‘The Dust Draws Its Face on the Wind’ by Avinash Shrestha: Some wordless intimations
Reading Avinash Shrestha’s poetry is a mixed experience. The poet clamours to express the ineffable, yet he falters to redeem poetry from the black hole of metaphysics or theology. The inordinate desire to speak without making sounds is inherently impossible. Yet, the poet ventures, taking failures as his happy epiphanic moments of participation in life. The misfired “infirm desires” give “crutches to my [his] dreams” (‘Concerning the Heart’). Very significantly, Rohan Chhetri, the translator of the Nepali poems, goes back to Shrestha’s first collection ‘Parewa: Seto Kala’ (Pigeons: White, Black) to zero in on the title of the collection ‘The Dust Draws Its Face on the Wind’. As the poet begins his journey, he celebrates the “futility” of his effort:
The dust wants to draw its face on the wind/I on you. Neither the dust gets it right, nor will I (‘Futility’).
For Shrestha, the fetters mark freedom: “An aquarium,” he excitedly discovers, “is a whole universe for the fish/Ocean its imagined heaven” (‘Of Heaven’).
Instead of succumbing to the lure of sovereign “big-big words” (‘Poor’), and their garrulity, the poet chooses “sigh” — “the lukewarm breath/without speech” (‘Final Poem about Pain’) as his preferred expression. In the giant waves of seas, he hears symphonic sighs: “Beethoven weeps in agony/poor Mozart/is inconsolable too” (‘Artist/Ocean/Symphony’).
Sigh, in Shrestha’s poetry, is Prometheus. It is a kind of gunpowder that can explode. The songs of lamentation are sung in “the metre of hurricane” (‘Map of a Revolution’). In his second collection, ‘Samvedna, O Samvedna!’ (Intimations, Oh Intimations!), Shrestha continues to drift along deferred derelict dreams, “unfurling/on a grave in the absence of spring” (‘City’). The outer calm holds inner turmoil: “Nothing transpires/only the river is restless, the fish distracted” (‘Death’). Restlessness is defined as a stifled “dream inside sleep” (‘Incongruity’). The sea-headland encounter is seen in terms of silence that “scatters/even as someone raises their voices to speak” (‘Headland-II’).
In the poems culled from the third collection, ‘Anubhuti Yatrama’ (‘On a Journey through Intimations’), the progressive or nationalist postures of the poet give way to intimate encounters with the resplendent landscape of the Himalayan nation. This is how a morning opens up before the poet: “The ten chariots of direction come to halt/morning’s maiden shakes off the blanket of mist” (‘Inattention’). He would say without any aesthetic camouflage: “The old shirt of my ideologies/blows in the barbed wind
of time” (‘The Other Man’). The set of poems taken from his ‘Karodoun Suryaharko
Andhakar’ (‘Darkness of a Million Suns’) continues to bear the intensity of interiority —
“a sigh/an intimation/a cipher” (‘Song of the Five Elements’).
The poems written on the edge of silence are not easy to translate. Chhetri does well to collaborate with the poet to generate a third mediated voice of the frugal Other. However, the placement of Nepali poems along with their translations does not serve any purpose. Rather, it leads to unwarranted readerly distractions. Chhetri adds his own epigraphs to adorn the translated poems — an interesting, enriching experiment!
