A VAGRANT MIRROR
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A VAGRANT MIRROR Satyapal Anand is as much India-born as he is a Brit or an American for he has taught, at the university level, a multi-disciplinary subject like Comparative Literature that required him to know not only Eastern languages, particularly Hindi, Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian, but also a working knowledge of Greek and modern European languages. His poetry shows his expertise in these languages and their literature almost at every step. If the present reviewer is asked to encapsulate the main concerns of Anand’s poetry in one sentence, she might say that he is a poet who cannot escape the pressure of the present for he is in it and of it, and the best he has done is to relate the immediate present to the living past and also – because his vision is unfaltering and clear – to a future that is already fast turning into present. This said, one might look at some of the poems included in this volume. The poem The Best is yet to be is beholden to Browning for its title and topic, but it is something far fresher and benignly better than the great Victorian’s poem. A silent poetic monologue, the speech vocalizes itself in the mind of the middle-aged husband who thinks of his wife. A time has come/ When cotton buds have started blooming / In her black tresses Her hair is getting bedecked/ With strands of sliver. This said, the husband muses about other features that have registered the vagaries of life’s ever-changing weather to wear them out. We grow old, we grow old is an echo of Browning. Growing old is not a sudden happening; it is a slow process. We count the falling hairs, fingering the deepening wrinkles, casting the plus and minuses of the passing age. So does the husband in Anand’s poem, but then he muses I wish I could tell her / This mortal body, O dear, is but a transient truth / The soul, that’s our real self, is eternal / Look, the roses of our yesteryears are still here/ They bloom as fragrant as ever./ Let’s then, my dear, hold hands/ And venture ahead /For the best is yet to be. It is not spirituality all the time that we come across in Anand’s poems. Many poems use the modernist techniques of allusiveness, wayward metaphors - even facetiousness to communicate his sense of nausea and disgust at the modern sights and scenes. The first poem of this book The Prodigal son will be back is relentless in its tirade against country of his birth, India. Anand’s poem does evoke memories but these are more fiendish than fond. He castigates India in a way perhaps no other poet would has done in the history of Indo-Anglian poetry. Here are a few excerpts from this poem. The opening itself is a challenge and a threat. Suddenly, past the midnight hour / Yes, I will come upon you / And you will shrink from me / Holding up frail arms vainly to fend me off/ But I shall come unassailable / I will beat down your pinnacles of falsehood /And crumple them into minute reluctant dust /A harsh clime, a fallow famine-stricken land / That never let me blossom forth / This is strong language indeed. There is no splitting of phrases so much in vogue in modern poetry, but the endless reiteration of hurt, such disillusion, such cynicism, about no one else but one’s own motherland has been unheard of before in the world poetry. Against with the backdrop of this ‘loud’ poem, we can see poems, soft and subdued in tone and tenor, caressing and comfort-giving even in their tear-smeared sorrow. In some it is the rich photographic background that heightens the impact; in others there is suffering ordained yet unqualified. In such poems, there is no vagueness of thought or an absolute faith in the mystical or the blind reliance on the heart. In the poem I am about to discuss, there is much innovative audacity in the expression, and the staccato formations and sudden but subdued twists and turns of phrase shock the reader. The scene is placed in Heathrow’s hubbub to identify a well-known locale. The two of them sitting in the lounge / Waiting to go their separate ways / Taking a turn of no return / Never ever to meet again, here or anywhere. / She was one / I was the other. The locale is now fixed. The two characters are identified. They are the ‘she’ and the ‘I’ of the poem. The purpose of the ‘dialogue’ has been alluded to. They are there to part, never ever to meet again. Then occurs a group of lines that make this poem a uniquely condensed and superbly abridged version of the amplitude that we expect. “Did you say something?” / “No, I didn’t, but I do sometimes think / How lovely is the knot the two tie together, / The knot of love!” / “When it comes loose and is undone / Perhaps, there is, but nothing happens. / The sweet song of summer / Lapses into the sad keening of winter.” And then the punch line, with words, deep and cold and long, come forth to seal the poem. In Urdu poetry, as his readers and critics know, Anand’s celebrated method is either a poetic monologue or a dialogue. More often than not, the dialogue is between a human character and a conceptual personification or an object or scene of nature. In one such poem with the innocuous sounding title The Halted Man, a wayfarer, walks past a man who is languishing on the wayside and hails him. They talk to each other. A journey, a voyage or a pilgrimage is a universal symbol of the passage of life; in this case it is no different. The wayfarer is tired, but he is still walking fast, when he is hailed by the man on the roadside. The wayside halted man asked / “Where are you going?” / The one who was walking fast/ Slowed his pace a bit but kept on walking / “I don’t know friend. I’m just walking.. But, my friend, / Why are you sitting on the wayside? / The halted man looked down where his feet should have been. / The one who was walking fast also saw / The halted man was an amputee. Well, this is the poem in its entirety. Short, intense, almost shockingly brutal, it leaves one mesmerized. Why does one stop without reaching one’s desired end? Not because one likes it, but because one’s feet no longer can carry him. Being an amputee might have certain other shades of meaning but the basic import of the fact of one having lost one’s feet remains. Trafford publishing House should be congratulated for bringing this rare feast of poetry to the American literary cuisine. - Caroline Greene
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About the Book
Satyapal Anand’s poetry is cerebral rather than emotional. It reveals a many splendored splash of color and sound. His poems reveal the essential mythopoeic self present in the poet himself, as in all humanity. Again, his personae are all inside his poems. “Here” and “now” or “there” and “beyond” combine and create word collages. By authenticating the effects of the vision and perceptions underlying them, his images give us new ways of seeing the world. There is a kind of double vision involved in it. His is the imagist’s faculty for seeing a thing at once precisely for itself and, at the same time, as part of a larger phenomenon. Many of his poems are dramatic monologues. In these the speaker does not speak in a vacuum. When he speaks or acts, it reflects the time, place, thought, social conventions, and general circumstances; but it also impinges upon political, philosophical, and religious shades of meaning that transgress the immediacy of the situation. Caroline Greene says that nothing extraordinary has happened in American poetry in the past half a century, and if an Urdu poet of Satyapal Anand’s stature chooses to bring his treasure house to the English-speaking word, it is likely to change the entire scenario here. It is precisely because the poet recovers the extracultural, historic-mythological ground of humanity as a whole that American poets have lost in “localizing” their poetry.
About the Author
He is an established poet in Urdu. Having published more than fifteen poetry books in half a century or more, he is now regarded as one of the chosen few in modern Urdu poetry. A professor of comparative literature, he has published poetry, fiction, and criticism in four languages, including English.