I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems
Page 30
Also in this poem, Om is a sacred monosyllable which probably originated as a solemn way of saying ‘Yes, so be it’, rather like ‘Amen’; it came to be regarded as an amalgamation of the three sounds, a, u, and m, signifying the gods Vishnu, Shiva, and Brahma (and standing for the functions of preservation, destruction, and regeneration), and was finally identified with the philosophical concept of the Absolute or Ultimate Reality (Brahman), worthy of the most solemn contemplation and meditation.
Further down in the same poem, the word ‘mother-bird’ perhaps deserves a comment. The original word is simply janani, one of the words for ‘mother’, but I felt that it would be worthwhile to bring over the underlying image, which is that of a mother-bird watching over her brood in a nest, staying awake through a difficult night. But that nest is bipul or vast, which tells us that it refers to the entire population of the land. This idea of the vast nest ties with Tagore’s subsequent conceptualisation of the university he founded as a place where the world might become one nest. The mother-bird thus merges with the ‘Mother’ of the last stanza, the mothering spirit of the country, or the homeland imagined as a mother.
154-57. No. 6 of Balaka (A Flight of Wild Birds): This poem remembers Kadambari Devi and was probably inspired by an old photograph of hers. As the poem was written in Allahabad, ‘this river’ could refer to the confluence of the Ganga and the Yamuna by which that city is situated.
157-59. No. 36 of Balaka: Tagore has confirmed that a flight of wild birds he witnessed one evening brought home to him the mobility of all things, even when they were apparently still. He calls the birds wild ducks (buno haans). Haans is derived from hamsa, which has been discussed at length in the note on ‘Death-dream’. This is a loose, non-specific description, and I do not think it is possible to identify them in any strict sense. What is clear is that they were migratory birds (Rabindra-rachanabali, vol. 12, Granthaparichay section). The image of a bird or birds in transit is a recurrent one in Tagore’s poetry and is often charged with a great deal of symbolic significance. See, for instance, ‘Death-dream’ and ‘A Stressful Time’ in this collection.
159. No. 39 of Balaka: This poem was written for the approaching third centenary of the death of William Shakespeare in 1916. The devotion of English-educated Bengalis to Shakespeare was almost proverbial. ‘The native generation who have been brought up at the Hindu College are perfectly mad about Shakespeare. What a triumph it is for him, dear creature!’ (Emily Eden, Letters from India, 1872, vol. I, p. 186.) My own grandfather could recite whole scenes of Shakespeare from memory, earning for himself the epithet of ‘Shakespeare Kushari’, and the cult of Shakespeare was very much alive in my student days at Calcutta.
160-61. The Last Establishment (Palataka, She who is Fugitive): I would be tempted to make a connection between this poem and the death or at least the impending death of Tagore’s eldest daughter Bela. Bela, the tiny heroine of ‘I Won’t Let You Go’, died of tuberculosis (like her sister Rani) after protracted suffering on 16 May 1918, the year in which Palataka was published. This is the last poem of the book, the title of which means ‘the fugitive one’ in the feminine gender. Kripalani (p. 285) is of the opinion that the poems of Palataka ‘bear unmistakable traces’ of this bereavement, and Professor Sankha Ghosh agrees with me that a connection between Bela’s death and ‘The Last Establishment’ is highly likely.
160. The other poem of Palataka which I have translated, Getting Lost, is also charged with a sense of loss. Is Bami, the little girl of this poem, a surrogate of Tagore’s second daughter Rani, dead for some fifteen years?
161-64. The success of the poetic prose of the English Gitanjali encouraged Tagore to experiment with the possibility of similar composition in Bengali. The result was a group of “prose poems” which form the first section of the book Lipika, from which I have translated four examples. The title Lipika can be translated as ‘Writings’, with a suggestion, perhaps, of the diminutive dimension: ‘Little Writings’. Extra spaces used in printing to indicate pauses are in keeping with the poet’s intentions. Many bereavements have gone into the making of these fine poems which seem a distillation of the essence of grief.
I have wondered if One Day remembers the days Tagore spent with Jyotirindranath Tagore and Kadambari Devi at a villa in Telenipara, Chandernagore, ‘the villa of the Banerjees’ where he set to music several lyrics of the medieval Baishnab poet Vidyapati, including a celebrated one particularly charged with monsoon-melancholy which could well be the song he has in mind here. (See Pal, vol. 2, 1st edition, pp. 140-1, or 2nd edition, p. 107. See also Tagore’s Chhelebela (Rabindra-rachanabali, vol. 26, pp. 623-34.)
In The Question the little boy is seven when his mother dies. Tagore’s own youngest son was just a few days away from his sixth birthday when Mrinalini Devi died. Note also the terrace which figures in the second section of the poem. There was a terrace overlooking the room where Mrinalini Devi slept and died (Rathindranath Tagore, p. 52), and when she died Tagore spent the whole night on the terrace, ‘walking up and down, having given strict orders that no one was to disturb him’ (Kripalani, p. 203).
166. Remembering (Shishu Bholanath): This is another poem in which the accumulated sorrows of personal bereavements have been distilled into poetry. Shishu Bholanath can be translated as ‘The Child Bholanath’, ‘Bholanath’ being an epithet of Shiva, meaning ‘the lord of the self-forgetful/absent-minded ones’. The title suggests the un-selfconscious nature of children.
167-68. Gratitude (Purabi): The collection is named after an evening raga. Written on 2 November 1924 on board the Andes, as Tagore was on his way to South America, this poem is haunted by the memory of a dead woman, someone with whom he seems to have had an intimate relationship (‘On that day’s kiss…’). Could she not be his wife, who had died on 23 November 1902? There is some similarity between the description of the opening lines and Rathindranath Tagore’s description of his last meeting with his mother: ‘The last time when I went to her bedside she could not speak, but on seeing me, tears silently rolled down her cheeks’ (On the Edges of Time, p. 52). The phrase ‘charged with your smothered vermilion’ refers to the powdered vermilion (red crystalline mercuric sulphide) used on the forehead and hair-parting by a Bengali Hindu married woman as long as her husband is alive.
168-69. The Apprehension (Purabi): This poem was written at the villa Miralrío in San Isidro, a suburb of Buenos Aires, where Tagore, accompanied by his honorary secretary, Leonard Elmhirst, was staying as the guest of Victoria Ocampo, to recover from the effects of an influenza caught on board the Andes. Tagore had come to South America to visit Peru, where he had an invitation to attend the centenary of Peru’s liberation from the imperial rule of Spain. But illness upset his plans, and he accepted the hospitality offered by Victoria Ocampo, a 34-year-old Argentine woman who was an ardent admirer of his works in translation and who was beginning to make herself a name as an emerging writer. In the end Tagore stayed in Argentina for about two months and did not go to Peru at all. A triangular relationship developed between Tagore, Elmhirst, and Ocampo, which was fairly stormy during the San Isidro days, but settled into a mellowed long-distance friendship afterwards. Tagore dedicated the collection Purabi to Victoria, who eventually had a long and distinguished career as a writer, editor, and publisher, especially as the founder and director of the magazine Sur and of the publishing-house of the same name. She died only in 1979. For the story of the Tagore-Ocampo friendship and their influence on each other’s work, the curious are referred to my study listed in the beginning of this Notes section. Tagore did a free English re-creation of this poem and after a great deal of hesitation and consultation with Elmhirst gave it to Ocampo. Those who are interested can find it in my book (p. 135).
Note the image of the anchoress and the association between love and penance/ asceticism in the last stanza of the poem. Figures like Parvati and Mahashweta are lurking here. See the note on the poem ‘The Victorious Woman’ above.
170-71. The Exchange (Purabi): Written on board the ship that took him away from Argentina towards Italy, this poem would seem to be about the encounter with Victoria Ocampo which Tagore had just had.
171-72. The Identity and Disappearance (Mahua): The history of how the poems of Mahua came to be written is interesting. Tagore’s admirers wanted an anthology of his love poems suitable for presentation at weddings and wanted him to write a few new poems to go with the old ones. In no time at all the 67-year-old poet wrote a whole set of new love poems, which had to be issued as a new collection. Personally, I would connect a number of poems in this book, including the two translated by me, with his encounter with Victoria Ocampo. ‘Mahua’ is the name of a tree and its flowers from which an intoxicating drink is made. See the Glossary.
In ‘The Identity’, stanza 4, l. 1, the original of the word ‘friend’ is in the feminine gender. Unlike several other European languages, English has no corresponding word.
173-75. Kopai (Punashcha, Yet Again, or Postscript): In this collection Tagore made his second set of experiments with the possibility of prose poetry in Bengali – the first being in Lipika – this time daring to break up the lines, so that the line arrangement on the page looks like that of poetry. In ‘Kopai’, which is the first poem in the collection, he uses the river Kopai, which flows close to Santiniketan, as an analogy to his own experiments in a form that reconciles poetry and prose. In Bengali the word chhanda stands for both ‘metre’ and ‘rhythm’; I have translated according to the context. Tagore seems to be implying that his prose poetry may not have formal metre, but it will have a rhythm of its own. What is interesting is his complete mastery over the new form: from the word ‘go’, as it were, he uses his new instrument with superb ease, continuing the style in several other subsequent collections with total confidence.
The indigo factory’s ruined foundations in the second stanza take us back to the time when British planters planted large areas of land with indigo for the manufacture of dyes.
176-78. Dwelling (Punashcha): A letter to Pratima Devi, Tagore’s daughter-in-law, written from Berlin two years ago on 18 August 1930, describing an imaginary studio by the River Mayurakshi, may be called the first draft of this poem (Rabindra-rachanabali, vol. 16, Granthaparichay section). See the entry on Mayurakshi in the Glossary to appreciate the aptness of the name in the context of the poem and especially the associations of the name in the last stanza.
178-79. Memory (Punashcha): The town remembered in this poem is most likely to be Ghazipur, now in Uttar Pradesh, where Tagore spent some time as a young man with his own nuclear family. Ghazipur is the location of three poems from Manasi translated in this volume. The phrase ‘in the west country’ refers to the region west of Bengal, generally to Bihar and the old United Provinces. The same town seems to be remembered in poem no. 4 of Arogya, which was written in Santiniketan on 31 January 1941. The names ‘Bhajiya’ and ‘Girdhari’ are appropriate for Hindi-speaking people.
183-85. The Last Letter (Punashcha): In a poem like this one cannot but see the shadow of Tagore’s own bereavements. For instance, Tagore’s second daughter was just two months away from her twelfth birthday when her mother died, and herself died nine months after her mother’s death. ‘Amli’ is a shortened and familiar version of ‘Amala’. The ‘Agra shoes’ (stanza 1) were presumably embroidered and with turned up toe-ends. See the Glossary for Bethune School and the place-names.
186-90. Camellia (Punashcha): Tagore had very probably seen the camellia plant in the Indian hills (see the entry on it in the Glossary), but the idea of using it in a poem could have occurred to him via Verdi’s La Traviata, a performance of which he attended at La Scala in Milan in 1925 on his way back from Argentina. The libretto of that opera was based on a play entitled La Dame aux Camélias, and Tagore may well have read about it in his theatre programme.
190-91. A Person (Punashcha): ‘Dhoti in wrestler-style’ (stanza 1): i.e. with the folds tucked front-to-back between the legs. The dhoti is the unstitched drapery worn by men, the male equivalent of the sari.
‘merchants from Kabul’ (last stanza): travelling traders from Afghanistan who also acted as moneylenders. One such man is the hero of one of Tagore’s short stories.
191-92. Writing a Letter (Punashcha): In the last stanza the obligation to serve a meal to her husband’s young nephew shows the young woman’s duties within the extended family.
192-93. No. 1 of Shesh Saptak (The Last Octave): It is quite possible that this poem, written in mid-November 1932, remembers Tagore’s wife, who died on 23 November 1902. Note that the word saptak in the title, though meaning, strictly speaking, a set of seven notes, has to be translated ‘octave’ in English. The saptak of Indian music is effectively the octave of Western music; it is just that the eighth note of the octave is not taken into account in the Indian term.
193-94. No. 2 of Shesh Saptak: The eighth line of the second stanza is an attempt to render one single word of the original, meed, which is a technical term of Indian music. I thought that to do justice to the musical metaphor it was better to translate the word in this way than to introduce it physically into the text, for the word by itself would not be comprehensible without a gloss and the metaphor would therefore be stillborn.
194-95. No. 3 of Shesh Saptak: See the entries on Valmiki and Tamasa in the Glossary to appreciate the comparison in the first stanza. From Valmiki the poem moves on to the memory of a dear one who is dead.
195-97. No. 9 of Shesh Saptak: The phrase ‘seven seas’ in the first stanza is an exact translation of the original phrase, which is an idiomatic expression signifying great distances.
199-200. No. 13 of Shesh Saptak: This poem is a play of metaphors from the philosophical songs of the itinerant Baul singers of Bengal. The Bauls are a fascinating religious-philosophical sect special to Bengal, incorporating both Hindu and Muslim (especially Persian Sufi) elements. The word baul literally means ‘mad, crazy’. The Bauls are essentially rebels: against caste, dogma, and all kinds of convention. In their songs they like to probe deep and go to the heart of the matter. Their contribution to the religious and social thinking of Bengal and to the region’s folk poetry, music, and dance is considerable. They like to give the impression that they are simple and unsophisticated, but in reality their conceptual finesse is quite remarkable. Concepts like ‘the unfamiliar bird’ or ‘the uncatchable’ are characteristic Baul concepts. Tagore was himself a notable collector of Baul songs and was deeply influenced by them. The district of Birbhum has always had many Bauls and they still congregate in large numbers during certain fairs. Modern Bauls have composed many new songs, – exciting, innovative, clever, – using images drawn from contemporary life. Baul buskers can often be heard twanging their instruments and singing in their characteristic shrill and passionate style (not unlike the cante jondo or ‘deep song’ of Spanish gypsies) on long-distance buses and railway trains. The curious might like to look at The Mirror of the Sky, an anthology of Baul songs translated by Deben Bhattacharya (Allen & Unwin, London, 1969).
200-01. No. 22 of Shesh Saptak: The expression ‘earth-ridge-bound’ in stanza 5 refers to the earthen ridges which are built by Indian farmers to act as boundaries between fields. One can walk on them.
202-03. No. 27 of Shesh Saptak: ‘The g
reen-forest-enamelled valley’s/ cup of blue sky’ (stanza 2): the image of the blue sky as a cup from which one can drink light is a recurrent one in Tagore. He says elsewhere: ‘I love the sky and light so cordially! The sky is my cup-bearer, holding a transparent cup of blue crystal upside down, and the golden light, mingling with my blood like wine, is making me equal to the gods’ (letter written from Shahjadpur, 2 July 1895, Chhinnapatrabali, p. 312, my translation). Compare with No. 7 of Patraput (‘I have accepted in my body and mind/ the juice of creation’s fountain dripping from skies’) and No. 8 of the same collection where the flowers of the wild plant of unknown name, nicknamed ‘Peyali’, are ‘like crafted cups of a violet hue/ for drinking the light’.
203-04. No. 29 of Shesh Saptak: ‘image-immersion rituals’ (stanza 1): in a number of Hindu festivals clay images of deities are made annually. At the end of the festivals the images are ceremonially cast into rivers or lakes.
‘contest between bards’ (stanza 2): referring to the tradition of contests where poets and singers tested their skills in oral composition and improvisation. The two contending parties would engage in a dialogue which they would make up as they went along.
‘peacock-neck-coloured’ (stanza 4): the original word dhupchhaya literally means a mingling of sunshine and shade, from which the connotation of ‘peacock-neck-coloured’ has evolved. In textile weaving the term is applied specifically to certain colour combinations in the warp and woof of a fabric.
205-07. No. 31 of Shesh Saptak: This poem, put in the mouth of a widower, seems to spring from the inmost depths of Tagore’s loneliness. The domestic incident at the centre of the poem could well be from his own married life.
210. The Indifferent One (Bithika, The Avenue): Personally, I think that in this poem and in poem no. 11 of Patraput Tagore is writing in veiled terms about his relationship with Victoria Ocampo.