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