhythm of the tram-journeys. I would think of two lines, and the tram would brake, or the conductor would ask me for my ticket, and the space insinuated itself into the poem. Normally I try to save my lines from interruption. Here, the interruptions became part of my lines. For me the form of my poems is linked with what my body is going through, whether spatially, emotionally or physically. What I was running away from on all those endless journeys was really a running towards the words. I was trying to hide in the words. The words that make up Surjo-Pora Chhai were my refuge, and my sanctuary.

SC: But what a terrifying sanctuary! Throughout Surjo-Pora Chhai there are images of great bleakness, great desolation. There is the overriding presence of death, skulls, graves, dying suns, a sense of annihilation, earth and flesh seemingly inseparable. A lot of the images are surreal, like the scull that falls out of the boat turning into a winged, horned, sea-creature pulling this giant boat through a drowning world. What was in your mind when you were writing these?

JG: The genesis of Surjo-Pora Chhai was really my terrible depression. Also, I was thinking of all sorts of things. About Andrew Wiles who was speechless when asked how it felt to have solved Fermat’s Last Theorem at last – he had no words to describe the ‘unbelievable beauty’. I was also wondering what would Niels Bohr have thought after the discovery of atomic structure. I was thinking of the enormous burst of energy from the dropped asteroids that wiped out the dinosaurs from the face of the planet, of pterodactyls taking to the air in the split-second before their annihilation. I was thinking of myths, of Hiranyakashipu and Vishnu in his Matsya Avatar, I was also thinking of Lord Ganesh writing the entire Mahabharata without any breaks or interruptions. The whole notion of poetry being ‘received’ rather than ‘written’. In this book, there is the image of this ‘headless painter’ painting his shlokas on the back of the universe – as if the universe were a giant canvas. All these things, you understand, were happening unconsciously. Surjo-Pora Chhai took three months to write, from my fleeing-thinking stage to the final penning-down stage. I put it away and 6 months later, when I submitted my manuscript to the publishers, I found that I had been cured.

SC: So this collection of dark, often surreal poems, had helped you return to reality. There was something to rejoice about, then, some hope?

JG: You see the thing is to go beyond the reach of the word. In poetry a limbless body can become an astral body. Which is why the title poem which is really about the end of the world, suddenly turns into a prayer, an invocation: “come down on me,/– smear my forehead with your ashen sun!” The poem here becomes a means of reproducing the emotion that I am feeling within the reader. The poet and writer share the same shock of a possibility of hope, however desperate, a sense of wonder, a straining towards something more than annihilation.

SC: Does that explain why this poem, unlike a lot of others (whose concluding lines are either left unpunctuated or conventionally punctuated with a full-stop) ends with an exclamation mark? Often, especially when seen in translation, an exclamation mark can be seen as an unnecessary flourish. But judging by the precision with which you have punctuated all your poems, I was wondering if this was also as precisely thought of.

JG: Yes, you’ll notice it in some other poems in this book. Wherever the concluding impulse of the poem is an active one, a determining one, rather than a passive or inconclusive one, I use the exclamation mark. I use it like a whiplash, underscoring the final stroke of transformation or joy or unexpectedness. Like the poem in which the dove sitting on the man’s shoulder ends with man and dove fusing into one blazing ember – that was something even I had not known was going to happen. But it did, and I signalled that moment of discovery with the exclamation mark.

SC: You mentioned that you like to avoid repetition at all costs. After Surjo-Pora Chhai what did you do that was different?

JG: My book Horiner Jonno Ekok which came out in 2002 happened in a radically different way. In Surjo-Pora Chhai I was trying to enclose, shut-out, in this one I was willing to let in. It was as if after being shut in a room with four windowless walls I had decided to peel the walls away, in soft layers as if they were paper not brick, lay them down flat and let the world in. I wrote Horiner Jonno Ekok in a state of openness. The noise of the city, the slogans of a procession passing outside my house, the ‘yatrapala’ of my childhood days, tele-ad dialogues, the voice on a mike, the abuses being hurled at each other by two competitive bus-drivers trying to out-race each other on Kolkata’s chaotic roads, I was allowing all that noise, all those voices in.

SC: You have also written prose. A few novels. Is your approach to prose the same, or is it different?

JG: Novels are what I write out of the commitments to my job and my family, poetry for love. My first and primary and enduring impulse will always be poetry. I write prose when I am asked to. I write poetry without being asked, and I will always write it, irrespective of whether it is read or published or seen.

SC: Do you think enough Bengali poetry is being made available to the non-Bengali world through translations? What do you expect from a translation of your own work? What kind of freedom do you think a translator can or should exercise?

JG: I do think a lot of work, good work is happening/ has happened as far as most established Bengali poets are concerned. As for my own poems, I believe more could be done. The thing for a translator to keep in mind is that sometimes it may be necessary to forgo the rhyme and maintain the thought. Sometimes, translators try to duplicate the original rhyme scheme and lose the thought. Neither do I like the approach where a translator completely rewrites the original. To my mind, a good translation conveys the imagery, the atmosphere, the ideas in the original poem, sort of ‘shows the scene’ as it appears in the original.

SC: And what is the situation in Bengali poetry today?

JG: In Kolkata, the scene is very bright, very active. Every month there are at least six to eight talks and conferences. There are a whole host of little magazines devoted to new writing in Bengali. The government of West Bengal also organizes an Annual Poetry Festival which is attended by hundreds of poets. There are regular reading sessions and from the ’90s on, a lot of poets at these sessions are women. Ordinary, middle-class women, writing about their lives, their concerns. I think that’s wonderful.

SC: So do you believe that poetry has its role to play in today’s world?

JG: Sometimes the world is more ready to listen to a poet than to his work. That’s what happens when you get co-opted by a cause or an organization. To me, poetry’s impact is best seen, not on society at large, but on the mind of the individual, interested reader. Poetry cannot always function as social commentary, or as a tool for improving society. Very often, poetry has no relation to reality. It could be surreal, a dreamscape, but at its core is the emotional truth, the imaginative truth that allows the reader to make that leap of faith. The reading of a poem is for me the only proof of its truth.