Preface
So many verses. Their root rhythm – trees.
Marked with sacrificial blood, they too are leaves.
So many dances. At the root of every footfall
an earthen god, dry palms open for alms.
So many seas. Their primordial faces afloat.
Mountains rise out of seabeds sucked skywards.
The vaster the plains – the faster the cattle run –
the easier they lose the men who mind the herds.
So many rhythms. Their tree-life, dance.
And yet, tree, you turn to ash in so many fires.
I chase the ash – in a flash I catch it – I break
each verse and discover the atomic gyres!
(Reference: Niels Bohr, 1913)
_____
My lightning-sudden hope
When night falls, the old cannon behind the clouds
slowly turns to face it
From the black gun’s gullet rises a fireball of spit –
honour long torched and cindered
Who hears my words? A blood-smeared god!
______
On the earth’s metallic surface
Spiky steel grass has risen
Under cover of night, the sky sleeps
The unread ‘Book of Lightning’ in his hand,
The slave walks on, shaking off each and every prison...
______
The fisherman who walks
splashing along the sea
who collects comets
clinking in his upturned hat,
that same fisherman’s head
burst into flame one dawn
when the moon drilled holes
in the sea.
The dam of your patience bursts
Centuries later, the blood stirs again
in my hard wooden fin...
________
On the roof, the idiot child. Growing long
its neck goes off to drink
from a faraway pond.
On the forest-road from time to time the harpy calls, hypnotic.
Walking on the cloudpath around midnight,
a skeleton salesman is hawking:
Curd, fresh curd...
The idiot child on the roof,
with its rockhard thirst, I bring my mouth to the pond
to keep it company and drink
not water but blood. I drink...
_______
What a treacherous moon strung to one end of your boat!
And at the other, what a lovely boatman!
His face skeletal, his arms rusted iron.
Tell him, tell your boatman to strike his iron blow.
The priceless moon, even that’s willing to be broken into scrap!
Falling chunk by chunk into the water, the water spurting high and low...
Tell me, don’t you wish you could see the waters parting
again, the comets being eaten by the watergod as he floats,
wearing the face of a monstrous fish? Don’t you wish?
________
Beheading is the issue here.
That explains the dug-up earth, soft to the touch.
All proof is drenched in fear.
Never tell anyone what you know, or how much.
_________
Today how certain how sudden how deer-swift this race
How vast, how blown-away-sand this hand
How pavian this dance
How well-deep how closed-room how tongue-out this envy
How inevitably grave-like each hole
And each persistently-pursuing ghoul how suddenly sunk
Today how urgent this verse
Which even the devil would not dream of buying
_________
They rise out of the water on to the banks
Their whole lives they have spent fleeing
From one age to another
Missiles, arrows come flying
Bursting into flame the refugee camps
The din of old-young mother-son wife-daughter dying
________
The tortoise is leaving. The earth suddenly rolls off
his back and plummets
through space, breaking the sleep of the rabbit that leaps
to catch it. The sky flares up in the bleached
glare of comets.
Joy Goswami was born on November 10, 1954 in Kolkata. Goswami's formal education stopped early, in grade eleven. His first poetry collection, named Christmas o Sheeter Sonnetguchchho (Sonnets of Christmas and Winter) brought him immediate critical acclaim. Goswami is one of the most powerful poets of Bengal and one of the best in the post-Jibanananda Das era of Bengali poetry. Primarily a poet, he has also written novels and literary prose. He has more than 30 published books, including three volumes of compiled poems numbering close to a thousand. He has written 12 novels, two of which are written in verse and 5 collections of essays related to interpretation and appreciation of Bengali poetry. He has received the most prestigious Ananda Puroshkar twice, in 1990 for Ghumiyechho Jhaupata? (Have you slept, Pineleaf?) and in 1998 for Jara Brishtite Bhijechhilo (Those Drenched in Rain). In 1997 he won the Bangla Academy Puroshkar for Bajrobidyut-bharti Khata (Scrapbook of Thunder and Lightning) and in the same year he also won the Birendra Chattopadhyay Smriti award for Patar Poshak (Garments of Leaf). The Sahitya Academy Award from the government of India came in 2000 for his collection of poems Paagli Tomar Shongey (With You, Crazy Girl). Goswami has expressed his dissent on several grave injustices that have taken place in India. These include the mass killing of Dalits in Jehana village in 2001 and the Nandigram massacre of 2007. He has been vocal against state brutalities. His poems have taken a very different turn in his most recent book of poems Shashoker Proti (To The Powers That Be), translated into English by Sampurna Chattarji. In 2007 he left the premier Bengali magazine, Desh and joined the newspaper, Sanbad Protidin, where he currently works.
Sampurna Chattarji is a poet, fiction writer and translator. Her translation of Joy Goswami's Surjo-Pora Chhai (The Ashen Sun) is forthcoming. Her books include Abol Tabol: The Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray (translation, Penguin, 2004). The Sahitya Akademi (India's National Academy of Letters) published her debut poetry collection Sight May Strike You Blind in 2007 and her first novel is forthcoming from HarperCollins.