Translator’s noteVinod Kumar Shukla, the beloved Hindi writer and poet from Chhattisgarh, turns 84 today. Many know him through his novel, Deewar Mein Ek Khirkee Rahati Thi (‘A Window Live in a Wall’, translated by Satti Khanna) that won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1999. A recluse by choice, Shukla has written on disappearing worlds, including how trees have disappeared from cities. Since mere nostalgia is passive, Shukla transforms it into dream in his fiction. He is also a poet with a rare idiom. For instance he writes in this poem (in my translation below), “The place of love is uncertain / Here, even there-will-be-no-one has no place.” You find speech idioms merging into his poetry, making it a fascinating occasion for a translator to innovate.I had the pleasure of meeting Shukla once, at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2011. He looked lost among the crowd. I am happy to recapitulate a bit of the conversation with him that I had written about: Shukla made the observation that poetry today was most noticeable in prose. I wondered if he meant the dislocation of the poetic into the prosaic due to a kind of material shift in lyric life. Or was it about rescuing the prosaic from its drab contours, its dull everydayness, by imbuing it with a poetic flight? I asked Shukla why he wrote in two genres. His answer was simple: there was a long road and a short one, there were things in life which demanded poetry, and those that demanded fiction. He spoke with serene grit about his difficult early years in writing. When I asked him for his email address, he fumbled and remembered it with difficulty. He lived away from the hazards of the new generation. But he could still offer new insights to that generation.The year 2020 has taught me among many other things, to keep remembering and paying tributes to writers and poets who are with us. These translations are a small effort to honour the thought.§That Is a Warning / Vinod Kumar ShuklaThis is a warningThat there is a small child.This is a warningThat four flowers are in bloom.This is a warningThat there is happinessAnd the water in the earthen potIs worth drinking,One can breathe in the air.This is a warningThat there is worldIn the world that is leftI am left.This is a warningThat I am aliveFrom a war to comeBy escaping aliveI want toDie with significance.In the last momentsOf my deathI desire eternal lifeThat there are four flowersAnd there is world.§The Place of Love is Uncertain / Vinod Kumar ShuklaThe place of love is uncertainHere, even there-will-be-no-one has no placeIt happens within the folds of a cloakThat no one will see nowBut everyone’s share of solitudeAnd everyone’s share of cloak is certainThere, even in too much afternoonis a little darknesswhere the sky is overcastwhereas night is fallingand night has fallenIn the dark of too much darkin the happiness of lovethere is the darkness of closed lidsunder the cloak of one’s sharesuddenly, by a touchI arriveand by a touch, I bid farewell.© Translation: Manash Firaq BhattacharjeeManash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of The Town Slowly Empties: On Life and Culture during Lockdown (Headpress, 2021), and Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India (Speaking Tiger, 2018).
