0 to 4 : Sharmy Pandey’s Anti-poems

In English Transcreation : Parnab Mukherjee



Translator’s Note : It has been a decade of reading Sharmy. The transcreation fermented deep within me all these years. Till one night – I took paper to pen. Sharmy brings a unique phenomenon in Bangla underground poetry – it is the use of body as a metaphor.

Sharmy’s poems are graphically sexual and in that sense a weapon. I think she is amongst the very few living Bangla poets who have taken sexuality into realms of realism.

Yes, that is good literature
ask Falguni Roy
ask Ginsberg
ask Amiyabhusan
ask Piyush Dhar

In her poem “Falguni” Sharmy (English Transcreation by the author of this note) writes : “A blue light washes the golden 60s as the taxi driver leaves College street junction – 11 in the night and I lean my body against the seat and I watch the droplets of Magh in the window – Falguni nods his head – and there I can see his beard, white kurta, folded hands – my entire forehead filled with evening glow – my eyes filled with book fair at College Square dust – and I am moving as I am sitting with splintered hands – legs – teeth and my love for carbon…and the roadside tyre burns – and I return home – Falguni’s forehead filled with sweat – and I can still see – somewhere his attacked lips – his frame – stops at Harkata – for two cigarettes – ignition – coconut rope – silence – the fire – black door closes firmly – Subhashda were you there? The burning cigarette – black packet – disintegrating foil – paper – plastic – my body burns with heat – and Falguni after 3 decades has come to further grapple with my consciousness – bulb moves – there you are Falguni…”

Now
Sharmy
I don’t care what you prefer and what you don’t
I still think Ritwik lacked Satyajit’s finesse and that was a lacking
and I still read mainstream poetry
and I think Ferlingetti is better than Ginsberg
and Kalidas is better than Ibsen
and Lautrec is better than Dali
and Badal Sircar is a bigger genius than Shambhubabu
and I still feel Kanchenjunga is the best Bangla film ever made
and I do think
you are the only successor of Falguni Roy
in Bangla poetry
with all my biases
keep it up Sharmy
Bravo!



1. Till my death in Jerusalem


My drops and drop of tears
Wrongly executed strokes while swimming
And the abject tiredness thereafter
Every death is agglomeration of
Gathered wood and
The bluish tinge that colours the night darkness
If my finger melts
O girl! Put the trinklets on – look good
Or you’ll have to
Absorb my sorrow
Tear apart the sympathy
Drape it all with white cloud
Night break yet nothing stops
The nobility



2. 19/4/93


And the light which gave fire
forest stories and crime
songs deposit
liking for the invisible eye
stomach deposits coal
we love old chained darkness
bubble broth mixed in darkness
scissors that turn into hands
darkness that resides in the lungs
nylon melted city drops
you squeeze the neck and the breath
take out the strings of existence
open up your breasts
look for those eyes
emerging
enveloping
phosphorus
igniting the bones marrow




3. Collage


Draw
open up
Distort
Change, Change, Changing
on the earth
stains of reality
After 10 years
the rotten smell from the shake-up of the first book
somewhat less blood
sometime the mass of bones placed incorrectly
dreaming on, dying easily, sky coloured days,
yes, meanings keep changing
and then the gut is dissolved into vapor
let’s talk
let’s cough up all that we thought last year
first cover
first etching
or first love
existential crisscross
crisscross game
transparent colours
canvas can’t take the etching
skin peels off
so I think transparent mask
words will perforate
this mask
sky on my head and we will cross over the forest of fire
guava tree, bougainvillea smell
rain we creep out
where new born
will look at joy
we will keep crying
like a lizard that creeps up
yet no road in forest
no roof
no mind
no transformations
only a blueness where rainbows will change




4. Two Lines I Wanted To Write



Plane, Plane, Plane, Pilot Plane
From Plane came down Suchitra Sen

Fragments

By Sharmy Pandey

1

Sleep is an intoxicating reality
Dreams are left behind difficult sums in a notebook
Unsolved due to lack of help-book (made-easy)
Scattered emptiness is flying on the roll numbers
Submitting the paper of dreams only with a signature
Rules and regulation of a lifetime
and then one step to another
new revised dreambunch fill with chunk of questions
Black board is hanging on the eyeball
Merging sunlight to gradual deduction
Siribhanga khetrofal
Dust are falling in the eyes
Few drops of dead tears
Drawing the skyline like a chalk

2
Pictures on the wall
are moving to their own will
I'm reshuffling them with my gaze
My room has no door
A city is standing between us
A road map is hanging on the wall


3

Alone for a while
No words no nights no darkness
Sailing in a submarine for the frequencies of sound
Sinking silently for a long long time
Grasping for water light and wind
As if rooms of colourful memoirs
movement of a black dial
songs of a broken radio
Now the city will disappear by wiping away everything


4

Lying inside the vagina oh mother
to get smeared with juice and blood
I come back from the overwhelming influence of the computer mouse
I get up from the coolness of the mind
Living all the colours clean
My fingers are only to grow bigger
I hang from the strings of a guitar
In a dream water unties from a knot
And ultimately hangs in broken gravitation
As if in those few droplets lies
The fear for rain
I float like a diesel ash who craved to be a cloud
Thinking of giving birth to a jungle
I am painting a few fangs of grass on the sky


Transcreated from Bangla : SharmyPandey

Writings of Sharmy Pandey

Moments

That day
storm
rising
or
the impending
pregnant
goat
convulsing
in our
soil
or
that day
when
like rain
sky
gave out
sunlight
that
streamed
endlessly



And the night littered the road with the consumer moonlight
The tar-cheeked city still is ready for dreams in melting tungsten light
Music bows to the rusty nails from a vendor’s tool

Words bloom as moments
From the edge of voice
And memory flows
Viscous down the ears
Eyes that look back from habit, not seeing



And the entire city is filled with the smell of rotten flowers
low of New Jersey cow
flow of bitter winds



that means then-only from my city
a slice of star fell off
As it revolved and kept revolving – it ran
as one long breath
grew and
it’s splintered splinter of atoms
shadows
spell
tottering around
What I at last wrapped in a strong polythene and carbon
And kept it alive in the warmth of dead cold burner



Many days have past like those many many days
Lots of unsaid – or less said – some what
sound less words – claps – glory and gap
lines and folds – city is not moving – when
sweat trickles down from Coca-Cola tin
not a single bus moves to destination less
destination – in absolute casualness
In an empty time crawling in the lap of the sky
moving the cloak – removing in a whiff – the clouds and
complexities – water and the drenched breath



At this moment unarmed – unarsed
Without coldness – without teeth – obsessive
Groping for a diseased search
Are now enmeshed the gothic structure of words



Pore a large dose of black on the paper
Dip your fat or thin finger
from the bottom end of the paper till the middle
mark nine close strokes
Give few drops of water and few drops
of tears of the hard brush



That’s colour
That’s sky
That’s emptiness
Or you



To be taken over by emotions returning home
with part and particles of neon
life along the ground and the plastic sound
of the mineral water – 40 ounces of local hooch
and ten twelve spurts of vomit creep and crawl across the
symbolic tramline – where lies
some dried condom-love and where the green
carpeted spread seeks for shadows everyday
the lost time trickles down with the afternoon sun
straight in the middle of the road
the back – in front or below
and seeks for the dust of vision in myopic glass
Actually that day is the day when – from the feathers
of bird flew husks and the smell of the lime of the wall
were everywhere – few drops of longing were merging in the sky
The temptation of colours – as colours – or colour – or colour-debt


Translated from Bangla By Sharmy Pandey and Parnab Mukherjee

More Pics of the happening

GRAFFITI HAPPENING, A Photo Collage

It was 2004 after Bill Morgan and Bob Rosenthal left for New York we were invited to do a happening in the Alternative Theatre Festival in Kolkata. The whole happening was directed by Sharmy Pandey. It was an interactive performance session lasting for 6 hours with poetry readings, paintings, painters reacting with audio sessions of alternative Bengali writer’s sound track, reading their own stuff and one act plays and viewers writing on Graffiti’s paper wall. It all started in a dark room with burning incense sticks-Buddhist chants streaming in from a tape recorder and every body was invited to lie down inside the room. Slowly the aroma changed into an ammonia stench and the show begun lighting up candles and every one introducing them one by one. These are few pics of that event.

SHILALIPI the GRAFFITI Book Store

RED ROAD From AAMAR CHAABI (My Key)

By Subhash Ghose



The black police van starts. It moves on and on. It stops suddenly. I get a great jerk so that I fall on an iron rod & receive an injury in my mouth. Two or three of them open the gate and drag me out of the van. Even then my eyes are kept covered with a black bandage. They shut the gate. The van starts again. I try to uncover my eyes. So I begin to tear at the bandage with great effort at last it slips down and hangs over my neck like a black ring. I open my eyes and see everything dim. I rub my eyes again and again with both palms, at first nothing comes into sight. No man no traveler no traffic. I take two or three steps south, then I find a man at a distance. I see his body made half by the waste he searches for something with his bent body around him, staying on the same spot. He searches with deep attention in the semi-darkness. I wish to talk to him so I start. Suddenly I hear something is going on behind me, making sound. I look back and find two or three lanes & bylanes which fly like chased bird and deer. I see a running train of row lane bylane, I see them moving towards Red Road, Rashmoni Road.

Sometimes two or three lanes join while flying, and after joining they run again. Thus comes Fears, Fardice Lane, Rajani Gupta, Decars Lane – some lines are identified, the name plates of others cannot be read. Some of the lanes come carrying broken lightposts, I find on a lane torn bodies and contraceptives, on a lane black curled hair and a haircomb, a lane comes packed with dustbins, broken cups, plates and flowers are seen somewhere, somewhere, bloody lungs are left, lanes carry blue cover and envelope, torn pieces of letters, heaps of race-books; I find the Uttariya (clothes used in the Hindu rituals) of Utpal on Royd Row; chair, benches, drums and glasses of Barduari (a country liquor shop) pass by, there goes the lane Chapatala of Maha (a famous whore), lane carries also broken shed, pen, the Gita, stones from Kamrup, embraced young man & woman, on a lane a naked one-legged man suddenly shouts; College Row, carrying heaps of obsolete and classic books goes, there go the dead to the crematorium, the magic card of Sandipan goes, I find the cutneck of friend Shaileswar, I shout , I cry, a footpath carrying a sleeping man runs away, a thief goes with his loot, there goes the bloody knife, a priest while peeing goes, thus I absorb a continuous moving procession of lane bylane; a garlanded mad I see, I see a night guard, a helpless barking dog; suddenly there runs the Shyamacharan Street which leads me home, I cry, I call it, run towards it, wave my hands, I begin to whisper…’how to go back….how to go home….’

‘please wait and see’…suddenly I hear the voice of that man who searches around him for some lost thing, after a pause the voice again goes…’hereafter roads avenues will begin to run, there will be some limited roads made by all the lanes bylanes rows and streets; and there will be a single road made by those limlted roads; and there will be no other road beside that; hereafter house, small and big, slum building, multistoried building, will begin to move, all those houses and buildings will make some limited number of skyscrapers, and this limited number of skyscrapers will make a single skyscraper; and again there will be no other skyscraper beside this one.’

The dimensions of my eyes begin to spread, eyes become very big and at last they burst, blood comes out. I want to learn from him whether men who are lean and thin, short and tall, who are of under calory and under strength, who are black red and white, will make some limited number of men, and whether this limited number of men will make a single man and whether there will be none but him.

When I finish, the eyeball of that man rolls, rolls like the mad needle of the clock. His eye pupil moves with tremendous speed. His back begins to twist. At last his back takes the shape of a bow. When his spinal chord is made just half, he falls on this ground, throws hands and feet. When he falls on the ground no sound comes to my ear.

Translated by Malay Roychoudhury