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Debashis Chanda. ed., Visual Rhapsody,
Niyogi Books, New Delhi, Pages 144 (hb), ISBN 81-901936-7-8

Waswo X. Waswo. India Poems: The Photographs,
Gallerie, Mumbai, Pages156 (hb), ISBN 81-901999-2-7

   The interface between poetry and painting and photography has always been one of close associations, not just within the intimately familial terrain of prosody — that of image, line, composition and metaphor — but also in the fact that there are innumerable examples over the ages of painters who write poetry and poets who practise the fine arts. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Picasso (the excellently exuberant Picasso’s One Liners edited by Susan Grace Galassi is worth tasting), William Blake, the Dadaists — Jean Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters and Paul Klee (Three Painter-Poets: Selected Poems which is part of the celebrated Penguin Modern European Poets series is a must read), the ‘concrete’ poets, our own Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, to contemporary Indian poet/painters like Dilip Chitre, Jatin Das and Imtiaz Dharker, to name just a few.

   Visual Rhapsody is a lavishly brought out anthology of poetry and
paintings by Bengali artist/poets in this tradition. The book is set in large format art paper with the Bengali poetry originals and their English translations juxtaposed with examples of each artist’s visual work. There are nearly two-dozen practitioners represented by artists as diverse as Nandalal Bose (b.1882), Hemendranath Mazumdar (b.1894), Jogen Chowdhury (b.1939), Sunil Das (b.1939), to relatively younger Sanjay Bhattacharyya (b.1958), Mithu Sen (b.1971), and, Eleena Banik (b.1971).

   Almost in all cases, the art and the Bengali poetry by each artist soar, but the translations leave much to be desired. The English versions are awkward in construction, and in many cases syntactically flawed, overwritten, or incorrectly translated. The diction employed sound Victorian and over-the-top, overly flowery and over dramatic. As an example, take the opening of Nandalal Bose’s poem ‘His Picture I Draw’:

Of him I speak whom I love,
His picture I draw, his song I sing.
You stand aside — obstruct me not.

   This not-so-fine rendition is fortunately accompanied by a fine drawing of an actor/dancer looking into a mirror — his posture captured beautifully in fluid strokes. One only wished the translation came somewhat remotely close to the quality and the honest diction of the drawing.

   One also wished as a reader that the editor Debashis Chanda had
commissioned a good team of contemporary English-language poets to do the crucial task of translating. Ideally, of course it could have been a team of English-language poets who also have a good working knowledge of Bangla. If that combination was difficult to find (which it is not), then good English-language poetry practitioners could have been given the English literals of the Bangla originals and further paired with a team of Bengali speakers/writers to collaborately work and produce translations of merit.

   Take for example, the title of the book itself, Chobi Aakiyeder Kobita — this is incorrectly translated as Visual Rhapsody. I am sure the editor might argue that he was taking poetic license in transcreating the title. But as far as I am concerned, the English translation is misleading; secondly, it shifts the emphasis only on to the artworks; and thirdly, it sounds clichéd. Simply calling it ‘Painter-Poets of Bengal’, like the Penguin anthology, could have been an uncluttered, lucid, and a more accurate alternative.

   Arindam Chattopadhyay’s (b.1970) artwork is reminiscent of
Rabindranath Tagore’s “erasures” where the ‘text-editing’ defaced in ink or charcoal produce figure-like compositions of what tonally appear as mixedmedia works on an ‘x-y’ plane. His accompanying two-part poem ‘Some Personal Rules and Regulations’ has a didactic tone and is by turns wry and conversational — “We ought to pack everything by tonight” is the poem’s opening line, as we encounter “self-contradictory love”, “hassles of acquisition”, and “jabbered flamboyant speech”.

   Mithu Sen’s (b.1971) poetry is more domestic and lyrical in content and tone. It is highly self-confessional in style and feminine in diction — the poem ‘Mother’ is a good example of that. Her paintings employ both a sense of the abstract and the specific — little pairs of scissors (and spirals) follow hemlines, a sewing machine sits silently — all washed and partly covered in broad brushstrokes.

   Sanjay Bhattacharyya’s (b.1958) art has very strong lines that create a lasting impact with its imagery — whether it is a man stroking a woman’s breast, or two ruddy figures staring ferociously at each other, or three men in priest-like postures — the character’s facial expressions are almost always acutely angular and Picassoesque in execution. Ultimately, it is the simplicity of his lines and their pared-down construction that adds weight to both his
artwork and poetry. “On the city footpaths / With the tongue and teeth bereft of toothbrush, toothpaste / A hidden kiss, every night.” (‘Scarcity’).

   And finally, I was completely enraptured by Sovon Som’s (b.1932) beautifully elegant lines that curve lyrically with minimum fuss and effortlessness. Both his line drawings and poetry have this common quality — a very hard thing to match and sustain simultaneously. As “gusts of wind rustle through the empty skull” (in ‘God’s Grace), we learn that the “body is a gift of rice” (in ‘Saptapadi’) — it is the tenor, tone and line-width that ultimately sound aloud in Som’s understatedness.

   Visual Rhapsody is worth only its content for their original works — the Bengali poetry and the art. Non-Bengali readers unfortunately will be cheated of the pleasures of the mother tongue of the poet painters. The English translations are left wanting and meek and are truly unremarkable, but at least the art (especially those of Prokash Karmakar, Tanmoy Mridha, and the others I have already mentioned in this review essay) makes up for all its shortcomings.

   Waswo X. Waswo’s India Poems: The Photographs is a sumptuously produced and stunningly designed book of images and poetry. The wide square format production is of a very high quality and the strength of the book’s design by Bina Sarkar Ellias lies in its simplicity of layout, understated composition, and clear-cut typeface.

   Waswo has authored three books — Requiem, India Poems: Seventy-Five Poems, and European Journal — prior to this one. In this new book, Waswo largely deals with people in their natural habitat. Nothing seems staged or forced, and yet this apparently documentary-style photography has an unusually poetic quality about them. Expressions of the different characters stare out directly at you thus creating an immediate contact and intimacy. Very soon after you have spent time with each image, you feel that you somehow know the characters for a long time — it is a quality that is hard to capture randomly unless one is very lucky. I have a feeling that Waswo must have spent a lot of quality time with each of his subjects — this is poetry of “light and shade”, of “texture and line”, of honesty and intimacy. Even the few still-life studies he has chosen to include, ones that do not include living beings as a subject, have a haunting and brooding quality about them (for example: ‘The Open Door, Pushkar, 2002’, ‘Cross Before a Goan Home, Arambol, 2002’, ‘The Shopkeeper’s Desk, Kerala, 2002’, or the serenely monastic ‘A Pair of Pots, Karnataka, 2001’).

   But Waswo’s real strength lies in portraiture — ‘Woman with a Scarf, Himachal Pradesh, 2003’, ‘Untitled Portrait, Himachal Pradesh, 2003’, ‘Rickshaw-wallah, Hospet, 2002’, and the stunning shot of an old man with a face full of shaving lather in a saloon in ‘Untitled Portrait, Karnataka, 2002’.

   Waswo X Waswo’s poetry however is more like diary recordings with a lovely turn of phrase here and a startling image there. It is hard to understand why he chooses to break a line at a certain point as opposed to another thereby appearing random and prose-like — “In the morning the monkeys come. / The women of the village / chase them with sticks. / In the morning / milk-coffee and chai, / toast with butter-jam / is set on my table.” This first stanza of the poem is juxtaposed opposite a photograph (‘View from the Monkey Temple, Hampi, 2001’) of a monkey sitting on a granite rock hill staring at you in the foreground as the backdrop recedes in a montage of hills, river, palm trees, and cumulous clouds. The brilliantly resonant ‘Rickshaw-wallah, Hospet, 2002’ photograph that I alluded to earlier has a prosaic poem printed opposite it:

They are moving past you faster these days.

You hear their horns
and see their taillights;

the young girls in jeans
pull your eyes off the road.

The Maruti’s have a simple ego.
The SUVs are hugely vain.

At night
the rhythm of your straining day
still throbs deep in your legs.

Sometimes it seems
you are pedaling backwards,
out of a world
        rushing forward,
                          racing to forget.

   It is so tempting to record events as they appear in their entirety with quasiphilosophical authorial commentary. Just highlighting an aspect or a microcosm says much more powerfully (as they do in Waswo’s photographs) than over-spelling them out in poems that are really, on most occasions, just chopped up series of sentences.

   However, Waswo’s prose writings work much better and reads effortlessly — ‘Dreaming the Monkey, Deep-Eyed and Lyrical’, ‘Taking a Photograph’, ‘Cupendra’s Story’ are good examples, as is his own ‘Introduction’. These pieces would have been enough for me, but more than half of the book is laden and overloaded with endorsements, essays in praise of Waswo’s work by many people he has encountered. Even the show-offy jargon-spiced ‘Foreword’ is entirely unnecessary. The real meat of the book, i.e. Waswo’s excellent photographs (and uneven free verse) occupies only about 80 pages. This is a real pity, as I wanted to be friends with many more characters he had befriended, wanted to be part of many more scenes he had captured through his highly developed sense of compositional photography. But ultimately, purely for the photographs, India Poems is worth possessing — the sharp-edged tri-tones in sepia-frames display Waswo’s skills as a finely subtle lens man and a sensitive visual artist.