A poet for all seasons

It's been nine years since I first began translating Joy Goswami's poetry. This year, three things happened to make that experience more than a deeply-satisfying personal odyssey. One, my book of translations, Selected Poems, was published by Harper Perennial. Two, the book was shortlisted for the inaugural Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry. Three, Joy Goswami was conferred the title of Poet Laureate at the Tata Literature Live! festival in Mumbai. It was an overwhelming feeling for me to realise that my book had played no small role in helping this foremost of Bengali poets to reach an entirely new audience. The mantle of Poet Laureate for a writer who is a star back home in Bengal (and among the Bengali diaspora) sends a powerful signal to non-Bengali readers that here is a poet worth discovering, and staying with.

Poet Laureateships are usually awarded by national commissions. I asked Anil Dharker, director of the festival, what inspired him to institute this award. He confessed it had been on his mind for over two years, stemming from his awareness of the increasing marginalisation of poetry in the cultural sphere. "Poetry will always be niche," he said. "What is sad is how little attention is given to it. The idea was to get poetry centre-stage." With poetry becoming 'completely peripheral,' the only way poets get recognised is when they "migrate to Bollywood and start writing lyrics". While acknowledging that there's nothing wrong with that (citing Kaifi Azmi and Sahir Ludhianvi as examples), he added, "Initiating this award is also a way of creating awareness of what really good poetry is." By selecting Joy Goswami as the very first recipient, the bar for 'really good poetry' has appropriately and delightfully been set very high.

Born on 10 November 1954 in Kolkata, Joy Goswami grew up in the small town of Ranaghat. His first poetry collection, published when he was 22, brought him immediate critical acclaim. One of the most powerful poets in the post-Jibanananda Das era of Bengali poetry, he has published nearly 50 titles, including a novel in verse, and several collections of critical essays. Recipient of many state and national awards, he has been a consistent voice against violence, war and genocide. Christopher Merrill, poet and director of the International Writers Program at Iowa (where Joy Goswami was a fellow in 2001) describes him as "a towering figure in contemporary letters, a prolific Bengali poet who writes in an impressive range of forms, addressing every conceivable matter of the human heart. 'Language for the sake of any language/ Is my thief, and I her thievery,' he declares, and in Sampurna Chattarji's powerful versions of his poems, we can appreciate the scale of his raids on the inarticulate. He changes every language with his every line. Listen well: he is speaking to all of us."

I sometimes think of Joy Goswami's poems as time-machines of the mind, hurtling from inner to outer space and back. There is, in his work, an acute consciousness of the illusion of reality and the reality of illusion. Repeatedly he asks — what is the poet's role? To be a seer, a witness, a blind prophet, like Tiresias? Or rather, is the true poet a dreamer, a master of disguise, a keeper of secrets? His faith in the reader of poetry is unshakeable. In a 2005 interview, he said to me, "Poetry's impact is best seen, not on society at large, but on the mind of the individual, interested reader. Poetry cannot always function as social commentary, or as a tool for improving society. It could be surreal, a dreamscape, but at its core is the emotional truth, the imaginative truth that allows the reader to make that leap of faith. The reading of a poem is, for me, the only proof of its truth."

With this award, a significant leap of faith has been made. If Dharker's goal is "not just to confer a title but to start a movement," he couldn't have started at a better place.