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- A Week in Translations: After Death Comes Water & When the Night Agrees to Speak with Me
It’s World Translation Day! Earlier this week, we kickstarted our initiative, A Week in Translations, to showcase brilliant voices from across the country. We have featured one distinctive title each day, from our vast range of translations in an endeavour to celebrate the rich linguistic diversity of India.
To close this incredible week, we felt it’s only fitting to include translations in poetry. To make it doubly special, we’re giving you a glimpse of some of our upcoming translations that we’re extremely excited about. Presenting three brilliant translations each from Joy Goswami’s After Death Comes Water and Ananda Devi’s When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me – COMING SOON!
After Death Comes Water: Selected Prose Poems by Joy Goswami
Translated from the Bengali by Sampurna Chattarji
RED PENCIL
Cross out all the mornings. Yessir! Cross out all the dawns. Sir, birdcalls? Cross everything out. Haven’t I put this red pencil in your hand, tell me, haven’t I? Yessir, you have, as I was saying, the flickering frieze of light and shade below the trees? What shall I do with that? Out out. All out. Can you see that river, flowing past? Yessir. Draw a line right through it. Done, done! … How many rivers have you crossed out? Sir, seven. Fine, that’ll be enough for now. Let the streams and rivulets be. Spare them. You have been given executive powers. All attention all at-ease is in your hands.
You’re the one deciding who will stay who will go, is that clear? Yessir. Sir, what? Sir, what do you mean? Repeat what I said. Sir, I’m the one deciding. Fine, now go… no no wait. Yessir? One job remains. Do you know the sun? The sun? Just see if that sun can be crossed out of the sky and thrown away… can you do that?
Sir, I’ll see… we’ll all see…
WE KNOW…
We know the human body has nine apertures. There’s one more present that we don’t know of. Because not all humans have it. That aperture is named power. Through that aperture might rains down on the powerless. And immediately they put away their own brains and accept their domination. That aperture doesn’t only rain down. It soaks up as well. It soaks up the power of others and dumps them drained and bloodless on the carrion heap.
It is in this aperture that the inexorable wish to simultaneously be Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, Jacques Derrida, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg locates itself. That wish slowly advances towards the highest hope of becoming Uganda’s Idi Amin, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, Romania’s Ceausescu, Libya’s Gaddafi. Even the Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis’s pleasure-boats and personal Scorpio Island become attractive.
It is through that aperture that the serpent of time will one day enter, this too we know. But there’s no one around who can seal that aperture for the time being with molten iron. Because for that what’s needed is power.
101.
You’ve got to do something for me! Otherwise how shall I survive? At least make a bushy-jungle out of evening. Show me crickets and fireflies. Show me some serpents and snakes. Show me a one-eyed ghost. A future. A future that winds far away in the moonlight over the uneven bumpy land. Show me.
When the Night Agrees to Speak With Me by Ananda Devi
Translated from the French by Kazim Ali
1.
At dawn you will descend barefoot
Like a silent cat
On crimson paws
To drink from the river
You’ll slip down the bank
Foggy with pleasure
In the silver tracks
Of trampled snails
To the south you will search
For some proof you lived here once
Had children, friends,
A love that lasted
But nothing’s left of all that
Just the low sky, the river grasses,
Wild water
Abandoned beehives
Your ears strain to hear
The voices of those absent
Until the night at last
Agrees to speak to you
2.
I don’t know you
Am unaware of your name
Your face unfamiliar
Scarred by its rage
When you tear up my page
You will know who I was
A wound, an upheaval
A scrap from a dream
You, the master of our fate
Whose name I do not know
From where comes all this anger
This unforgiving fury?
I fled fast as I could
But you brought me back
Dragging me by the hair
Like the last of the damned
3.
That this rain should be the last
The last word of my prayer
Before my lips are sealed shut
By the mouth of the wind
That this lonely walk
In your footsteps
Should never circle back
To search for the pierced wings
That my hand once compliant
Should not join another’s
To close upon the void
Of abandoned bodies
That my tomorrow be a yesterday
Since nothing is left to accomplish
Nothing to build or to destroy
Nothing has already become: Never
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