I read an interview with Michael F. Moore, the American translator from Italian to English. In it, he said: 'The authors I translate are like houseguests. I don't let them sleep with me: they get the sofa bed.' In my case, it is as if I am a willing conscript to the project of translating Subimal Misra.
There are many writers, but there are very few translators. And yet, without translators, the world of literature would dry up and die. Literature is about reading, but it is also about sharing. The American writer, Paul Auster, has said: 'Translators are the shadow heroes of literature.' And Göran Malmqvist, the well-known translator of Chinese literary works into Swedish, said in a recent interview: 'World literature is translation and translation is world literature – without translation there is no world literature, and that is true.'
Translation is a magnificent and powerful vocation. Just as a writer must and will write, some people must translate. It is a peculiar temperament, an aesthetic, a pleasure and a passion. A translator may choose a writer, but a translator may also get chosen. That happened in my case. Being a 'chosen one' is satisfying but also difficult.
Subimal Misra is a not just another writer, but a different kind of writer. Similarly, he is not just another person, but a different kind of person. Hence it is only natural and inevitable that working with him is also a different kind of experience. I am fortunate and glad that my translation venture did bear fruit in the form of books. It has been a valuable apprenticeship in the practice of literature. I hope I shall continue to learn and grow through the Misra translation project.
SUBIMAL MISRA ON READING
HIS WRITING
'In the capitalist system, artists and litterateurs have to survive by being amicable sometimes, and sometimes by wrestling … he stands on the left side, left of everyone … I do not want my writing to be converted into a commodity, or be capable of being digested in the intestines of middle-class babudom. I want to make writing into a weapon against repressive civilization.'
'… Given that which takes place flagrantly all day, the mentality of avoiding that and escaping is idiotic. If the perspective of social conflict does not emerge – if that is not elaborated upon – it's nothing but a ploy to make money from the business of bright topics. If sexual titillation is the only objective – a rape scene, if it remains just a rape scene; if the conflict-ridden process behind the rape is not indicated, if it's not saturated with the economic backwardness – if upon reading it, hatred towards the social system does not arise in the readers' mind, if it does not make one aware about the terrifying nature of the capitalist scheme of things … The fundamental thing is the point of view, from which angle it's being shown. Just as the writer who denies reality is dead, again, the writer who merely writes admitting the reality, is also just as dead, for the same reason.'
'… Not merely left or right politics, my battle's against anything connected with every kind of establishment – which suppresses people, and does not let them be fully human.'
—From the anti-novel, Actually This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale(1982)
'The needs of the reader who makes an effort to become one with the times are not met merely by the popular stream of stories and novels. For him the story has to say many more things beside the story. And it is through these many more things that the real character of the writer can be discerned. Consider all the information and statistics pertaining to a country or a society, which are easily available in books and are published in newspapers. Some truths are contained ever more clearly in the many more things of a story, the effort is made to make it contain that. It's because of the credibility of the writer's effort that a piece of text is simultaneously story, history, proclamation and personal diary. The carrying capacity of the text can be stretched as far as man's thinking and imagination can reach and ascend. And in the normal course of things, in the eyes of the unpractised reader, it may well appear complex and entirely doomed. A story or a novel is not merely a form of art, it is also a medium of expression of a personality. On the other hand, the writer is not merely a social theorist or sophisticated political thinker. The conscience of the independent writer submits only to truth and truth alone. And in that sense, it is the task of a writer to raise all kinds of questions, of all sides … and to always evaluate the possibility of alternative realities. Let us be able to recognize our own likes outside of the likes imposed on us.'
'… I don't know whether my writing is Marxist or not, but I do know that my fundamental inclination is to investigate. Until now, it is the search, rather than reaching a decision on anything, that I'm more enthusiastic about. I am always aware of my sense of incomplete-ness, and the inclination to search arises from this sense of incomplete-ness. I look at two broad strata in society (the arrangement of strata is however not so easy and simple, rather it is quite complex and this is not the place for a discussion on that): a certain class is content with the progress of a few people, while most people, ordinary labouring folk, are merely a means for the progress of the few people. Today there is an effort to build a society where the progress of the majority of people takes place. There is no end to artful analyses or opinions about this, and to the division into levels as well, but it is clear that my writing and the attempt of my writing is against those who in earlier times had the sole right over culture, and in favour of the excluded people.'
—From the anti-novel, When Colour is a Warning Sign (1984)
SUBIMAL MISRA,
THE CRYTO-REVOLUTIONARY
Janam Mukherjee
Although a 'Mukherjee' by birth, I am no Bengali. My father fled Bengal, in fact, long before I came into this world. What he had left behind remained scarcely discernible, except in the moans of his nightmares and in the few truncated stories he told me of his impossible youth. After coming to America he married a woman of European descent; the daughter of a 'rounder', half-Irish and half-Hungarian. My rough-living Irish grandfather (my mother's father) rode the rails in the 1920s, leaving Chicago at the age of thirteen and travelling – rough – back and forth across America for the next several decades – a real-life hobo; drinking, fighting, loving, livingand even, occasionally, working. Back in Chicago, he lost a few fingers in a machine press, probably either half drunk or fully hung-over, when the steel punch came down across his hand. If I remember correctly, it was the middle finger that was cut off at the knuckle, and the ring finger that was cut at the cuticle. From that cuticle a hardened, twisted yellow nail used to grow – 'shorty and the claw' he used to call the pair of them. Though not formally educated past the age of thirteen, he read three newspapers a day and commanded the respect of even the likes of university professors (such as my father), who would defer to his wit, super-sharp 'common sense', and unflinching honesty.
Well into my twenties, my grandfather remained my hero and role model. Accordingly, as soon as I could, I left home and began to travel – rough – like him. By the time I was thirty, I too had clocked tens of thousands of miles on the open roads of America, had ridden freight trains, slept beneath overpasses, spent nights in jails, and days under the scorching desert sun of the southwestern United States, waiting for an improbable ride. At times I lived on whiskey fumes and stale pizza, at other times, on the kindness of strangers. In any dicey situation, I channelled my grandfather, and his spirit would see me through. By and by, I thought, I was growing tough and wise, just like him. Unlike him, however, I meant to documentthe passage. While my grandfather was an inestimable raconteur who could hold any given audience rapt, I would be a writer – a great American writer. But aside from being a bum and an occasional manual labourer, in order to write, I knew, I would also have to read. And so I read, and read: Faulkner, Miller, Bukowski, Fante, Beckett, Hamsun, Stoppard, O'Neil, Sartre, Camus, Dostoevsky, Baldwin, Cleaver – anything and everything that I understood to be anti-establishment, pro-rebellion, iconoclastic, debauched – free.
To cut a long story short, after many thousands of miles, and as many
packs of cigarettes, I began to wonder about my methods. I was working hard to generate stories, to accumulate 'experience', to hone my perception and to concoct a style to cleverly impart my hard-won 'wisdom'. At times – in those halcyon days – I even sometimes imagined that I was succeeding. But overall, there seemed something terribly artificial in the exercise. The commotion, displacement, irony and slapstick that defined my own life – and prose – was almost entirely of my own invention, and as such could never really escape being ultimately contrived. Meanwhile, there were still those haunting stories –realstories – of my father's – of a life far away, stories of a world where corpses of starvation victims got stacked like chord wood in the streets, a world of riots and bombings, of madness, cruel indifference, fierce resolutions and fear. There was no joy in the telling of such stories and very little artifice, but, nevertheless, they remained powerful and profound. Most often they were told in a low and sad voice. Sometimes after telling them my father would cry. But what could such stories mean to me? At school in New York I was called a 'spic' and a 'nigger'. If I protested that I was, in fact, half 'Indian', that only drew the predictable howls and jokes about head-feathers and teepees. And to be truthful, the idea of any 'Indian' – no less Bengali – identity meant scarcely little more to me. I had cut my teeth – quite literally – on Marlboro boxes. My secret ambition was to play basketball in the NBA. Henry David Thoreau, more than any other thinker, informs my political sensibilities, and Charles Bukowski remains my favorite poet. I knew not a word of Bengali, and cared nothing about my supposed 'roots'. But those stories of my father's … a writer needsstories.
So, having run the gamut of American life, I travelled for the first time to Calcutta, in search of stories. In particular, I was interested in the Calcutta riots of 1946, the 'Great Calcutta Killings', that had left my family, along with so many others, refugees. I had heard it so many times: the attack on the house, the bloodcurdling cries, my father's sister bludgeoned, her husband's family slaughtered, the fire, the fear, the shots from a rusty rifle, the escape … And then the years of uncertainty, compounding misfortune; sorrow, uncertainty, loneliness. Though without any substantial knowledge of Bengal, by the time I left for Calcutta in 1999, I could almost feel the riots in my very bones. The riots had driven my father across the sea and by now they had become firmly lodged inside of me. My aim was to excavate those riots, about which I could find almost nothing written, and thus reconstruct the story of my father's childhood in war-torn Calcutta.
But as I began my investigations on the riots, at the frayed end of each and every lead that I followed, what I was repeatedly confronted with, was famine. What I came to realize was that in as much as the riots emerged from a specific socio-political context, the most salient factor impacting the lives of the vast majority of the population of Bengal during this entire period was hunger. And so, in the end, what began as a personally motivated investigation of the Calcutta riots quickly developed into a multifaceted investigation of the catastrophic event called the Bengal Famine of 1943.
That first visit I spent two years in the city of my father's birth, learning Bengali, struggling to come to an understanding of the complex and chaotic culture of Calcutta, renamed Kolkata during my stay, and talking to anyone I could find who had survived the 1940s in Bengal and wished to share their stories. Ten more years of intensive research, as a Fulbright Scholar and doctoral student in Anthropology and History has finally culminated in a historical monograph, Hungry Bengal, that details this period of violence and despair in great depth. In my analysis I conclude that famine in Bengal cannot merely be seen as the 'collateral damage' of war, nor simply as the crystallization of the monstrous structural violence of colonialism, but it must also be understood in relation to a shocking proliferation of local venalities: the rapaciousness of the middle class, the cruel expediency of extortionary intermediaries, and the mute complicities of an increasingly callous society at large, increasingly inured to death, becoming increasingly more indifferent, month after month, and then year after year. It is also the story of a mushrooming and pervasive moral bankruptcy that stems from the burden of a thousand banal decisions made in the face of increasing despair.
Over these years of research in Kolkata, I was inevitably concerned not only with the historical landscape of pre-independent Bengal, but also remained deeply immersed in the project of coming to terms with the seething city around me – endlessly fascinated by the complexities, ironies, outrages and eruptions that characterize Kolkata even today. Meanwhile, my perspective remained that of the grandson of a hobo, the son of a refugee, a child of foreign sensibilities, deeply influenced not by Saratchandra or Rabindrasangeet, but by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Flannery O'Connor and Tennessee Williams. From these angles, I looked into every crevice and corner, ventured into every back alley, and peeled my eyes to every encounter with adamant openness. There was much that was new, moving, shocking, enlightening – even beautiful – but there was also much that was dark, contemptible and infuriating; cruelty, violence, outrage; scenes and scenarios that one wishes one had turned away from, rather than stared down intently. Steeped as I was in the history of famine and riots, moreover, what was perhaps most disorienting of all was a sense of dizzying simultaneity between the city at large and the history of it that I was delving deeper into. Hunger stillseemed to be everywhere, haunting the shadows, moaning in dingy corners, undoing the faces of young children on street corners, gnawing at the spines of middle-aged sweepers, and silently ravaging the collective consciousness of society at large, an ongoing instigation to yet further violence, yet further indifference, yet further merciless competition for resources, for space, for human dignity. At length there arose a burning question in my mind – which still burns today – did the Bengal Famine ever really come to an 'end'?
But there was yet another aspect to my meditations that was just as disconcerting; namely, that they were my own and seemed to be shared by few others. My interlocutors in Kolkata were almost exclusively middle class, educated, Hindu, housed. Many were shocked when I recounted the scenes that I had witnessed on the streets of theircity. What violence? What hunger? And how could that be? Surely someonemust have done something about it! (Perhaps it was that a ten-year-old girl had been dragged through the street by her hair for failing to fold an uncle's punjabi shirt properly…) 'How is it that you are always turning up such things?' At times, in conversation with my genteel contacts, I felt that perhaps I had gone slightly mad, that my immersion in history was corrupting my clarity, and that the hunger and violence that I found haunting the sidewalks and alleys of Calcutta were merely figments of my imagination, hallucinations of an overwrought historical imagination that hears echoes of a clamorous past everywhere. 'You seem to be too focused on these things, Janam, there is much more to Bengali culture than all that. We all remember the famine, the famine is with us still, but not in the way you seem to think. We have come a long way…' And yet, still the emaciated figures prostrate on doorsteps, and still the nose-holding 'Babu', who has nothing to share with the skeletal old widow, and still the sharp-kneed 'Party Worker', who gives one to the groin of the half-starved potato farmer on the local train just to let that wretch know who the boss is.
It was not until I met the translator of these stories, V. Ramaswamy, that I was able to conclude with any certainty that I was, in fact, still in my right mind. It was he who confirmed for me that these visions were actual, and that there exists a vast conspiracy of not seeingthat renders many of the moneyed classes in Bengal almost completely ignorant about the more brutal aspects of the social reality that surrounds them – and which they, in fact, wilfully, if blindly, reproduce. It was, moreover, my introduction (again through Ramaswamy) to the prose of Subimal Misra that confirmed for me that not only were these sights real, but that they are meaningfuland despite inclinations otherwise, one should never look away. Everywhere in Misra's stories one finds the stark ravages of a hunger that is impos
sible to ignore, a mute but irrepressible destitution that nags every plot and that pricks at the conscience of the reader. In the title story, 'Wild Animals Prohibited', it is the haunting materiality of hunger – in the body of a beggar girl – that spoils the mindless hedonism of a middle-class sex club, as in the more poetic 'Health for all by 2000', it is a headline announcing the death by starvation of 45,000 Indians a day that interrupts the writer's morning tea. Such juxtapositions of want and excess underwrite the jarring candour of Subimal's prose and reveal enormous amounts about the craven dynamics of entrenched inequality and structural violence: the middle-class girl in 'Spot Eczematous' who dreams of making lice fried rice the 'food of the proletariat'; the 'elderly revolutionaries', in 'How a Horse Becomes a Donkey', who 'afflicted by constipation, enunciate the objective condition of the nation, spewing Marx– Lenin'; while, as in 'Drumstick Flowers Make a Fine Chochchori' the little children of Radhanath, a beedi-worker, 'stay at home and make beedis instead of going to school … [and] never get the opportunity to hear about the International Year of the Child'.
In all the stories in this volume, in fact, Misra examples a truly rare form of prose that probes into the dark recesses of human society and consciousness, revealing the hunger, craven desire, cruelty and absurdity of uninspected lives. In this aspect, Misra's writing represents a mission that he himself (in one of his inventive flights of meta-narrative) describes as 'shock therapy'. Hunger and power intermingle at random in the cauldron of characters that Misra stews, and while it is always power that puts the boot down across the neck of the hungry, an almost inexplicable inkling of humanity silently accrues to the downtrodden, and all at once – in a word, or a gesture, or even in a stench (as in the case of Misra's story 'Golden Gandhi Statue from America') – breaks through to starkly reveal the vanity and diabolic arrogance of power. In his undaunted attention to dark detail, in his penchant for describing the depravity of the rich, the indifference of the bourgeoisie and the malignancy of the socio-political order, Misra might be compared to Faulkner, or Celine, or Elfriede Jelinek. But in the irreducible material presence(and in many cases it issheer physical presence alone) of the poor and the downtrodden, Misra identifies an immanent critique to power and impunity. It is not that Misra 'champions' the poor, and in no sense does he promote any particular social agenda, instead, he extremely artfully demonstrates that for all the jockeying and chicanery, for all of the willto snuff them out, or push them aside, or smite them – either through violence or indifference – the wretched of the earth still remain, and in their mere existencelies proof that power is both inhumane andincomplete. In this double revelation, Misra might be understood as a crypto-revolutionary, pointing not only to the human wreckage that power and social hierarchy leave in their wake, but also to the weakness in power that allows for such human refuse to stilldisrupt its morning tea.
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