Nasrin, Taslima [Nāsarina, Tasalimā]; Carolyne Wright (tr); Farida Sarkar (tr); Mohammad Nurul Huda (tr); Subharanjan Dasgupta (tr);
The game in reverse: poems
George Braziller, 1995, 63 pages
ISBN 0807613924, 9780807613924
topics: | poetry | bengali | translation
Although Taslima shot to fame on her virulent prose defamations of male society, her poetry has much stronger claims to art. This volume contains translations of poems from her five volumes of poetry: - Amar kichu jay ase na (1988, 1990) [i couldn't care less] - nirbAsita bAhire antare (1989, 1990) [banished without and within] - atale antarin (1991) [captive in the abyss] - behula ekA bhAsiyechhe bhelA (1993) [behula floated the raft alone] - Ay kaShTa jhepe jIban debo mepe (1994) [pain come pouring down, i'll measure out my life for you) with the last two books grouped together as part IV. Many of the poems are fierce in their defence of the woman's place in the bAngla world - while some of it has to do with islam, much of it actually holds for all of South Asia, and perhaps most of the developing world. While the text describes the titles of the books in some detail, it makes no attempt to identify the bengali titles of the poems. Three translations are excerpted below. For the first two, I also provide the original bAnglA, as well as alternative translations from the unsevered tongue.
After she was enlightened and therefore wished to see
the world's shapes and scents and colors,
she wanted to step out over the threshold;
they told her -- No. This wall is the horizon line,
this roof terrace is your sky.
This bed and bolster, scented soap, talcum powder,
this onion and garlic, this needle and thread,
lazy afternoons embroidering red and blue flowers
on the pillowcases, this portion is your life.
When she opened the main gate's black padlock
to see how much land there was to wander in
on that far-off shore,
they told her -- No. Plant seedlings of sajne in the courtyard,
spinach vine, bottle gourd, here and there in various pots two kinds
of cactus, yellow roses;
this courtyard with its smooth floor, this portion is your life.
(from the unsevered tongue) the moment she was conscious she wanted to look smell feel hear the world and she made to step out the door but she was told - no. these walls are your horizon this ceiling your sky. here -- this bed, these pillows, this fragrant soap, this talcum powder this onion, this kettle, this needle and thread – on idle afternoons these flower-patterns on pillowcases this is your life. to see how much life lies beyond unseen on the other side she unlocks the back-gate and peeps out but she is told - No. look after the courtyard garden this spinach, this louki-creeper, every now and then a yellow rose, a marigold in conical pots. this swept-clean alcove, this bougainvillea, this little fragment of soil this is your all your world. (trans. amitabha mukerjee)
বোধোদয় হবার পর সে যখন পৃথিবীর রূপরসগন্ধ ও বর্ণ দেখবে বলে চৌকাঠ ডিঙোতে চাইল, তাকে বলা হল – না । এই দেয়াল দিগন্ত রেখা এই ছাদ তোমার আকাশ। এই বিছানা বালিশ, সুগন্ধি সাবান, ট্যালকম পাউডার, এই পেঁয়াজ রসুন, সুঁইসুতো, অলস বিকেলে বালিশের অড়ে লাল নীল ফুল তোলা, এইটুকু তোমার জীবন । ওই পারে কতটা বিস্তৃত বিচরণভূমি আছে. দেখবে বলে যখন সে কাল ফটকের তালা খোলে, তাকে বলা হল – না, উঠোনে সজনের চার রোপো পুঁইশাক, লাউ, মাঝেমাঝে রকমারি টবে দু’রকম ফণিমনসা, হলুদ গোলাপ, এই যে নিকোনো উঠোন, এইটুকু তোমার জমিন ।
This body of mine, known so long,
at times even I can't recognize it.
If a rough hand
with various tricks touches my sandalpaste-smeared hand,
in the house of my nerves a bell chimes,
a bell chimes.
This is my own body,
this body's language I can't read;
it tells its story itself in its own language
Then finger, eyes, these lips, these smooth feet,
none of them are mine.
This hand is mine only
yet I don't correctly recognize this hand:
these lips are mine only, these are my breasts, buttocks, thighs;
none of these muscles, none of these pores,
are under my command, under my control.
In the two-story house of my nerves
a bell chimes.
In this world whose playtying am I, then,
man's or Nature's?
In fact, not man
but Nature plays me,
I am the sitar of its whims.
At man's touch, I
wake up, breaking out of my slumbering childhood;
in my sea, a sudden high tide begins.
If the sweet scent of love is found in my blood and flesh,
it's Nature only that plays me,
I am the sitar of its whims.
--
(from the unsevered tongue) my long-time friend, my body at times you are so alien. just the touch of a sandpaper hand on this painted perfumed moisturized palm and bells ring out at my nerve center bells ring out this, my own body i cannot read your language. you speak with your own tongue these toes, fingers, lips, these smooth legs - nothing is mine. whose arm is this on my body whose thighs, whose muscles, skin, hair nothing is mine, no one listens to me. upstairs in my nerve center bells ring out in harmony. is it man, or is it how i was made – that sets off these tunes on the strings of this body, this Sitar. man touches me, i awake from the deep innocence of childhood tides spring up on calm seas. blood, flesh, limbs wake up at the first scent of love. is it merely man, or is it a greater force that plays with the taut strings on my body (trans. amitabha mukerjee)
এতকাল চেনা এই আমার শরীর সময় সময় একে আমি নিজেই চিনি না একটি কর্কশ হাত নানান কৌশল করে চন্দন চর্চিত হাতখানি ছুঁলে আমার স্নায়ুর ঘরে ঘন্টি বাজে, ঘন্টি বাজে। এ আমার নিজের শরীর শরীরের ভাষা আমি পড়তে পারি না। সে নিজেই তার কথা বলে নিজস্ব ভাষায়। তখন আঙুল, চোখ, এই ঠোঁট, এই মসৃণ পা কেউই আমার নয়। এ আমার হাত অথচ এ হাত আমি সঠিক চিনি না এ আমারই ঠোঁট এ আমার জংঘা, উরু এসবের কোনো পেশী, কোনো রোমকূপ আমার অধীন নয়, নিয়ন্ত্রিত নয়। স্নায়ুর দোতলা ঘরে ঘন্টি বাজে এই পৃথিবীতে আমি তবে কার ক্রীড়নক পুরুষ না প্রকৃতির? পুরুষের স্পর্শে আমি ঘুমন্ত শৈশব ভেঙে জেগে উঠি আমার সমুদ্রে শুরু হয় হঠাত্ জোয়ার। রক্তে মাংসে ভালবাসার সুগন্ধ পেলে প্রকৃতিই আমাকে বাজায় আমি তার সখের সেতার।
My sister used to sing wonderful Tagore songs.
She used to love reading Simone de Beauvoir.
Forgetting her midday bath, she immersed herself in Karl Marx,
Gorky, Tolstoy, and Manik's novels.
When she wanted to feel nostalgic, Laura Ingalls Wilder was her favorite.
When she saw a play about war, I remember her crying half the night.
My sister used to read wonderful poetry;
her favorites were Shanka, Niren, Neruda, and Yevtushenko.
My sister loved the forest, not the garden;
she liked sculpture so much she once bought a ticket for Paris.
Now in my sister's poetry notebook
she keeps meticulous accounts of green vegetables,
now she walks around very proudly, loaded with metal ornaments.
She says with pride she no longer thinks about politics.
Let culture go to hell, she couldn't care less.
Dust collects on her sitar, mice nest in her tanpura.
Now she's a smart shopper, bringing home
porcelain dinnerware, fresh carp, and expensive-looking bed sheets.
---
[This last poem I found rather disturbing - it laments the loss of a woman's
intellectual abilities, measuring it in terms of her love of poetry and
music. Indeed, growing up in Bengal, one cannot help notice how the young
talented women, many of them excellent rabindra sangeet and classical
with years of training behind them, quickly abandon these pursuits after
marriage, when they become "saMsArI" - meeting the exigencies of raising a
family, and meeting the social pressures of maintaining relations with a
larger group.
Sometimes, as in the case of an aunt of mine, a doctorate in science, who
completely turned over to managing the home, this loss came back much
later in life to haunt her. It is a choice that "good" women make, to
conform to the norms of society, giving up something individual, art,
learning, and other solitary pursuits.
But while these intellectual pleasures are lost, isn't there a lot of joy
in the daily experience of living and raising children, which finds no
mention in the poem? It is a dilemma faced by many men as well, a balance
between the prerogatives of the family and that of the mind - but for South
Asian women who are non-working mothers, it is of course far more severe. ]
Born in 1962 in Bangladesh to Muslim parents, Nasrin, a physician, is one of the Muslim world's most daring--and reviled--feminists. The poems in this, her first book to be translated into English (some of these poems have appeared in the the New Yorker, Grand Street and other publications), passionately rebuke Islam and its attitude toward women. Some come off as pure didacticism, but this may be a function of the difficulties of translation from Bengali. Despite Wright's succinct footnotes, which clarify historical and cultural references, the English is rarely vivid enough to lift Nasrin's rage from the merely polemical to the truly But when it does, the result is powerful. In ``Fire,'' a woman notes how greedily her husband anticipates the afterlife, where, Muslim tradition holds, worthy men will have heavenly consorts: ``I see my doddering husband/ exult over the seventy-seven pleasures of sex.'' Then, imagining her own, less desirable hereafter, she writes: ``Watching the blind obscenity of men/ I burn inside in the everlasting fires of hell,/ a chaste and virtuous woman.''