Book Review: This Number does not Exist
Poet: Mangalesh Dabral
Translators: Various Translators
Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd, Rochester, NY, 2016,
Review by: Supriya Prasanta
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Mangalesh Dabral is a much familiar name among the readers of modern Hindi literature: he has been a voice to reckon with for over three decades. This Number Does Not Exist brings in translation the very best and the very varied of Darbar’s poems, selected from five of his anthologies. Translated into English by a group of eminent translators, the anthology offering sixty-five poems alongside their Hindi original is a sumptuous feast for those who crave poetry in its essence.
‘This number does not exist’, the poem which lends its title to the book paints a desolate picture of emotional unavailability of people in a society which becomes more and more alienating. The anguish over a society and its people changing and a new way of living and relating taking place is evident in many of the poems. It is not something readers should merely pass up, it’s something readers will have to experience deeply. Most of the poems seem reflective of this anguish. In ‘The Death of Leaves’ translated by Arvind Krishna Mehotra lines are stark: “The houses on either side/of the road have locked front doors/I call out, and my voice rebounds.”
Some of the poems are axiomatic as in the four lines of a poem, ‘Words’: “Some words scream/ some take off their clothes/and barge into history/ some fall silent.” This number does not exist is lyrical, melancholic and honest. The poems don’t reflect intellectualism or leaning toward a particular ideology, which one finds in poems of many the great contemporaries of Dabral. There is a soft lyric in ‘Song of the dislocated’, lines straight out from the heart of a person away from home: “with a heavy heart we left, tore away from our ancestral place”. There are lines which trace Darbar’s quiet acceptance of despair: “I wish despair remained/that again gave birth to hope, for us/may words remain/ which like birds, cannot be/ caught.” (‘I wish’, translated by Akhil Katyal)
Striking in their structure are the prose-poems, ‘Poems of dreams’ ‘Return’ ‘A poem on Childhood’ ‘Kiss’ and many others: in these poems the poet does not seem to bother to break a line as if to say poetry lies in the feelings evoked in the readers rather than in how it appears in print. Dabral’s simplicity and clarity is a style of his own from the beginning, it seems to say the poet who writes for himself, not for readers, and even wonders whether he belongs to the city he has migrated to in ‘Delhi 1’: “I see bizarre people in this city. Their faces resemble the faces of my enemies. Lolling in luxury cars they go toward Indira Gandhi International airport.” (Translated by Sarabjit Garche)
When Dabral moves away from depicting the city life, he goes down the memory lane: ‘Grandfather’s photograph’ ‘A picture of father’, ‘Ganananda Pathik’ are soulful rendering of people whose memories haunt him forever. The poet seems to be living forever in memories which warm him up against the cold and mechanical life in the city he has chosen to live in. The poet’s unsettled mood is clearly seen in ‘City’ translated by Giridhar Rathi, “I looked at the city/ and smiled/ and walked in/ who would ever want to/ live here/ I wondered/ and never went back.”
In the foreword to the book, the poet writes about his experience of migration “from a serene hemmed in place endowed by nature to a sprawling and predatory world abuzz with activity.” Throughout the book the understated, the sensitive, the uncultivated make their peace with the loud, the counter-intuitive, and the urbane: it is as if Dabral has groped and found his defenses in poetry. His is a fresh voice that told of many joys and many sorrows and of inevitable change and lingering memory. This Number does not Exist, in essence, is a precious addition to Indian literature in English translation, a category which is yet to receive the serious attention it deserves. Names such as Dabral’s will lend the category a much needed gravity.
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(First published in The Dhauli Review, an online journal, 2016)