A journey of the soul
Fatema Zohra Haque delights in new poetry
It was really an overwhelming journey into the wonderful poetic alleys of Kamal Chowdhury's world of lyrics. It was completely a day and night tour through lonely days and melancholic nights. The Story of Bones and Other Poems is a book of supreme sense and sensibility.
As the poet himself once said, "Words provide poetry with just its skeleton. The poet gives it life by providing its blood stream, pleasure, joy, fears and sorrows --- everything in fact is culled from life, from the experiences of past and present, from the dreams of future. Poetry is a marvelous compound of all these. What we see around us is our life's journey, what we want to touch but cannot is our dream. That's why poetry is a timeless, universal idea".
The passion that Kamal Chowdhury's poems generate is practically untranslatable; so are the resonance, the rich cadence and the rhymed elegance of his flowing lines. Kamal's lyrics can be described as 'lyrics of feelings'; the life they project is often idyllic and romantic, but behind the usual exuberance of emotion lies the bitterness and desolation that life seems to offer to any living individual. The highly charged moments of his poems that generate multiple meanings cannot be taken over into any other language.
The Story of Bones and Other Poems by Kamal Chowdhury, translated by M Harunur Rashid, can be complimented as cryptic, nocturnal tales of passion and unfulfilled desire with which the poet wishes to identify. As Robert Frost says, "Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat" he welcomes the poetry lover to peep through life's inner landscape of loneliness and isolation and to join in melancholic monologue along with himself. Hauntingly romantic Chowdhury's work offers spiritual and intellectual sustenance of anyone's romantic attitude and unfulfillmemt. In his work the harsh realism of love is presented in elegiac existentialism. His poetic soul exists in time both as fantasy and fact, as meadow of dream and origin, of memory and redemption.
Kamal Chowdhury the poet, a sad, solitary, melancholic time traveler, reincarnates in temporal flux. His verses are woven of the human soul's woes and joys, hopes and aspirations, dejections and frustrations, conflicts and contrast, rise and fall of hope and hopelessness. His hatred of the ugly and evil, hypocrite and hypocrisy has powerfully been conveyed in his poems. Kamal Chowdhury's words carry brevity, precision and rich intensity worthy of embellishing
ideas that are deep and concentrated, emerging from the salient chamber of self and soul. In his poems the true realism of Bengali soul is presented as a strange source of aesthetic life. The poems selected in this book create a romantic vision of divine truth. Some are with a rare delicacy of feelings; some are dreamy and symbolic of the poet's mood.
Some are strikingly different in the robustness of form and rhythm and reflect the unending quest of life.
One can ask, what is it in his poems that compel the romantic mind to be engulfed? Is it magic of the moist atmosphere of his poetic texture? Or is it the sun ignited air hovering lazily over languid hamlet pastures presented in his poems? I have the answer; we see time flows and fluctuates on his poetry canvas in all directions, where life can be real and absurd in pain, loss and anguish. Chowdhury's world is a world of war, violence, conflict and vulgarity along with love and adoration, sex and sexuality, togetherness and betrayal and he himself is not sure about where and how he is going to end up after he runs his course in the wheel of life.
As a poet Kamal Chowdhury is extremely passionate about his lyrics, as in his "Black Beauty" where we can sense a resemblance to Shakespeare's Dark Lady. He projects a persona extremely sensitive, elusive and emotional. To him, love is a far distant image. His careful craftsmanship and skillful writing takes wings to a fairy land where anything is possible and everything is impossible. As a weary traveler he travels across the time line. Some of his poems emerge from distant horizons and the speaker walks alone. T.S Eliot's protagonist 'Prufrock's presence is very much obvious and felt in Chowdhury's poetry: "The shadow of a dream is walking alone".
"This is the story of bones. The heart is a bird full of questions,
Broken bones fly off driven by an endless solar storm".
What an ending with matchless imagery and subtle symbols! Chowdhury is modern by virtue of his understanding of the human situation, his interpretation of the complex ideas and issues of his time and his style that uses the tools and techniques of modern poetry without compromising his originality and the 'romantic' quality of his imagination. The passionate, enigmatic, and often ironic Chowdhury remains elusive here as in any other translation. It is indeed a soulful poetic journey and a nearly impossible task for me to do justice to his literary world in some given space. In a representative selection of poems, the reader can be introduced to one of our front ranking poets in a new and dynamic way. The urge to read The Story of Bones and Other Poems will become irresistible and thus will positively cast a lasting impression on the reader's mind. It surely has the capacity to transform and remind.
Fatema Zohra Haque --- poet, translator, writer ---teaches English at Viqarunnisa Noon School and College.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments