Cover art: a detail from Bangladeshi rickshaw art.
Poems by Razu Alauddin
Translated with an Introduction by Munzer Talukder
Razu Alauddin has been straddling poetry and critical writing or essay quite vigorously for well over three decades in his native tongue, Bangla, along with his occasional dabblings in translation from Spanish and English. Though ‘dabbling’ might not be an apt description when it comes to his lifelong obsession with Borges translation as well as appreciation, his other translation works in view of his whole career amount to little more than ‘occasional dabblings’. Unlike in the realm of literary and socio-cultural criticism, he has been neither prolific nor popular in the arena of Bangla Poetry, but his poetic prowess and ingenuity far surpass in gravity the comparative obscurity and paucity of his poems. Among his poetic oeuvre of less than a hundred poems, the brightest, for the most part, are some of those that can be called amoral, anti-puritanical erotic poems. I have chosen five of them for translation, in consultation with the poet himself, hoping that they will adequately represent his antinomial, heterosexually ‘omni-sensual’ preoccupations and equivocal, defamiliarising and allusive architectonics.
The longest poem that has been translated on this occasion is perhaps also one of the greatest triumphs of ‘sustained conceit’ after Donne’s ‘The Canonization’ or ‘A Valediction’. “This book full of wonders” apparently treated as “fresh as a lass” which is to be approached sensually, mated with ecstatically, and to be lost eventually to the antagonist is the central conceit of the poem sustained primarily through the anecdotal convention of lyric. The distinct punctum of this figuration is that it has been mystified to such point as to make it difficult to discern whether the persona is presenting a book that he was completely rapt with in terms suited to a female figure or narrating his secret sexual engagements with a certain mistress as if it was a bout of reading a fascinating book which is full of erotic details. This fundamental ambiguity at the heart of this tropology is articulated rather eloquently in a different context in another poem “The Original to Its Translation”: “Now, which one of us two was in other’s image?”. The tenor and the vehicle of the conceit, as I.A. Richards called them, progress in such inextricably confounded state so organically and suggestively that a vision seems ineluctable. This vision is redolent, on the one hand, of Nitzsche’s aesthetic metaphysics of the Dionysiac which believes, above all, in the “mysterious [reality of] primal Oneness” (Birth of Tragedy, Penguin Classics, 1993, p.17) and in the maxim that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world justified” (BT, Introduction, p. xiii) as well as in the “conviction that ‘art is the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life’” (BT, Intro, p. ix); on the other hand, it leads us to some customised version of the ‘primordial religion’ of Dionysism/Shivaism that Alain Danielou propounds with an unparallelled zeal. As this poem followed by others of its kind unfolds before any perceptive eyes, the cult of Dionysus/Shiva is called to mind because the primacy, literal and figurative ubiquity, and non-pharisaic divinity that the personae impart to hedonistic sexual act throughout these poems at large in a setting mostly devoid of urban civilisational features resonate with these tenets centred around the image of a young naked ithyphallic deity called Shiva in India and Dionysus in ancient Greece: “erotic ecstasy is not a means of reproduction, but purely a seeking after pleasure”, “pleasure is the image of the divine state”, and “sensual enjoyment is a “sensation of the divine””(Gods of Love and Ecstasy, Alain Danielou, Inner Traditions, 1992, p.57). More important, both the Nietzschean Dionysiac and primeval naturalistic pagan tradition enshrined in Danielou’s Dionysism/Shivaism tend somehow to equate art/ realisation of ultimate reality/knowledge/aesthetic experience/the metaphysical with orgasm/pleasure/ecstasy/sex/the physical, holding a firm belief in the essential oneness of all beings in the universe, and that corresponds well to the crux of the first poem—book/mistress and reading/sex with their undecidability as regards precedence, and the consequent projection of the idea of their fundamental unity. This association pushes back the horizon for one to go beyond the simple reading of the poem as a ‘tragic’ fictive anecdote of a man engaging in an impassioned affair with a voluptuous woman only to be caught by his wife and left with wistful reminiscences of the lost paramour. The innominate book addressed as the goddess, who in turn is ‘sexual pleasure’ incarnate [“Governess of the World”, “You who pervade the universe”, “Pheromones sprinkled a mesmeric desire over every page”] and likened to the Islamic holy scripture [“Ummul Kitab”, “a secret opus in the Preserved Tablet”] can plausibly stand for an ancient, arcane, hermetic Tantric codex, and the recounted event can allegorise lyric persona’s clandestine initiation into the lore and orgiastic rites of the lover-Goddess aimed at realising the relationship between the microcosm of body and macrocosm of the cosmos through erotic magic, eventually winding up in the distress of separation from the codex forced upon him by the dominant moralistic orthodoxy which “my wife” embodies. Yet, the rhapsody of his remembrance almost drowning the plaintive tone of loss intimates that the separation is not ‘spiritual’. Lyric strategies of proximal deixis as in the very title “This Book Full of Wonders” and of apostrophe ensure that the poem itself besides representing an event becomes ‘the event’ of enacting speaker’s creative, but non-procreative eroticism in the space of lyric present through which he reappropriates and relives, even enlivens the past in its spirit. The epigraph used as part of the poem’s rich and revealing allusiveness adds further facets to the already convoluted thematic. First, intertextuality or perpetual inter-compositional influence enters the scene suffused with the over-arching idea of unity because both Mallarmé and Bloy exist as quotations inside a quotation of Borges, and both the quotes inside the quote refer not to multiplicity of books, but to a single, singular book. Second, interconnectivity of our creative efforts suggests yet another parallel between reading and writing which reinforces and redirects the entangled conceit of ‘creative eroticism’ as the experience of reading/sexuality through its essential creativity results in this case in poetic expression to be enunciated and possibly recreated ad infinitum. It is vital to note that associations of primitive religion evoked especially in the first poem, and in general in all of them do not place the persona within ‘another sort of religious’ dogmatism in any measure. His leaning towards the primitive suggests the craving for only sort of freedom ever at human disposal as against all the modern monotheistic religions; otherwise, he does not seem to think much of any divinity, which is conspicuous, among other things, in the ironic, subversive way he intermingles Islamic parlance deemed sacred with various profanities. Much like Mallarmé replacing religion with art, and a whole lot of atheistic or agnostic Latin American writers sublimating the residue of religious fervour bequeathed to them toward ‘a kind of mystical’ eroticism, the lyric personae that Alauddin has created in these poems hold fast to their faith in the sublime pleasures derived from sex and aesthetics. Thus, out of these lyric personae, emerges, as it were, one potent, cogent cult-prophet of carnal passion and intellectual enthusiasm, of opus and coitus who, through his artfully vivacious, variegated, but fairly intelligible verses, narrates the parable of how he received orphic enlightenment at some point in the past in his euphoric encounter with an anthropomorphic, or better yet, gynomorphic book, then forfeited his right to pleasure, and performs and preaches with poetic opaqueness what he finds worthy to live by.
What might outrage us most and shock us ‘into of our wits’ among these poems is the one that boasts a latter-day Donnean ‘metaphysical’ leap of deforming human genitalia to fit a transfigurative description of football match as “social sexuality”. We might recall the very best of Donne once again in the consummate use of casuistry in favour of sexual freedom with meditations on a football game at both ends and a vignette of dialogue in between. It requires true finesse to balance the mimetic façade of representing a fictional character’s momentary thoughts about the nature of football game and his intervening recollection of a conversation he had with his mistress, which is what spurs the thought in the first place, with the implied poet’s obtrusive intercession in the penultimate stanza pulsating with ritualistic beauty and vivid imagery. And, with the last intercession, the implied poet in the absence of an ‘I’ clinches the casuistry with a couplet of socio-poetic, acutely ironic observation in which he also indicates the specific situation for mimesis [ “sitting in the gallery”, “spectators explode into moaning”]. The romantic/sexual engagements represented through complicated depictions, suggestions and sometimes epideictic meditations in this poem as well as others are all but linear, far from the exfoliating complications so prominent in Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil involving ambisexuality and beyond. They are, rather like in Donne, purely human though with a semblance of rhetoric-affective divinity where necessary, masculine, heterosexual, and directed by male perspective. However, among the five translated, one poem. “The Original to Its Translation” is ostensibly written from female point of view. The implied poet again unleashes his ‘omni-sensual’, that is hyper-eroticising instinct, this time in dramatising the dynamics between the original text and its rendition as an entire romantic relationship from its overture to orgasm and re-enacts the indelible three-fold metaphor of reading/writing/sex. Not only the personified ‘text’ is chosen to give a figurative female voice to the dramatic monologue, but the mystique and sublimity of a female figure in the male gaze is also reified onomatopoeically through the laconic, baroque language and ritualistic rhythm—as if in an attempt to compensate for the relative passivity the female is assigned in the role of ‘the original’ in the process of translation. Apart from Adorno’s claim that lyric has a utopian function, what accounts for the surprising representation of the rigmaroles and complications entailed in translation as a beatific and harmonious reciprocity is the underlying desire of the persona/implied poet to sound a clarion call for a new ‘social imaginary’. Such clarion call finds its pithy epitome in the last poem as the persona in a raffish, seductive, lapsarian tone invites his paramour to the Heraclitan fire of sacramental extra-moral desire. Also, “Inclined to the Other”, a veritable incantatory confessional formed as a series of rhetorical questions of an infant terrible with a persistent gusto serves to inculcate the contrary of what it was designed to do—the idea of salvation in the vices of mind and flesh. And in the masterful concluding stroke of irony, the prophetic persona addresses the readership in a déjà vu stanza, alluding to Baudelaire’s “To the Reader”. While Baudelaire, in his poem, lists a vituperative litany of vices in all their gory imagery, and attaches the last of them, “ennui” to the reader, sardonically calling him/her “hypocrite”, the poetic persona in Alauddin’s poem glorifies the reader and identifies with him, co-opting him to finish what he has commenced in the poem, and marking him as an “accomplice” in his own virtuous vices.
True, it would be vacuous to claim that Alauddin always maintains the verbal standard of ‘inevitable’ felicity which is emblematic of great poems, as illuminated in Harold Bloom’s “idea of inevitability as unavoidable wording rather than merely predictable diction” in his essay ‘The Art of Reading Poetry’, but that does not smother the brilliant fire of his structural, rhetorical and figurative “proclivities” that, from time to time, emanate perverse ingenuity of perception, oracular polyvalence and pregnant allusiveness.
Let us go now, without further hermeneutic ado, “burn in [these] proclivities” and a few others as well.
Munzer Talukder is a Bangladeshi translator and essayist. Born in 1993 in Dhaka, he completed his BA and MA in English literature from the University of Dhaka. He has translated works of Kurt Vonnegut, Wallace Stevens, George Orwell, Roald Dahl and Tishani Doshi into Bangla. He writes critical essays in both Bangla and English.
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