Asian Poetry samples for print out.
Japan: Sumitaku Kenshin (1961-1987, Japan; modern haiku poet, died young, of leukemia, left 281 haikus about his final days.)In the nightThe traumatic historical event called "Partition" refers to the British dividing up the Indian subcontinent at the end of the Raj into Pakistan and India; the partition came about rather abruptly and arbitrarily, and it caused enormous panic on the Hindu and Muslim populations; a conservative estimate of the death-toll from the violence that followed is one million; it caused massive displacement; the distrust between Muslims and Indians this event created continues to this day, relentlessly exploited by politicians, not only in India and Pakistan, but also by United States and other world powers, who benefit from the escalating arms race. As you read through these poems, try to pick up the subtleties of this national Caesarian operation. An ironic detail you might want to remember about the Partition is that the present President of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf (b. 1943) was born in India, in New Delhi, whereas India's Prime Minister Manmohan Sigh (b. 1932) was born in a city which is now in Pakistan. A kind of Berlin Wall still separates families in an absurd way. If you examine the literature and film produced after Independence, you will see there are all, in some way, charged with the grieving memory of this trauma. (A Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh is an accessible novel in English. Deepa Mehta’ film Earth (1988; also check out her, Fire, a major film on the lesbian theme.)
suspended are the drip
and the white moonMy window faces
a faraway mountain
The cemetry is there.Having cried my heart out
a contended look
on my tearful faceOut of the washbowl
I scoop up
my distorted faceIn a dream
the apron of my sister
attending at my bedsideA sake cup
full to the brim
with my happy faceMy life
like soda pop
gone flatHaiku by Kaneko Tota (born 1919: Japan)
Above the crumbled bricks
a butterfly, its heart attached
here to the slumsFactory dismissing the workers--
it vomits cloudy autumn water
into the canalOn the hill, a withered farm:
in the valley, no cogitation
Clear water is allAfter a heated argument
I go out into the street
and become a motorcycle.Pakistan: Urdu. Mustafa Zaidi (1930-70)
Born in an aristocratic family in India, he went to Pakistan after Partition and joined its foreign service. After General Yahya Khan's military coup, he was purged from his position and he killed himself, along with Shahnaz, his mistress.Shahnaz IIIIndia: Bengali. Poems by Rabindranath Tagore
Certify from my wounds, from my ashes
That someone was the breath of the messiah, a face of fireThe afterworld is in doubt, the mention of God is in doubt
Yet, in that mind, someone was belief and wisdomThe phone is silent and the belt at the gate soundless
As if someone never was in this cityWas it a circle of souls or your burning lips?
Was it a reality or a notion that someone was here?Now there is my pledge and loneliness
In spite of my denial, someone was my friendPoets, singers, sculptors, look
Meet her then say: someone was beautiful.Shahnaz IV
Destroy yourselves, curtail your lives
Mourn the maddened heart as you wishThis fear is not of the desert or prison
Time cannot give the power of the cureThe analogy of the lover's vow will come
Only in the correspondence of friends torn apartOnce ruined, homes are not rebuilt
Such wounds do not heal.Translated by Laurel Steele
India: Urdu: Punishment for Dreaming: Elegy for Mustafa Zaidi
by Salam Machhli-ShahriTegh, you became Mastafa Zaidi in Lahore,
Yet you were the same as you were in Allahabad.
Flowers longed for and came to your lips
That wild flame was still in your heart
Which long ago had burned for a woman.
People say you thought of dying
In the past as a sensual jest.
You thought of turning your back on life,
The flight that is wine and song and love.
But flight is nothing but fog:
The body's rainbow, the wine in the cup and goblet
Are nothing but a leaping flame.
Two abandoned children and in your body the poison of Shahnaz.
Perhaps your spirit spirit isn't calm even in the hereafter.
You were always starved for love.
Maybe you cannot understand all this.
Well, death has come in the past like this.
We have always been punished for our dreams.
Translated by Laurel Steele
The crucial 20th century literary figure from India. (Begali language). Won the Nobel Prize in 1913 for Gitanjali. As important as Gandhi in India's struggle for independence from Britain. His novels, plays and short stories captured the modern cultural ambitions of an India struggling with its ancient heritage. The movies based on his novels (Devi, Home and the World) illustrate aspects of this struggle.Selections from Tagore's Gitanjali
Little Flute
Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail
vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.
This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales,
and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.
At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in
joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.
Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.
Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.Purity
Life of my life, I shall ever try to keep my body pure, knowing
that thy living touch is upon all my limbs.
I shall ever try to keep all untruths out from my thoughts, knowing
that thou art that truth which has kindled the light of reason in my mind.
I shall ever try to drive all evils away from my heart and keep my
love in flower, knowing that thou hast thy seat in the inmost shrine of my heart.
And it shall be my endeavour to reveal thee in my actions, knowing it
is thy power gives me strength to act.Leave This
Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!
Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a
temple with doors all shut?
Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!
He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground
and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.
He is with them in sun and in shower,
and his garment is covered with dust.
Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!Where The Mind is Without Fear
35.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action-
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.Deliverance?
Where is this deliverance to be found?
Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation;
he is bound with us all for ever.
Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense!
What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained?
Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.final verse in Gitanjali
103.
In one salutation to thee, my God, let all my senses spread out and touch this world at thy feet.
Like a rain-cloud of July hung low with its burden of unshed showers let all my mind bend down
at thy door in one salutation to thee. Let all my songs gather together their diverse strains into a
single current and flow to a sea of silence in one salutation to thee.
Like a flock of homesick cranes flying night and day back to their mountain nests let all my life
take its voyage to its eternal home in one salutation to thee.FIREFLIES
I touch God in my song
as the hill touches the far-away sea
with its waterfall.
The butterfly counts not months but moments,
and has time enough.
Let my love, like sunlight, surround you
and yet give you illumined freedom.
Love remains a secret even when spoken,
for only a lover truly knows that he is loved.
Emancipation from the bondage of the soil
is no freedom for the tree.
In love i pay my endless debt to thee
for what thou art.I'm Leaving You Now, Shyama*
Rabindranath Tagore
(consider this as a bhakti poem addressed to Kali (Shyama.)Shyama, I'm leaving you now.
I was only tricked into calling you "Mother."
You are the stone-hearted daughter
of the stony mountain god.
By your magic, you made me
hard-hearted too - until now.
Today I see the face of my real mother
and melt into tears, Mother!
I'm not beguiled by black anymore,
now that light has charmed me.
You had me deceived,
and now I've deceived you.
I've recovered from your spell,
and I go to the lap of my mother, Mother!(Trans. Sagari Sengupta.)
Bangladesh: Bengali. Things Cheaply Had
by: Taslima Nasrin (She is currently in exile; she was sentenced to death by Islamic fundamentalists)In the market nothing can be had as cheap as women.
If they get a small bottle of alta for their feet
they spend three nights sleepless for sheer joy.
If they get a few bars of soap to scrub their skin
and some scented oil for their hair
they become so submissive that they scoop out
chunks of their flesh
to be sold in the flea market twice a week.
If they get a jewel for their nose
they lick feet for seventy days or so,
a full three and a half months
if it's a single striped sari.Even the mangy cur of the house barks now and then,
and over the mouths of women cheaply had,
there's a lock, a golden lock.Kali
Rukmini Bhaya Nair (English, India)A goddess chews on myth
As other women might on paan
Red juices stain her mouth.Bored by her own powers
Immense and spectral, Kali broods
About Shiva, she is perverse.She will not plead with him
Nor reveal Ganesha’s birth
She will not ask him home.Shiva loves her, but absences
And apsaras are natural to him
No god is hampered by his sins.Kali desires a mortal, whose day
Begins with her, ends at nightfall
In her arms, a man who will dieWithout her, whose love is fallible
But secure, she wants to be held
Like a warm creature, not a fable.Loneliness drives this goddess mad
She is vagrant, her limbs askew
She begs a mate, her hair unmade.Fickle as Shiva, memory deserts her
Chandi or Durga or Parvati, which
Is she, which of her selves weeps here?Even Ganesha, for whom she feels
Only tenderness, excludes her, even he
Seems impatient with her flaws.Where should such a goddess turn?
Kali, mistress of the temporal worlds
Wants bliss defined in human terms.Staid Ganesha knows this wildness
Must be curbed, Shiva, peripatetic
Agrees, and across the wildernessBoth gift Kali a companion eagle, hurt
By no arrow, fed on nothing, it returns
Each night to its eyrie in her heart.India: Her Dream by Indira Sant (born 1914, India)
Her dream, like the dream of a dozen women.
A full plate, deliciously full,
Places to go, things to do, morning and evening.
Neatly ironed clothes. A nicely furnished home.
sometimes a play, sometimes a cocert--with the best seats.
All the happiness in the world on a meager income.
Laughter and teasing. Talk and chatter.
Her dream, like the dream of a dozen other women.But she woke up before the dream began.
And then she never fell asleep again.Translated from the Marathi by Vinay Dharwadker
India: Kamala Das (writes fiction in Malayalam, poetry in English.)
Madness is a country
Just around the corner
Whose shores are never lit
But if you go there
Ferried by despair
The sentries would ask you to strip
At first the clothes, then the flesh
and later of course your bones.
Their only rule is freedom
Why, they even eat bits of your soul
When in hunger,
But when you reach that shore
That unite shore
Do not return, please do not return.SAKUNTALAM (Sakuntala)
K. Satchidanandan (b. 1946; India, Malayalam)
Every lover is cursed
to forget, at least for a while,
his woman: as the river of
amnesia devours his love.Every beloved is cursed
to be forgotten until her secret
is trapped in the net of memory.Every child is cursed
to grow fatherless,
with his hand in the lion’s mouth.India. English and Kashmiri. "Ghazal" by Agha Shahid Ali
for Daniel Hall
I'll do what I must if I'm bold in real time.
A refugee, I'll be parolled in real time.Cool evidence clawed off like shirts of hell-fire?
A former existence untold in real time . . .The one you would choose: were you led then by him?
What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time?Each syllable sucked under waves of our earth--
The funeral love comes to hold in real time!They left him alive so that he could be lonely--
The god of small things is not consoled in real time.Please afterwards empty my pockets of keys--
It's hell in the city of gold in real time.God's angels again are-for Satan-forlorn.
Salvation was bought but sin sold in real time.The throat of the rearview and sliding down it
the Street of Farewell's now unrolled in real time.I heard the incessant dissolving of silk-
I felt my heart growing so old in real time.Her heart must be ash where her body lies burned.
What hope lets your hands rake the cold in real time?Dear Friend, the Belovèd has stolen your words--
Read slowly: the plot will unfold in real time.Gazhal: A popular genre of love poetry in India, Pakistan, and the Middle East. The word means "talk to women" although this “talk” could be addressed “to God” or to any entity; the form originated from the long qasida verses tradition in Arabic; a portion of the qasida known as the tashib evolved into the ghazal and grew independently—this kind of change happened to haiku also—in Iran and spread in India in the 12th century. Now it is equally important as a musical genre. (Check out Ghulam Ali audios on the web for a taste.) With the decline in the feudal society, and of the courtesans who performed ghazals in salons and at aristocratic households, the ghazal migrated to film music. Gazhal contains a series of couplets (shers) woven together by a complicated rhyming structure. The first couplet (matla) establishes the overall form and mood of the poem, and then each couplet that follows is linked to the matla. The last couplet (maqta) usually contains the pen name of the poet. Another requirement is that the first couple must have the same word at the end of the line and that it ought to repeat (radif) at the end of each second line of each couplet. Very hard to translate, but Adrienne Rich and Robert Bly have tried to popularize the form in America.
China: Chinese
Answer by Bei Dao (born 1949, China, lives in the USA)
The scoundrel carries his baseness around like an ID card.
The honest man bears his honor like an epigraph.
Look--the gilded sky is swimming
with undulent reflections of the dead.They say the ice age ended years ago.
Why are there icicles everywhere?
The Cape of Good Hope has already been found.
Why should all those sails contend on the Dead Sea?I came into this world with nothing
but paper, rope, and shadow.
Now, I come to be judged,
and I've nothing to say but this:Listen. I don't believe!
OK. You've trampled
a thousand enemies underfoot. Call me
a thousand and one.
I don't believe the sky is blue.
I don't believe what the thunder says.
I don't beliebe dreams aren't real,
that beyond death there is no reprisal.If the sea should break through the sea-wall,
let its brackish water fill my heart.
If the land should rise from the sea again,
we'll choose again to live in the heights.The earth revolves. A glittering constellation
pricks the vast defenseless sky.
Can you see it there? that ancient ideogram--
the eye of the future gazing back.Translated from the Chinese by Donald Finkel with Chen Xueliang
"All"
by Bei DaoAll is fated,
All cloudy,All an endless beginning,
All a search for what vanishes,All joys grave,
All griefs tearless,Every speech a repetition,
Every meeting a first encounter,All love buried in the heart,
All history prisoned in a dream,All hope hedged with doubt,
All faith drowned in lamentation.Every explosion heralds an instant of stillness,
Every death reverberates forever.Translated from the Chinese by Donald Finkel with Chen Xueliang
"Also All" by Shu Ting (b. 1952; she was sent to the countryside for 'education" during the Cultural Revolution. She has chosen to remain in China.)
In answer to Bei Dao’s “All.”
Not all trees are felled by storms.
Not every seed finds barren soil.
Not all the wings of dream are broken,
Nor is all affection doomed
To wither in a desolate heart.No, not all is as you say.
Not all flames consume themselves,
shedding no light on other lives.
Not all stars announce the night
And never dawn. Not every song
Will drift every ear and heart.No, not all is as you say.
Not every cry for help is silenced,
Nor every loss beyond recall.
Not every chasm spells disaster.
Not only the weak will be brought to their knees,
Nor every soul be trodden under.It won’t all end in tears and blood.
Today is heavy with tomorrow—
The future was planted yesterday.
Hope is a burden all of us shoulder
Though we might stumble under the load.