Translator’s note
Vinod Kumar Shukla, the beloved Hindi writer and poet from Chhattisgarh, turns 84 today. Many know him through his novel, Deewar Mein Ek Khirkee Rahati Thi (‘A Window Live in a Wall’, translated by Satti Khanna) that won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1999. A recluse by choice, Shukla has written on disappearing worlds, including how trees have disappeared from cities. Since mere nostalgia is passive, Shukla transforms it into dream in his fiction. He is also a poet with a rare idiom. For instance he writes in this poem (in my translation below), “The place of love is uncertain / Here, even there-will-be-no-one has no place.” You find speech idioms merging into his poetry, making it a fascinating occasion for a translator to innovate.
I had the pleasure of meeting Shukla once, at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2011. He looked lost among the crowd. I am happy to recapitulate a bit of the conversation with him that I had written about: Shukla made the observation that poetry today was most noticeable in prose. I wondered if he meant the dislocation of the poetic into the prosaic due to a kind of material shift in lyric life. Or was it about rescuing the prosaic from its drab contours, its dull everydayness, by imbuing it with a poetic flight? I asked Shukla why he wrote in two genres. His answer was simple: there was a long road and a short one, there were things in life which demanded poetry, and those that demanded fiction. He spoke with serene grit about his difficult early years in writing. When I asked him for his email address, he fumbled and remembered it with difficulty. He lived away from the hazards of the new generation. But he could still offer new insights to that generation.
The year 2020 has taught me among many other things, to keep remembering and paying tributes to writers and poets who are with us. These translations are a small effort to honour the thought.
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That Is a Warning / Vinod Kumar Shukla
This is a warning
That there is a small child.
This is a warning
That four flowers are in bloom.
This is a warning
That there is happiness
And the water in the earthen pot
Is worth drinking,
One can breathe in the air.
This is a warning
That there is world
In the world that is left
I am left.
This is a warning
That I am alive
From a war to come
By escaping alive
I want to
Die with significance.
In the last moments
Of my death
I desire eternal life
That there are four flowers
And there is world.
§
The Place of Love is Uncertain / Vinod Kumar Shukla
The place of love is uncertain
Here, even there-will-be-no-one has no place
It happens within the folds of a cloak
That no one will see now
But everyone’s share of solitude
And everyone’s share of cloak is certain
There, even in too much afternoon
is a little darkness
where the sky is overcast
whereas night is falling
and night has fallen
In the dark of too much dark
in the happiness of love
there is the darkness of closed lids
under the cloak of one’s share
suddenly, by a touch
I arrive
and by a touch, I bid farewell.
© Translation: Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of The Town Slowly Empties: On Life and Culture during Lockdown (Headpress, 2021), and Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India (Speaking Tiger, 2018).