Interviewer: Amit Shankar Saha
You have been a prolific writer and translator as well as an artist apart from being an academician. As a poet, short story writer, critic and a translator, which of these aspects of yours do you love practicing the most and why?
Ans: Being a poet came to me as leaves come to stems and branches in spring, right from the sapling stage. Poetry, like the seasons, is my natural evolution. It’s in me. My thoughts, my feelings, my awareness is all in poetry. My other roles as a short story writer, critic, artist and translator have also been paved by time, but they happened much later than poetry. Once, while on a cruise down the Nile, I found a little boy holding a Buddhist prayer flag in his hand possessively. He had no idea about Buddha, but just the feel of the wind playing on the direction of the flag as it blew. That was innocence and a marvel at the same time. He didn’t know what he held. It stayed with me. A Buddhist prayer flag! Long after, when I was in Gangtok in a monastery, the little boy came back to my thoughts when I saw the little Lamas there. I had then written a very serious but brief short story. That’s it! Writing arrives, be it in verse or prose, and blesses your mind when you are least prepared. None can plan it out.
I had begun to translate from Assamese and Bengali to English, from the year 2016, and have translated nearly eighteen works as of now. The authors are all reputed stalwarts, Gyanpith Award winners, Sahityarathi, Maharathi- The Monarch of Learning, etc and the works are tomes distanced by time. This fact I feel necessitates the translation. I have also translated the poems of reputed Hindi poets and also some of Tagore’s works. Translation is also about creativity.
Your father Dr Maheswar Neog, was the stalwart of Assamese literature and you have translated his poems from Assamese to English in your collection, Antyaja. You have also translated in your book, Modern Assamese Drama the first Assamese drama Ram Navami of Gunabhiram Barua and Dr Birinchi Kumar Baruah’s Ebelar Nat (The Events of an Evening). Translating dramas is said to be generally a not much done thing. What do you have to convey as a translator to prospective readers?
Ans: My father a profound erudite scholar, was a poet and painter only during rare occasions as a hobby-fad. In my latest work The Mahabharata: Between Love and Retaliation, the cover page has a ninety-year-old painting, done by my father of Lord Krsna. I preserved my father’s memory there. Antyaja has some fifty poems of my father, translated from Assamese by me and my sister, Snigdhamalati. My sister was into translation from her student days at college. Apart from Antyaja, the two of us have translated Verses. Verses is a precious work of translation, of some 68 Assamese poets since times immemorial and later ones too. Writer and Literary Critic, G. N. Devy as well as Harekrishna Deka considers this work to be the most challenging translation of poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth century Assamese poets, preserved for eternity; and Jharna Sanyal considers it to be a significant addition to the corpus of Indian poetry in translation. Sanjukta Dasgupta considers the task as an arduous labour of love, that will enable global readers and others to savour the thematic content, and experiments with metaphor and symbol through Assam literary history.
The two dramas I have translated in the book Ram Navami, are powerful social plays of the nineteenth century. If the first is an effort to remove social evils like child marriage, widow remarriage, and fight social superstitions and prejudices; the second is a critique of the newly emerging aristocratic society after independence. It is marked by consumerism and a ruthless desire to acquire wealth, together with a break-up of family values, and a stir among women to be aloof of the family hold. Modernity often arrives like the mist.
Well translating such period plays, is a challenge but such challenges do not maul. They speak and make it a seamless reading experience, providing satisfaction. After translating the memoirs of the Sahityarathi Lakshminath Bezbaroa and the Maharathi Dr Maheswar Neog, translation has become for me a pleasure to indulge in. These two memoirs are our tradition and tradition can be resilient. I have translated enthusiastically novels from Assamese and English.
In your collection of poems, Finding the Canopus and I’d Once Erased Those Margins in 2023 after the pandemic, I found your poems philosophical, some dwelling on myths, some social, others personal. A poem like Stalemate is at once personal and philosophical. From the collection, I’d Once Erased Those Margins. The Jobless has a social context of realism while Kalki has mythological references. While traversing these domains of creativity, what actually inspired you to write poetry and what is your creative process?
Ans: Poetry cannot be fashioned out from empty air. It stems from within the poet’s heart from the world he lives in, breathes and sees. Experiences at times harden into fine poetry. It has no pretentions. You have mentioned Stalemate. In this poem I speak of ash, of cinders, of glib talkers, of the grave of days, of the Phagun mashe’r hawa (February winds), despite approaching spring! Then where do man stand.
We fall on our knees to a god unknown.
Let thy holy will be done on earth
Let thy holy will always be done.
Readers will read into the tormented social scenario here and have the dank smell of defeat spread around. Aphids have affected the roses. The fragrance is lost.
Then I come to The Jobless and Kalki from the collection, I’d Once Erased Those Margins. In the first, how do a people of the nation feel when the bottom drops off from our lives forever.
We need jobs, not new names on bill-boards
Or new temples or watchwords or slogans
Neither tall statues nor critiques
Nor words that mean nothing to our lives
The ‘our’ speak as a collective pronoun…for we are the jobless people who feel the heavy weight of life. In Kalki, reverence for the tenth Skandha of the Bhagavat Puran and the Kalpataru is there together with faith in the Satyayug. But men have remained torn, apart! That is sad, and yet the poet has hope. Without hope, how can people live? Thus, every end is but a beginning!
My creative process rests in reason, deep thoughts, emotions, and realistic judgement that do not permit guard-rails to come up. poetry has a much more important role to play now in this twenty-first century.
Your poems are insightful and resonate easily with the readers. Can you talk us through one of your favourite compositions and tell us why it is your favourite.
Ans: I am a poet and a mother. The mother’s instinct is very strong in me. I always feel that between the poet and the poem, there is the reader. Now, to select a favourite poem becomes difficult. A reader would have done it better. Nevertheless, here is one from another collection of my poems, My Love (Published by Authorpress- 2023)
Let’s Love for a Change
Let’s find out love
From the midst of the rocks
To see how they hold on
Deep within the crannies
Moss from past time
Hold on lovingly to them
All secure.
I have placed within my satchel
All my past gleeful laughter
My memories when I held your hand
Your first embrace when I blushed.
I fear losing them all.
All the love spread within the draperies
Of the mind’s alcove
My antique love
With all its weight in gold!
This is a poem that in all its simplicity speaks of what we need most in our world that has gone awry!
You have been a member of the IPPL for quite some time and have also instituted the Dr Maheswar Neog IPPL Poetry Award by your generous grant to the organisation. What do you have to say about the community that IPPL fosters?
Ans: Nobody can come closer to me than my parents. What I am as a human being was by dint of their influence. I had earlier given an award in the name of my mother Nirmala Neog Award in the very college in Guwahati where I studied for my grad and where I also taught. My mother was a writer and it was she who turned the writings in my diary pages, into my very first anthology, Vaijayanti. After being with IPPL for a year, I was so deeply affected by the aura of the place, by Sanjukta Dasgupta’s influences, the poetry of the place, the minds of the educated-elite that I realized that here I must place my father’s blessings to root among the beautiful academics and the poets. I spoke to Sanjukta one evening about it, and she was not only enthusiastic but raved about my very idea. I feel so good, so contented. At IPPL we honestly “live”, “breathe”, “express”. Here is fulfillment.
What will your parting message to the writers of the future be?
Ans: Can I say it in the words of Tagore… “The light that emanates from the core of gloom is your glow. Goodness wide awake among all discord is your truth.”
Do learn dear poets, to live amidst the complexities of a world of disparities and write on. It is the petrichor in the air, so live up to your own trust.
Amit Shankar Saha
Amit Shankar Saha is a short story writer and poet. He is the author of three collections of poems and a non-fiction book. He has been nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Pushcart Prize and the Best of Net anthology and has won the Wordweavers Prize both for short story and poetry. He is the Assistant Secretary of IPPL and Editor-in-Chief of EKL Review. He has a PhD in English and works as Assistant Professor in Seacom Skills University.