Foreword to Beauty, Be My Brahman

Chandanashis Laha

Lord of the Flies made William Golding the lord of post-war novelists, brought him enough money, and slowly but surely augmented his claim to the Nobel Prize.  Even so, the royalty-flushed Golding, at some point, was to blush at the fact that he had always, always been talked about in terms of his debut work!  And so too was T.S.Eliot once fed up with the ceaseless clamour about his ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, as if he had not written any other critical piece of any worth.  William Radice, despite his consistent double vocation as poet-translator, is still generally hailed more as a (Tagore) translator than as a poet in his own right, although his poetry readings have been successful on both sides of the Atlantic as well as in the Indian sub-continent.  There might be moments for him as well to get impatient with this rather lopsided reception.  It is idle to say how posterity will evaluate WR’s achievements; but it can now be said with some certitude that to foreground his translations only would be doing him an injustice.  One reason why he is such a good translator is that he is such a fine poet himself.  It is not very difficult to see how his translations proclaim (or, reclaim) his identity as a mature poet, and how in turn his own poetry registers the requisites of a good translator.  Beauty, Be My Brahman beautifully exemplifies the interface.  This Redbird book from Writers Workshop, Kolkata, is indeed a little masterpiece, which highlights both the centre and the circumference of WR’s poetry to date.

WR is a poet with real guts!  He can cast a cold eye on the indifference of a British publisher to one of his books, and take pride in having it published in Dhaka (‘Hundreds of English poets have books published in Britain.  How many have had a book published in Bangladesh?’); he can valiantly but sincerely title a volume Beauty, Be My Brahman at a time when academics are still feeding on the ramifications of postmodernism; and he can daringly drag into the volume his one and only Bengali poem with his ardent faith that poetry can ‘widen and deepen the scope/Of friendship between peoples’ (p.123).  A poem like ‘Adiyabad’ strives to erase ‘the brutal line / The British drew on the map’ (p.117) and to heal the ruptures across cultures and history.  There is neither East nor West when WR puts pen to paper.

WR has talked about ‘hybrid’, ‘futuristic’ poetry in his Poetry and Community (2003);  and lo! he practised it in 1970 and won the Newdigate Prize.  Don’t worry if the poem seems too experimental or abstruse.  All prize-winning poems are not the best.  But, if gheraoed for its ‘meaning’, WR can smartly get into the bolt-hole of what he says in his Before and After: ‘I looked at my Newdigate Prize Poem again the other day.  At first I couldn’t make head or tail of it, but then I understood it: the “old fool” speaking has come to see that the scientifically ignorant aestheticism he was trained in is irrelevant and unwanted in the polluted modern world: he instructs the painter to seek artistic excitement and joy through a rapprochement between science and painting (“Marvellatomic”)….’

Nor should the quasi-philosophy of ‘The dance is failing’ perplex us.  It is neither about, say, ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’ nor a reductive-realist study in failure like Larkin’s ‘As bad as a mile’.  The sonnet is both a prayer and a petition – a dialectic of observed and yearned-for beauty; and the crux of it lies in the volte-face of the couplet which demands a re-reading of the quatrains.  The crucial question that the title piece in particular and the volume as a whole raise is: how shall beauty hold the over-arching triad of Art-God-Reason?  WR’s whole literary career seems to be one of a deep involvement in the task of locating beauty as both subject and object amidst his strivings across the louring skies, looking before and after, pining for a retreat where Beauty will be his Brahman and when gifts received and given coalesce into one.  His ‘Indian poems’ epitomise the saga.  From the ‘tentative flowers’ (the early poems, which are more than simple juvenilia) to the ‘gifts’ of his volume of that name, we can trace a movement that can be likened to the  gradual flow of a river: from the heady waterfall of ‘I don’t know who designed the sun-set’ to the calm estuary of ‘…I’ll join this din /Of birds at dawn and praise the rising sun’, from the bewildering ‘ignis fatuus’ to the beatific vision of ‘Ananda-dhara…’.  Given this trajectory, Beauty, Be My Brahman is indeed a kind of poetic Künstlerroman.

The real ‘Indianness’ of the poems does not reside in the fact that many of them were written in and are about India; nor does it disseminate from such head words as ‘kismet’, ‘Simla’ , ‘lotus’, ‘Puri’, ‘Ganga’, ‘rasa’, ‘Satyajit Ray’, ‘Jibanananda’, or compounds like ‘Bombay traffic lights’ and ‘Chowringhee crowds’, and the like.  What makes the poems truly ‘Indian’ is the poet’s ability to weave the many into one with sensitivity and self-effacement – his ability to ‘translate’ a foreign world into his own by dint of what  he has elsewhere characterized as ‘…a ceaseless surge/Of power to make, but also deep submission /To what’s made for me’.

With this new volume, WR has once again proved that he had and still has the ‘strength to be nourished not poisoned by’ the ‘taste of fame’ (p.96) that he says India has given him.  I’m sure I shall return to it time and again for the pleasure of rediscovering WR, who has been so wonderfully ‘summoning’ and ‘meddling with words’ for over thirty years.

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