To learn a poet like Kunwar Narain is to affirm witness to a brand new epistemological start. Having been drawn into the quiet, unambiguous, and staunchly empathetic universe of his poetry, there isn’t a turning again. One is led, as if by hand, from one reflection to a different, from one musing to a different, from one poem to a different, in order that web page by web page, there’s a light revelation of a potent and intense different existential imaginative and prescient, and by the finish of Witnesses of Remembrance: Selected Newer Poems, one has been resolutely weaned away from the world to which one is compelled to return.
Widely considered one of India’s foremost intellectuals and literary artists, Kunwar Narain (1927-2017) selected to jot down primarily in Hindi. His wealthy literary profession encompassed over seven many years of sturdy writing throughout disciplines and genres with a number of accomplishments and honours. A recipient of the Sahitya Akademi award and the Jnanpith award, Narain had a staggering oeuvre, together with three epic poems, eight poetry collections, translations of world poetry, brief story collections, criticism, essays, diaries, conversations, and writings on world cinema and the arts. His work has been extensively translated and readers, globally, have testified to his cosmopolitan literary sensibility firmly grounded in Indian and Western thought.
A cosmos teeming with guarantees
As a poet reborn in the English language by way of exemplary translations of his work by his son, Apurva Narain, Kunwar Narain’s ninety-seven chosen poems in Witnesses of Remembrance deliver forth to the English reader his distinctive poetic voice in all its political, philosophical and aesthetic inflections. What strikes the reader from the very starting, and with explicit pressure, is Narain’s intrinsic religion in the grace and energy of verse.
To write poetry nicely and to dwell in it are two completely different approaches to life and creativity. By endorsing the latter, Narain lays the framework for a brand new aesthetics, politics and ethics of poetry. His lived life, as Apurva Narain factors out at many locations in his insightful “Introduction” to the guide, was inseparable from his poetry – “a way of life, a way to the inner sanctum of wonder and peace that literature and the arts were meant to cultivate.”
As a person, he relished reclusion and in his literary profession of seven many years “never launched his books, went to less than a dozen festivals, and remained reluctant about events, committees and positions of power”. One understands, on studying his poems, why such reclusiveness was very important to nourish and shield that different view of life that imbues Narain’s poetry with a uncommon visionary grace.
“I remember a river flowing inside my father and never growing old; a whole forest of intimate, detached trees, birds, people, stones and reveries evolving all around it; and the dark cosmic sea of a world hardly yet begun, in which we immersed,” writes Apurva Narain. Kunwar Narain’s poetry attracts sustenance from this river of religion and begets a cosmos teeming with guarantees that no actuality, nevertheless harsh, can break. It wouldn’t have been attainable to gestate this extraordinary cosmos in conjunction and confrontation with the on a regular basis world. A certain quantity of distance can be prerequisite to its conception, creation and sustenance.
This, nevertheless, is to not say that the poet’s artwork was disengaged from life. Much to the opposite, Narain’s artwork speaks for a courageous and relentless engagement with life’s poignancies, its paradoxes, its injustices and impossibilities. But this engagement – attribute of his artwork – although sinewy, quiet, and although profound, solely with out fanfare. Thoroughly occupied with the existential and inventive exigencies of his explicit poetic universe, Narain has no area or inclination for creeds, ideologies or one-cease options to the world’s irreconcilable variations.
As a poet, his self-chosen process is to not criticise or reject the world that he sees round him however to affirm its potential for generosity, development, sanctity and love. “In a lifetime with him,” states Apurva, “I never once saw him get angry, talk ill of anyone, or even swat a fly. Instead, he turned to the cosmos within, marvelling at the paradox of god in a godless world, the numen of nature in us, and the moral as an evolutionary counterpoise to the physical.” This energetic nurturance, in thought and motion, of an “other-worldliness” as Apurva calls it, stays central to Narain’s imaginative and prescient as an artist and his intrinsic religion in the chance of poetry to the touch and rework consciousness.
Detachment and denouements
In “Hesitation”, the poet carries “today’s newspaper in one hand / and poems in the other”, not sure which one to learn first to little youngsters of the future, ready “with bated breath / to see what our epoch/ brings for them after all…” Here, the very juxtaposition of newspaper with poetry amply signifies Narain’s stance. His curiosity and dedication, as is evident, is just not a lot to the outer public world as to the interior non-public one for he is aware of that it’s the latter that shapes the former and not vice-versa.
In “Those Who Do Not Know”, Gandhi’s Ahimsa is resurrected with these words: “A path, which can always be walked / And freedom found / From any injustice, any oppressive / Condition of the world.” In “God is Our Witness”, the poet conjures the unusual paradox of, first, affirming our organic ties to kith and kin and then negating them in the battle-discipline to behave in accordance with dharma. Evoking the legendary context of the Kurukshetra, the poem is a poignant interrogation of the which means and development of God in the world.
In his historic poems in the assortment, it’s fascinating to see Kunwar Narain’s creativeness empathetically drawn to descents, to ruins, to denouements. It is just not glory that draws him in the previous, each glory being, finally, brief-lived. What stays important to him on the pages of time is the reconciliation with loss, failure, betrayal and defeat. In “The Last Days of Chandragupta Maurya”, he asks the king to hunt “a small abode / deep within which you will slowly go on / getting detached from this world”.
“The Estrangement of Bhartrihari” visualises detachment as a superior kind of attachment to the world doubtless or self-curiosity – “creating an eternal space – / not torn by people and things/ or trifling news from kith and kin”, to visualise the world as “a sculptor sees a statue in stone, / a poet sees a soul in a statue,/ a saint sees the universe in a soul…”
“Bazaar Anarkali” recollects the tragic story of love punished by historical past, “a savagery / tyrannical by tradition”, and sees the ghost of “a heavy-hearted prince” putting “a lighted lamp / in the alcove of a nondescript wall”. This historic reminiscence is so painful that “beyond the endurance of so many nightfalls/ the eyes of a sky well up / and spill out stars…”
Existential minimalism
A outstanding quantity of poems in Witnesses of Remembrance converse from an earth-centred perspective, illuminating the eco-religious pressure that runs strongly in the poetry of Kunwar Narain. In “The Estrangement of Bhartrihari”, the poet says “neither the universe has a limit / nor sentience…” Sentience, for Narain, is a key phrase. His personal sentience is awake to all entities of expertise – animate and inanimate – and his intense consciousness visualises a soul in all he sees. In reality, this extension of human sentience to acknowledge and empathise with all that the universe holds, is integral to Narain’s imaginative and prescient and mission as a poet.
In “The Beings of Stones”, the poet regards the sculptor as violating the stone’s integrity and finds his arms “blood-sodden”. In “The Door”, the door turns into a tragic reminder of “the seeds of a tree / the legend of a grand forest / one tied up in servitude today”. In “Next to a Paved Road”, a paved street is visualised as developing and saying – “grandpa, / look, we have come / so close, to live by your side now!”
In Narain’s authentic poems, the Hindi language permits for appreciable ambiguity in phrases of pronouns. “Waha” in Hindi could possibly be “that”, “he” or “she” relying upon the context. The fertility of such ambiguity is significantly arrested in English the place pronouns are, by nature, extra revelatory of the identification of the noun. Despite this limitation, one is satisfied of the undeniable fact that Narain’s poetic cosmos teems with presences. In his world, nothing is subordinate, subsidiary or non-important. His ethics repudiates the very thought of marginality.
By such poetic logic, the nice additionally has no place in Narain’s oeuvre. In “Mega Truth”, for occasion, he expresses anguish on account of “the endangered lives of our / tiny child-sized truths”, anxious that the mega fact shall be “a giant machine, an assembly / of countless circling cogs.”
“Living an Ordinary Life”, once more, asserts the worth of the commonplace over the distinctive by stating how residing the commonplace life in all its sanctity, is an exception too – “Living ordinary lives too / people have been seen/ quietly getting martyred.”
This extension of sentience to each single object and expertise leads the poet to ponder an existential minimalism. Note, for occasion, the Beckettian poem “Buried in the Earth Up to the Neck”. Here, the physique of the protagonist being buried as much as the neck, it is just the face that enters into communion with the world. And but, Narain insists that this face with its 5 organs of sense is greater than sufficient to take part in life’s drama and to depart it enriched “a billion times bigger / than the world could be/ a humanesque idea”.
The world represents, as he factors out in “The Killing of the Heron”, “the bad times / of a man with an axe/ hatcheting his own roots…” This tide of violence and self-destruction may be turned solely by way of the very important pressure of love. “Laughter is also a kind of nearness,” the poet asserts in “Nearness” and in every poem emerges the necessity of establishing communion with the world as a way to embrace and heal its paradoxes. In Narain’s existential minimalism, one doesn’t want a lot to stay a peaceable life. “…somewhere inside of us, a corner / where the schism between earth and sky/ between people and God/ is the least…” is sufficient.
Graceful translations
One marvels at the dedicated process of translation that has introduced these valuable poems into being. Translation may be an arduous mission, given the quiet magnificence of Narain’s verse and the absence of priority of such commonplace but profound and dignified simplicity in the English language. The endeavour may be additional difficult when the relationship between the poet and the translator is as intimate as the father-son bond is.
While proximity does have its benefits, intimacy usually results in an erosion of objectivity – a significant consideration for a translator, nevertheless subjective the act of translation could also be. It goes to Apurva Narain’s immense credit score as a translator to not have misplaced the requisite crucial distance in bringing to start his father’s poems in English. Further, he makes use of his intimate information of his father’s thoughts and life to appreciable benefit in resolving the ambiguities of translating between languages, his subjective decisions in translation talking for the authentic poems with felicity and substantial poetic authority.
Poetry, for Kunwar Narain, “is not a declaration, but a witness” and “even if one wants one cannot stop / its testimony in language”. “There are some words / that if abased / leave life and language / of their own accord,” writes the poet in “Words that Disappear”. His whole life was an energetic campaign to protect the words and sentiments that mattered. For these poems to not have discovered a life in English, would have been a grave injustice to the English language.
The repertoire of Indian Writing in English stands richer and prouder by these swish translations. Prouder, nevertheless, stands our nation in providing to the world the witnesses of remembrance of a uncommon poet who spent a lifetime deciphering indefatigably and with unsparing vigilance, the which means of current as an extraordinary, finite being in an infinite world.
Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College, affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa, and loves, rebels, writes and evaluations from Jamshedpur, Jharkhand. Her second assortment of poems is titled Stitching a Home.
Witnesses of Remembrance: Selected Newer Poems, Kunwar Narain, translated by Apurva Narain, eka.
