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Subhro Bandopadhyay
Subhro
Bandopadhyay(b 1978) is a polyglotic young poet who speaks four languages
including English and Spanish and writes in two. Closely connected with a whole
generation of contemporary Spanish and Chilean poets, Subhro is also a
prolific translator of poetry. He edits Podyacharcha, a Bengali poetry
magazine, and is an associate editor of Kaurab. He has published several
books of poetry in Bengali and Spanish and a short biography of Pablo
Neruda. Subhro was awarded I Beca Internacional Antonio Machado de creación
poética (2008) by Fundación Antonio Machado and Ministry of culture, Govt.
of Spain. He regularly publishes in leading literary journals in India and
Spain. He received Diploma Superior de español como lengua extranjera
from Instituto Cervantes, Spain in 2010 and the Indian National Youth
Literary Award (Sahitya Academy) in 2013. Subhro teaches Spanish language
& literature at Instituto Cervantes in New Delhi.
NEW POEMS
from Glass Pronouns
Metal Poem
I tell myself to aggravate ferocity
with those I had chosen to be worse with
last year
those I had toiled more to be hostile with this year
Who put tongue against blade?
Everyday feet entwined by sun
not submissive mornings but sparkling
afternoons
arranged my books before orderly rows of
insecticides
unwritten absences of buddies on the pages
Would you traverse elsewhere?
Effortless stops of choice descending from
the bus
alleys proximate, early arrival of
stray-dog-catcher vans
that howled by
You watch the dreaded tremors
of saved
animals
Everyday, do you think about dad?
hate the compulsion of going to work
before mirror, by not looking at
what is aging by habit training
Translated by Aryanil
Mukherjee
Of Returning
I have constructed my
movements
Electronic music amidst
apathy
abrupt parrots
Are winds ever clear and
non-sporadic?
Does any dust ever point
to a direction?
You can’t walk on these
streets to ponder
a descensus sticks, to
your legs
and with a sharp turn
around, you realize
the games have disappeared
boats deserted on the bank
and so what finally remains?
A stream of words offer
decaying testimony
Do I know these streets?
Home is an easy metaphor
yet the fly in the train
concerns me
will it be able to find
its filth-house?
Who can? With a little
arbitrary dusting
the bag of my return is
ready,
Soil and seedlessness
ready
To return to the
bow-string this yellow universal flower
in polite collision,
but before that sleepy
head writes in the train
and it rains as it gets
off
Translated by Aryanil
Mukherjee
Towards absence
(for father)
Our rains strengthen
But we speak away from
seed-wetting
about resting the language
instead
On the days growing
towards you, I try to get out
I want to say this clear
and present living
is like a commercial break
This is the present that shocks
the city
no feathers anymore
a metal ball rolls on
grass
I speak with you
I end up poisoning your
suave evening.
But your only response is
silence
I ruin your songs
broken long-playings
ground-cover the evening
a wronged shell of melody
has rolled inside of me
Paltry notes,
however, silence stretches out with you.
Well, are
chats just meant to be generational?
Unshackling
one’s own time?
Certain
evening in a friend’s house, some stale joke fading in the spine?
Why a book
flies towards your time, I don’t get
neither the
drenched birds encircling my home returns
a series of
undone roads or diphthongs
violence
trees and violent inns
I ponder over
your listening
whisper about
your page-marking of social texts
with ripped
slices of waste paper
You nodded as you read
and the note-box filled
with pages of music
Days fragmenting away
towards abandoned melody
What did you acquire from
those time stained pages?
What was on your mind?
Like this, I come in
through the gourd-green fields
keeping the word Upaneeto*1 farther away
from
“consummation of the
sacred thread”
Humble songs from a lost
EP record, or maybe some
beggar singing with a Dotara*2
Winter has spread out in
this afternoon
my soul on polite
constructs
Clad in a snuff-colored
shawl, father waited for his 3 PM tea
How much effusion did Gita Dutt*3 bring?
I don’t look for it
anymore. Foreign summers stole those
shivers.
Only a greed for
socialization keeps its fluorescent tape
who sends back home at
night, keeps words of vigilance
with casual carelessness
this going, this quietly
sliced patience , are at most vegetables
as the monsoon arrives,
will prolong panting for a decade
the color or stamp of
syllables before they compound
this afternoon
complexioned like your cassette tape
on this shapeless terrace
(in part)
[Translation
Notes: 1. Upaneeto - ceremoniously
presented the sacred thread, an
ancient practice among traditional
Hindu Brahmins.
2.
Dotara – a two-stringed folk
instrument popular in Bengal.
3.
Gita Dutt – mid-twentieth century Indian songstress (of modern Bengali and
Hindi film songs)]
Translated by Aryanil
Mukherjee
For Mother
1.
That was one cloudy
unpresence
The sun had brought along
these
streets leading nowhere
the sweet, soft hue of Neem on the water
after rain ceased on day
four
You went up to the
terrace bucket full of washed
clothes
sun reflecting on soap
water
the fast cooling frying
pan leaning against your kitchen wall
These afternoons become
towers
nonstop boy playing
pretend-cricket with his marbles
layers and layers of the
showers’ white cotton
and radio station zooming
in and out
But your kitchen gas flame
is bluer
sending a metal disc in to
my head
circular mouth of the wok
the doused yellow of sun,
will it reveal soon
Brown shades of tiny fried
fish and aubergines
absorb the hour, afternoon
1:30
Your steady hands
dust off ash from the
boy’s head
2.
We had so much ashes in
the wind?
This rain following
prolonged depression makes
the world feel like a
naked foot cut from beach shells
the slight fever from
flu-shot
This is how I digest the
notion of country
When had the unfinished
part of the house
become strange continent
to the boy
skipping school every
Monday during
the Chandicharan years, breathing troubles
In the bamboo woods,
unexplored now for a while,
some snakes move
You could tell the dull
days, animals never scared you
everything that naturally
grew around, turned into your afternoons
No street-peddlers but did
the clouds call?
Your back was against the
wall white
3
Let’s assume I am
unaware of the visitors
gradually my resistance
shredding to reveal
its purpose
wet minarets
but I retreat under the
umbrella
opened out since yesterday
to a kind of living
I defend myself with
content
Metal branches cloud over
me
What infinite distance and
the interrupting colour schemes!
Flowers and forest the escape stories
faces of dead pets vining
up as
those growing on the
terrace of low access
There is exiting though
to a room full of
uncomprehended sentences
on my watch
Leaves fade out in the
rain and colourful grammar
weaves my hair
4
Suppose the field’s empty
Afternoon Junish
on the steps of tidy
dust, Babur and his army
live dense like
self-defense
I didn’t tell you the
vessel
departed under cover
thick water left its ghee
stains
on papery mast-light
Seasons and theirs
markings likewise
you tamed the ends in the
whiteness of flour
like TV programs in
unknown languages
you seasoned in black and
white
A shade later hands will
crave for touch
tame hunger through the
night
and will place hoof beats
on hair
[Translation
Notes: Babur – First emperor of the Moghul dynasty ]
Translated by Aryanil
Mukherjee
POEMS
Joaquim Mondal’s Poetry
These poems could have
belonged to any illegal immigrant. In Europe. Someone who left his country on
a fortnight’s visa. And years rolled by. He is unlisted in the government
records of either country. If he can remain missing in his ghetto for a few
more years like this, he will be declared dead. Joaquim Mondal is an
ex-painter. Some middleman put him into Europe for a fee, where he works
petite jobs. We met by chance, when I came to know of his poetry. These are
his poems, taken not after, but from him.
1
You better speak, since you have come this far
like the empty sigh on a bum’s manuscript or
the whispers about someone’s failed marriage, as far as you’ve
piled up passive resistance : look no culture they have, just cash, fast
cash
look they drink liquor with rice with those ill-dressed damsels
I copy in the language of the tongue
in the neurones of a tape recorder, is there a buddhist shaman inside
sodium?
his violet robe has worn off, right after immigration check
a temple had asked for some donation
large empty canvas, I first apply some discolored white acrylic on the
panel
then from the thick brush with a sudden gush of monastic air
rolls an empty street’s mid-day preparation
April in the flesh
2
To Romania’s Jenica or any of those prostitutes from Eastern Europe
I didn’t ask which country
As the conversation elongates I get a sense of the artery’s bruises.
It hurts you to see any road, any cloth or paper turn red
As pigeons push through soft October in the park, I can see
in the breeze black patches
in the seat of eyes attuned to unsleeping
Our riverine mother coast.
Characters from the book have turned into statues
that this steel rain wets
A secret journal tells me that.
As the silhouette of nakedness wets
a wing pulsed by touch
Salty and ashen air.
Stepping out of the house to see the hackneyed foam-wrapped stores
float, continuous two-way traffic into the root cellar, I return
a side-turned flight touches huddling boobs
Fluorescence from the sex-shop angling across the window
A bird made from a plain knife
On the bedside table
5
What do we write with
in these naked neuron receptors acid
camera and x-rays!
1 or 2 letters from apparently engrossed cities
The narrative or uninformation
muted with eyes closed
in the crevices between rusty iron piles and the imaginary line
divorcing suicide from a rose
The man who tore away from the teeming Saturday crossstreets
hand in hand with a hooker -
I call him writing.
A summer mid-day prepares itself
as it slowly turns pages of a yellowed book, a dog cooling off in the swamp
A new couple moaning behind holidaying closed doors
Opium color on a shalik’s plume, darkness dense wet walls
Where does he go in this otherland of no-identity ?
[Translation notes:: shalik – (Beng.) Indian blackbird with
a yellow beak]
6
How much can these troubled hands mean to earthly body ?
Winter strangulates marmoreal youth
I would never wish that its meat slacken
eyes from sweatdrops turn salty
In this wronged jungle the city tightens
around throat and nerve, vomitting blood
If language dies, to absent thoughts and poets
will imagery drift
to the temporary park an empty bench
Is not for any of us
10
I am not going to write about sunyata. I have hidden intimate hollers in my
torn creases. Then I’ll place the rebel secrets in a terrorized season.
Even the walks in the garden hide weaponry. In the dawn of evenings, a
darkness cannot sleep, densifying raindrops feel like rice grains, and is
that why this harvest-fair is a kind of hunger ?
[Translation notes:: sunyata – a sanskrit word used in both
hindu and buddhist ancient texts. It could be used to mean “emptiness” in
general but the connotations are deeper, multiple and diverse. It implies a
“lessness”. The word has been extensively used by Allen Ginsberg, Gary
Snyder, Octavio Paz and others.]
13
Let someone else speak of time, of patience and apprehension from mired
rhyme scrape out these burnt bright nights. Whose nest fills your head ? Of
the mail pile ? Who would you like to read where ? Your language has
snapped. Burdened with history. Devoid of fiction, of intersections. In
this pure winterless jatismar country dark fields open, hidden thorns and
the cards of fog, and from this unfriendly wet who is it that has deserted
us leaving unsealed the pout of past century, some ambitious comrade, a
detached photo lyrical, suddenly a piano vines up to my ear a four quartet
[Translation notes:: jatismar – has no English equivalent.
It hints at reincarnation and means someone or something who/that has the
ability to remember past life.]
15
Those words, I’d like to sit beside. Critters from inside the grave-pit.
Botched phrases make the salt of a silent tongue. It needs more scribbling.
But why me ? Where did I error ? In my abdominal fat ? On the fogged
street? In the broken line of the river ? In exchange these transformers,
structuralist dreamers stand up amongst my angst-ridden and in order to
fiercely grapple on to some hard thing, this metal pen I found, with
clenched teeth and a pressured palm some firm writing calls upon
22
There is a jungle inside. A walker’s path and its clutter of broken picnic
bottles. I don’t ask you to come barefeet, neither to clean out this trash,
not an effort nor participation no acceptance or rejection, no sad sigh
trends suspended in a philosophical paradox, just a proposition for a quiet
pause leaning against these errored signs
23
If one could hide wound and incompetence behind these lines and letters. I
put my hand on the bleak throb and pray for more strength. I say you need
to know antiquity better of words to put them to proper use, since the
evolution of the metal age, men haven’t forgotten it. Wound or incompetence
is actually an animal kind. Have all signs of life. And dying ?
26
I have arrived on the bright shore of an island. Noise didn’t let me feel
the un-depths of its affection. Call these processions an act of crying. I
know how faces sink and how around the rough edges of our community-skin
spreads a chromium of fear.
[Translation notes:: chromium – Despondency and melancholia
in oriental literature have often been called “gray” (connotations –
feeble, lightheaded). Chromium, a gray but tough metal, is used here to
disconnote that label. Chromium is an essential component of stainless
steel, something that makes steel “stainless”, i.e. corrosion resistant and
hard.]
34
Not static flaccidity, but a womanly walk along the fruit-market. As the
last sabado metro leaves, the discotheque/shelter - from these options I
pick my old neighborhood. The way I step into is never homeward bound.
Little homes arrested in language's temporary cauldron. Roads unrivaled,
stonewashed with no asphalt. Floats in the one across the museum, music of
a lesser taste, luring men into video parlors. Painting, music, letters
italicized, all gravitate towards their country of origin. But what is
country ? Old songs ? Eyes moist from the hearings ? Our headcount of
realities never taut with that. Who keeps the count ? Wet feelings, vapor
and coffin in front of dark chocolate doors. A different road rebounds from
each one. Wetness hangs in the air.
45
Grace in our words,
but I suffer to celebrate
At the blunt end of feelings, this country
We move towards languagelessness
Writers on the bench trying to better best best your outdated narrative
Here is mercy
For how long can life live box-bound ?
Poems translated by Aryanil Mukherjee
Page last updated Apr, 2020
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