An Interview with Rabindra K Swain
Dr.Nilanshu
Kumar Agarwal
Rabindra K Swain
has authored poetry collections like Once
Back Home, A Tapestry of Steps, Severed
Cord and Susurrus in the Skull. He
also has three books of translation from
Oriya: Dear Jester and Other Stories, Bahubreehi and The
Cemetery Flower and Other Stories. He has two books of criticism: The Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: A Critical Study and Silent Tongues: Writings in Contemporary Indian
Poetry. His poems have appeared in many journals, like Critical Quarterly, Contemporary Review,
Times Literary
Supplement, Wasafiri, Acumen, The Kenyon
Review and Ariel. Presently, he is Managing
Editor of Chandrabhaga, one of the foremost literary periodicals
in
NKA: What, according to you, is the function of poetry? Some scholars
believe that poetry instructs. It guides us. Another
group of scholars believes that poetry is for providing aesthetic pleasure.
Poetry is read and written not for any special purpose. It is read and created,
as it provides a sort of unique aesthetic pleasure, which is similar to the
pleasure, which we derive when we look at something beautiful. Poetry delights.
One more view about poetry is that it is therapeutic or cathartic. It releases
the inner tension of the mind, heart and soul. Out of the just-mentioned
functions, which one is preferred by you? Or, do you appreciate the union of
all these three functions? Or, do you find any other function of poetry close
to your heart? Please illumine.
RKS: Reading a poem and writing a poem are two
different experiences, although sometimes one affects the other. When you write
a poem all that you had read might or might not contribute their bit. It is all
so accidental. When you read a poem your response to it is conditioned by the
type of poems you are capable of writing. If you like it you tend to be
jealous. You wish you had written that piece, or almost the kind of that.
As for the function of
poetry, it varies depending on who reads it. For example, if a poem is about a
frog jumping to a pond it might irritate an activist but it will elevate
someone who is in low spirit.
But
what would you think of the function of A.K. Ramanujan’s
volume Speaking of Siva which the Tamil poet Atmanam read before he attempted suicide? You can find this
information from Ramanujan’s Uncollected Poems and Prose.
NKA: What are the symbolic/ metaphorical connotations of the titles of your
poetry collections like Once Back Home,
A Tapestry of Steps, Severed Cord and Susurrus in the
Skull?
RKS: Titles emerge when you prepare a collection of
poems. This happened with my first book, Once
Back Home. At that time my connection with my village determined most of my
poems. Once back home, things began to flow for me lucidly. The rest of my
collections are named after particular poems included in them. As for the
latest one, Susurrus in the Skull, it
is a sort of dialogue with my self. It is a peeping into my living skull, into
the intimate aspects of life I have lived so far. Here there are a lot of
restraints in my expression, which should make this volume different from the
earlier ones.
NKA: Tell
something about the major themes of your poetry.
RKS: I write about those things with which I can
identify myself, which pokes my conscience or stirs my inner being. Yet I
cannot write about Kargil or Kosovo. For me there is
something too distant about them. Yet it does not necessarily cancel the story
of the body of a primitive man found on the
NKA: In you
poem “Betrayal of the Sea”, you have artistically painted the fury of the
cyclone. The pathetic condition of the human beings in the poem is sure to
touch the innermost chords of the reader’s heart. How emotionally you cry—“… a lone baby/ alive in a family of ten, / a refugee woman found/
unconscious and without water/ in the bamboo grove next dawn…” Why is nature so
carnivorous for the humans? Why is God using such a devastating force to devour
us? Does it not mean that He is against us? In a way, He is a great tormentor
of the innocent citizens of the world. He is lashing and whipping us
sadistically without any reason. Your views, please.
RKS: The Super Cyclone devastated our coastal Orissa in 1999. Only the one who was trapped in it knew its
fury. As I have put in that poem, it was “unreal, too much real.” This version
you read is the outcome of several revisions. My belief in it was further
strengthened when I read Galway Kinnell’s narrative
piece on WTC tower. One has to admit that poems need not always be short and
sort of symbolic. As for man-god relationship and questions of suffering and
reward, it takes me to the question as to why an innocent lamb be slaughtered
on return of prodigal son. Terms like fate, coincidence and destiny are only
consolations.
NKA: Some of
your poems talk about contemporary horrid social order. In “August Fifteen,
2000”, the actions of the extremists are discussed thus—“But I wonder, other than killing/ and sometimes getting killed/ what
do they get in return?” Similarly, in “Panchayat
Elections”, you say, “Here the enemies are real.” To be very precise, human
society is filled with eerie ennui on account of the spiritual drabness of the
man. My question is—Can literature fill the moral vacuum in this spiritually degraded
contemporary society? Can literature be a torch-bearer in this blighted age?
Please make a statement.
RKS: However personal a poet may be there are moments
when he cannot close his eyes to the injustice around him. The difference is
that he may not be so pronounced in his protest but if you look deeper you will
find that his personal poems are no less anguished than those of protest-poems.
One cannot be a dead wood.
As regards to social
commitment, we have to move subtly for we are not Pablo Neruda.
The poetry of Pablo Neruda is the best example of a
successful marriage between the personal and the universal.
NKA: Among your various poetry collections, which one is closest to you
heart? Please make an emotional statement.
RKS: I am yet to move out of the world of my latest
book, Susurrus in the Skull. It is
fresh, just out of oven. Besides, each successive book is expected to exhibit
the signs of an author’s progress, provided one is so lucky.
NKA: You are
also a translator. What do you keep in mind, while translating a work of
literature? Can a work of translation be also highly creative and imaginative? Your views, please.
RKS: I am forgetting who said it but it was a wonderful
expression: a piece of work in order to be translated should first of all sing to you. One should love the work before
one translates it. I have been translating an Oriya poet and an Oriya short
story writer for the last 20 years or so but I have not been able to put them
in book forms. Whereas my translation of our Jnanapith
Award-winner Sachi Rout-Ray’s short stories The Cemetery Flower came out in 2006. It
is because the work was assigned by Orissa Sahitya Akademi and the stories
coming from a master story teller were challenging ones.
NKA: How has
your literary relationship with Jayanta Mahapatra sharpened your creative urge? Please tell.
RKS: The first book of Jayanta
Mohapatra I was to read was The False Start. It was in 1980 and I was doing my graduation.
Ironically it is the toughest collection of Mahapatra.
I must not have understood it (can I vouch to do so now?). But I like those
poems. They stirred my imagination. What is poetry if it does not give you
imaginative leaps? Towards the end of that year I came across his long poem, Relationship in our local book shop. It
was priced at two dollars. I was proud that I possessed a foreign publication
of an Oriya poet, someone I loved, although I did not know him personally till
then. Later on, in 1990, when I began my PhD thesis on his poetry I had to
cover all his work. And those were the years (I submitted my dissertation in
1995) when I not only knew many of his lines by heart but also had before my
eyes the pages of his books. Those were the years of my apprenticeship.
NKA: You are
an editor, poet and a translator. Out of these several literary roles, which
one do you prefer? Or, do you find an interlinking among these diverse creative
roles? Please tell.
RKS: Certainly writing poems is most close to my heart.
But poems do not come often. That is when you take up translations to keep
yourself nearly creative. Translation is no less creative. Rather, here is an
added responsibility. You have to conform to the given form of the original
work.
As for being an editor, I
consider it to be a privilege to be associated with Chandrabhaga, which is perhaps
the single most influential literary magazine in the country. I am thankful to Jayanta Mahapatra for his
generosity in accepting me as the managing editor of his magazine Chandrabhaga in
its second avatar. It gives me an access to the process of selection of
materials that come our way. Chandrabhaga would sometimes place comparatively unknown or
lesser known poets, not much familiar poets from Indian languages in its first
pages. The Telegu poet Mandarapu
Hymavathy is one such discovery for me. It is through
the pages of Chandrabhaga
that I was introduced to the Dalit poems, the
subtlest ever I have read, of G.S. Shivarudrappa.
NKA: As the
Managing Editor of Chandrabhaga, what, in your view, are the major problems faced by the creative
writers? Please illumine.
RKS: The editors of the
magazines walk a razor’s edge in selecting pieces. They have to consider both
the quality of the submission as well as the reputation of the author. But the
surprises lie in the unsolicited works. And each magazine has its unstated
stand, which is governed by the editor’s personal likes and dislikes.
NKA: Tell
something about the other important contemporary poetic voices (except you and Jayanta Mahapatra) from Orissa. Do the poets prefer English as a media of their
poetic output? Or, do they like to write poetry in their native Oriya language?
Please illuminate about the contemporary literary scene in Orissa.
RKS: Besides Jayanta Mahapatra, poets like Bibhu Padhi and Niranjan Mohanty from Orissa are familiar names in the field of Indian English
poetry.
About present Oriya poetry I
can say that it is of high standard. The senior poets like Sachi
Rout-Ray and Ramakant Rath
have shown the path. You might also be aware of the names like Sitakant Mohapatra and J. P. Das, who are also scholars. Not so much known outside Orissa but no less great Oriya poets are Rajendra Kishore Panda and Soubhagya Kumar Mishra who are
emulated by the younger generation of Oriya poets. The young Oriya poets are
more direct, more confident, but none of them have got the kind of popularity
that their predecessors had when they were young.
*The interviewer Dr.Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal is
Senior Lecturer in English at