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CENTRAL LIBRARY Poetry : Text and Context IOth UGC-Sponsored Refresher Course in English cu / ^ f* CEhfTRAL \ts library . p (T R Published by UGC Academic Staff College & Department of English University of Calcutta CENTRAL LIBRARY Editors Jhama SanyaJ Krishna Sen Publisher B. K. Duti (Honorary Director ASC-CU) Editorial Board Dipcndu Chakra bait i Ramkrishna Bhattacharya ^2 Santanu Mazumdar ------------- Sanjukta Das gup ta Sinjini Bandyopadhyay Sona Roy Srobona Munshi Subhadra Kumar Sen Sudeshna Chakra varti Sumita Naskar G\ S Surabhi Baneijee Tapati Gupta S © Academic Staff Coliege. University of Calcutta Published : December 2003 Designed and printed by Blue Pencil Publishing Editorial & Consultancy Services Pvt. Ltd. 2At D. P. P Road. Kolkata-700 047 CENTRAL LIBRARY Message t/e&A (A& &/WT1- of i^TWYvy //sitsfCj-tUf-p tj/' (ja/cii££ar Besides organising a large number of Orientation Programmes, Refresher Courses, Seminars and Workshops, the UGC-Academic Staff College has a programme of publication of quality books primarily based on the lecture materials provided by the Resource Persons, A Refresher Course, in particular, is an opportunity to the participant teachers to listen to and interact with many eminent speakers and researchers at one place. The documentation of such discourse is essential not only for the professional benefit of the teachers hut also for dissemination of knowledge and thoughts to a broad spectrum of people interested in the concerned area. The thrust area of the 10th Refresher Course in English - Poetry : Text and Context - is unique in itself The course was designed by the Joint Coordinators, Professor Sona Roy and Dr Santanu Majumdar, to convey the rnultj valent appeal of this thrust area. The efforts of the editors Professor Jhama Sanyal and Professor Krishna Sen have culminated in this intellectually fulfilling publication. The book is a worthy addition to the titles published by the UGC-ASC. University of Calcutta. Binay K. Dutt CENTRAL LIBRARY Preface We take great pleasure in bringing out the third volume of a senes ol publications of the Deparfmenl el English which are the outcome of Peiresher Course programmes sponsored by the UGC. and administered by Ihe Academic Staff College, University o! Cakxrtta, The First eight fteiresher Courses in Engltsh had dealt with literary periods, literary theory, and various soao-CulturaJ contexts ol literalura. From the ninth Course, which was on ‘Drama: Literature and FerTomance\ the Department is offering a senes of genre-based explorations, looking into (he ways in which the discourse on the genre has developed from traditional perspectives to contemporary concerns. Poetry, a hallowed pursuit in times past, occupies a particularly ambivalent site today. On the one hand, there are debales about its relevance Jn an increasingly fragmented and dystopic world. On the other hand, poetry now embraces more spares or smcui'aijon than ever before, including not only new cultural contexts, but at$o issues such as mtenexluatity and translation. This mulli-dimen$ional discourse has evolved Irom ihe interface of the poei, Ihe critic, and the translator. We are privileged that m the current volume we have been abte lo include alf these voces m our galaxy of national and international contributors, among them renowned pc*ts, eminent academicians, and distinguished translators, The grouping of the contents aims to project the diversity of (he current thinking about poetry. The volume begins appropnatefy with poems by an earlier and a contemporary poet - Mohini Mohan Chatiegee and Meena Alexander. A novel insight into Colonial perspectives on poetry is provided by two rare reprints from The Calcutta Review. The evolving nature of ihe genre is explored in the contributions of Keki N. DaoiwaFla. Jayanta Mahapatra, Huck Gutman and Anisur Rahman We then move to Indian English poetry rn its various manifestations - indigenous, diaspora: and Dab! - in the pieces by Maya Shankar Pandey. Sudeshna Chakravarii. Murari Prasad. K Suneetha Rant, and Sanjukta Dasgupta. Canadian and British poetry are analysed irom diverse viewpornts by Subir Dhar, Mary Ellis Gibson, Visvanath Chattegee, Srobona Munshi. Jharna Sanyal. Ramkrishna Bhattacharya and Jayah Gupta The important area ol inteitextuarity is addressed by Subhas Sartar and Uyal Kumar Majumdar Finally. the new insights on translation as a constitueni ol the discourse on poetry are analysed by Fakrul Alam and Chinmoy Cuba We would tike to thank the Registrar ol the University of Calcutta, Dr Ujjal Kumar Base, for his kind permission to reprint articles from The Calcutta Review and past numbers of the Journal of the Department of English We are grateful lo Dr. Binay K. Dull, Honorary Director o! Ihe Academic Slafl College o! this University, lor hi$ enoOuragemeni and help in publishing Ihis vorume. We thank our contributors and all members of our Editorial Board, especially Protestor Sanjukta Dasguple, for their unstinting cooperation. The First and Second Tear MA students who manually copied material from The Calcutta Review, which is too brittle to be photocopied, deserve our special appreciation. We musl particularly mention here our Departmental Project Fellows. Sanghamitra Dalai and Debapriya Paul, who took charge ol ai! the Laborious tasks associated with this publication Finally, our grateful thanks are due lo Mr Sujoy Gupta, who undertook to design this book and see it through the press in record time. December IS, 2003 Jharna Sanyal Krishna Son CENTRAL LIBRARY TABLE OF CONTENTS I Moh ini Mohan Chatterjee : 1 A Poet Rediscovered H Meena Alexander 15 Poems III George Smith 25 Poetry of the Rebellion IV William Douglas 41 The Critique of Pure Nonsense V Keki N, Daru walla 51 The Decolonized Muse VI Jayanta Mahapatra 57 Hedging the Heart : To What is the Poet Responsible? VII Huefc Gutman 63 The Plight of the Modern Lyric Poet VIII Anisur Rahman 79 Inverting the Language of Power : Two Wayj of Seeking Identity IX M. S, Pandey 89 Fragments of a Broken Geography : Diasporie Conftgu rat on in the Postcolonial South Asian Immigrant Writing X Sudeshna Chakravarti 99 Yeats and the tradition of re-incarnation : *rMohini Chatterjee " and other works XI Murari Prasad 113 Indian Poetry in English * Turn -of- the - Centu ry Signposts XU Kh Sunwtha Ranj 127 The Negated Narrate : Dai it Literature and the "Nation " CENTRAL LIBRARY XIU Sanjukta Dasgupta 135 The Politics of Language : Post-Independence Indian English Poetry 149 XIV Subir Dhar Imagined Indians : Duncan Campbell Scott adn the Psychology of Colonialism XV Mary Ellis Gibson 159 The Garden and the Empire : Family Drama and Global Politics in Tennyson's Poetry XVI Visvanath Chatteijee 175 Prometheus and the Poet XV)I Srobona Munshi 1S5 Thomas Caret's Visual Conceits XVIII Jhama Sanya! 201 Criseyde Through the Boethian Glass XIX Ramkrishna Bhauacharya 221 A Possible Political Reading of Gray's Elegy XX Jayati Gupta 231 A Re-Reading of the Landscape Poetry of Alexander Pope XXI Subhas Sarkar 245 Modernism in Indian English Poetry and P. Lai : The Influence of T. S. Eliot XXII Ujjal Kumar Majumdar 251 Truth is Beauty XXIII Fakml Alam 257 Translating Rabindranath Tagores Verse XXIV Chinmoy Guha 285 Out of Place : the Translator's Identity' CENTRAL LIBRARY Mohini Mohan Chatterjee A Poet Rediscovered Mohini Mohan Chaltcrjcc (1858-1936) is remembered today mostly becau.se of the fond tribute paid to him by W. B, Yeats in his poem Mohini Chatterjee (1930), But U may be a surprise lo us to know that he was a poet and translator by his own right and wrote both in English and Bengali, Mohini Chatterjee completed his M.A., LL. B, from Calcutta University. His life-long engagement with the traditional Vedantic philosophy brought him close to the Theosophists and he travelled to Europe as the private secretary of Madam Blavatsky in 1883, H is during this period he met Yeats, then a boy of sixteen, and initialed him to the idea of reincarnation. To Yeats he appeared to be a Christ-like figure. Bui it seems, apart from Yeats, there were many others whom he influenced by this wonderful eloquence. According to the apocryphal account given by O C, Ganguli, in his memoirs, Mohini Chatterjee had an encounter with the Pope in Rome where the Pontiff supposedly failed to win Chatterjee over lo Christianity and accepted the superiority of Hinduism. Yeats on a different occasion recounted how orthodox Chatterjee was, for he never allowed Yeats to touch him physically. Mohini Chatterjee preempted the arrival of Swami Vivckananda in America, And in 1885 he brought out a wonderful prose translation of Srimadbhavadgita from Boston, Massachusetts. Coming back to Calcutta in 1889 he started practising as an attorney. He was the permanent attorney of the Tagore family. By his marriage to the daughter of Dwijendranath Tagore he became a distant relative to Rabindranath. He and his brothers were the members of 'Khamkheyali Sabha1 - a club established by the Tagores, Perhaps because of his non-Brahmo attitude and deep knowledge of Hindu philosophy, Mohini Chatterjee became a good friend of Sister Nivcdita. He was present in the only meeting between Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath, which took place in 1899, at the behest of Sister Nivedita. CENTRAL LIBRARY 2 Poetry: Te.tt and Context Mohini Chatterjce's Bengali poems were published in magazines like Bharati. When in 1921 the periodical The Calcutta Review was taken over by the University of Calcutta, Chaiterjee became one of its regular contributors. His poems in English, both original and translations from Bengali and Sanskrit, continued to be published till his death in 1936. The terse expression and the consummate artistry of the poems make us suspect they were perhaps not the compositions of a frail old man in the last decades of his life (Vishnu Dey recalls by 1930 Chaiterjee had become completely blind). They appear to have been composed earlier, perhaps during his tours in Europe and in America. Though we have the names of two anthologies of his Bengali poems Bhikkhar Jhuli (The Beggar's Bowl) and Jiban Prabaha (The Flow of Life) and also some of his other English works like Indian Spirituality and History as a Science, his English poems have so far remained uncollected. We present a selection of his poems From the pages of 77ie Calcutta Review with the hope that some day in the future we will be able to bring out an anthology with a full biographical account of this fascinating Bengali intellectual. (Collated by Debapriya Paul and Sanghamitra Dalai | CENTRAL LIBRARY Mohini Mohan Chatterji Quest of Beauty L Aspiration I sit me down by Beauty's stream, I dare not touch the water. The day is bleak and bitter cold. Around rain's cold, soft patter. I rise resolved to plunge in stream. My courage shivers cold, I land-ward look, my courage comes, I re-resolve, I'm bold. In doubt my courage flutters fast, I know not what to think: Misfortune’s sprinkled on my face, I care not if 1 sink. 1 jump —1 plunge — the die is cast. All doubt, all fear forever past. II, Resolution Lend ear, ye faithful sons of truth,, Record my solemn vow, I’ll lose my life in Beauty's sea. And never turn back now. Unseen, in silence Beauty rapes What I have known as me, A sweetness steals o'er all that's left, Serene in agony. By liquid light on Beauty's sea Without is made Within, Without, Within in Beauty merged; To think of aught is sin. CENTRAL LIBRARY Poetry: Text and Context tii. Conservation I fear i'm wrecked on Beauty’s shore. My lines have snapt. My crazy craft Is helpless, helmless, 'reft of oar. The wind, called mind, is clean distraught; Its rise* its fall Are madness all. Obsessed by devils, vainly fought, |Tve sailed by words from somewhere heard. Whene'er it thunder'd* I only blunder'd And whirl’d as Pass ion-storm bestirr’d. The horrid, ugly thing called life The shore enshrouds In deep, black clouds. Unpierced by lightning's thinnest knife. The mind dies to see her. The eye dies to flee her. Take her or leave her - so rages the strife. IV, Consummation O take my father's richest store* Take diamonds great and pearls galore. Gems* red and green, - How sweet their sheen! Take silver cold Bold, bright gold* Take all - take all that you need more. But buy me Beauty - Beauty find. Let be all else but light to Blind, Seek dark and glow. Above, below, Scour sky and eunh. Seek death and birth, Make beauty "lone the light of mind.