I don’t expect writing to be easy in any language
If it was all that easy I’d probably have stopped writing long ago.

THE heart stops as one reads these lines in The Boatride and Other Poems (2009), a collection of published and unpublished writings, both in the English original and translated from Marathi, by Arun Kolatkar himself (1931-2004). The poems are brought together posthumously in a single, lovingly edited (by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra) and fastidiously produced volume by Kolatkar’s long-time publisher, Ashok Shahane, for Pras Prakashan. In a literary land scape rent by squabbles about which kind of Indian writing is superior, that in the regional languages or that in the English language, Kolatkar’s kaleidoscopic musings in two languages signal genuine quandaries of representation that go beyond the polemical.

A sporadic art school attendee and one-time advertising professional (he was a partner for three years in Design Studio, an advertisement agency), Kolatkar won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1977 for Jejuri, a celebrated clutch of secular poems in a fragmented modernist vein about the popular pilgrimage site in Maharashtra. This more recent collection, The Boatride and Other Poems, is a five-part showcase of Kolatkar’s earlier and later oeuvre plus three appendices of less-known works and unfinished jottings. It offers glinting snapshots of urban and rural life; bluesy odes to alcohol harking back to the poet’s own drinking days and his growing interest in pop/rock music in the 1960s; translations of Namdeo, Janabai, Muktabai, Eknath, and Kolatkar’s beloved Tukaram; the title poem written in 1963 and set off here in a separate section; and meditations on the nature and purpose of writing.

The Boatride and Other Poems represents Kolatkar’s persistent interest in making the everyday – the sordid and the subterranean – the subject of poetry. It is by no means a definitive anthology of Kolatkar’s work, it does not claim to be one. But the collection does spur interest in Kolatkar’s other poems. It represents “all the decades of Kolatkar’s writing barring the last” and is also the first book to bring together his English and Marathi writings (in English translation).

Kolatkar avoided established literary circuits, preferring to skulk in the corners of Mumbai streets and cafes, contributing sporadically to literary journals in Marathi and English and producing the occasional volume of poetry. He sidestepped the rat race, lived in a one-room flat with his wife in Mumbai, and was a regular at the now-defunct Wayside Inn in the Kala Ghoda area, where he watched the world wag past, wrote, doodled, and held weekly conversations with friends – Dilip Chitre, Adil Jussawalla, Shahane, Mehrotra, Arun Khopkar and Kiran Nagarkar, among others. Kala Ghoda Poems (2004) are a testament to Kolatkar’s Wayside Inn days. They showcase the poet’s eye for detail and his capacity to reflect in microcosm the rapidly burgeoning invisible economies criss-crossing the global city.

If writing was not easy for Kolatkar, it almost seems he wrote because he had to, in whatever language bubbled to the surface. Every line marks a wrenching resoluteness of vision and craft, and a precise recording of the entire gamut of his experience ranging from the mundane to the mystical. In the deeply felt and meticulously arranged introduction, Mehrotra explains how Kolatkar achieved this vision through research, observation, doodling and drafting. He kept vigil at local restaurants, walked through the city and the region, and read copiously on subjects ranging from Kannagi to Christ. Mehrotra lists 28 references – including books, translations and a slew of newspaper reports – that Kolatkar read in preparation for each poem included in the Marathi collection Bhijki Vahi (Tear-stained Notebook), readings that may well “outline a course in world literature”. Enfolding scholarly insights in the personal – Walter Benjamin and James Joyce are invoked as is the image of the Parisian flâneur – Mehrotra describes Kolatkar’s last days, when he was terminally ill with stomach cancer, sensitively and without sentimentality.

In the Kala Ghoda poems, Kolatkar provides unforgettable pen portraits of the one-eyed ogress, the idli vendor, the street sweeper (“a Meera before her Lord”), and so on, never exoticising his subjects for a foreign readership. “Enchanted by the ordinary, Kolatkar made the ordinary enchanting,” writes Mehrotra. This curiosity and capacity for enchantment are palpable in The Hag, first published in 1965 and reprinted in section I (Poems in English 1953-1967) of The Boatride:

The hag is stone deaf: you wouldn’t even guess.

The window has a curtain. It’s florid. It’s grimy.

Entrenched behind it she devours oranges

In self defence. She likes them baggy. She paws.

She claws. An orange isn’t peeled. It’s torn. Each

fruit a vapid debacle. An invalid pose

in tattered filigree.

An unwavering gaze and staccato stacking of detail heighten the pathos and power of the poem. The reader is inescapably complicit in its gaze. Kolatkar does not speak for the hag. He speaks of the character in visceral terms and in poetry, forcing us not to look away, to get under her skin.

Images of the hungry hag and the drunken beggar in Kolatkar’s verse can jolt even jaded city-dwellers desensitised to the predicament of the urban poor. But Kolatkar’s poetic vision militates against their use as hackneyed symbols of subaltern ruin.

One usual suspect of the Indian literary canon, Irani Restaurant Bombay, is sandwiched between such gems as Suicide of Rama, Dreaming of Snakes and Today I feel I do not belong in the first section. The introduction, notes, and Appendix II provide further revelations – that the poem was first published in Marathi under the title Irani and that Kolatkar added a stanza to the English version. “Whenever I have written a version in both languages, I like to think of them as two original poems in two different languages rather than one a translation of the other.” Other sidelights are revealed in the notes: Make Way Poet is among five poems first published in An Anthology of Marathi Poetry (1967) that were accompanied by the phrase “translated by the poet”, for which no Marathi originals exist.

The collection’s title poem is set against the seashore and glances at colonial history even as it describes a motley crew of passengers about to begin their journey. A grandfather warns a grandson about the perils of falling in the water:

the child cogitates

while the eyes of his contemporaries

are already riveted

proudly to the portuguese ship they learn

the indians captured

The poem reflects Kolatkar’s abiding interest in lower-case histories, the small details that make up the lives of individuals who have since vanished in obscurity, and the ways in which these personal narratives rub against broader social matrices.

GOWRI RAMNARAYAN

Arun Kolatkar (1931-2004). Every line of his marks a wrenching resoluteness of vision and craft.

Together, the poems in The Boatride highlight Kolatkar’s syncretic, simultaneous negotiation of multiple languages and dialects – Marathi, street Hindi, English – in poetry, a process he describes as schizophrenic, clandestine, carnal, “a kind of psychological double bookkeeping”. Code-switching from one language to the next is neither a seamless process nor a matter of simple or conscious preference.

Translating a poem is like making love / having an affair

Making love to a poem / with the body of another language

Dark metaphors of sex, deception and incest defamiliarise the process of translation highlighting both the intimacy and power play inherent in the act. Kolatkar wonders, too, about the potential reach of his poetry, a reflection that leads quickly back to the bilingual poet’s split self:

Whether half my work will always remain invisible

like the other side of the moon

whether a reader in one language will have to be content

with the side facing him

Whether my work is 2 bodies of work in spite of their common origin

Which have developed independently of each other

each with its separate history

ecology life forms

In Appendix III, Kolatkar boasts a kinship with Tukaram who “has left me everything / everything he ever wrote”. And yet, it has been said that Kolatkar’s own verse includes everything in bhakti but bhakti itself. Asked whether he believed in God, the poet declared, “I know Tukaram. And Tukaram knows God.” Like A.K. Ramanujan (someone he profoundly admired, we find out), Kolatkar shuttles between the mythic and the modern, repeatedly traversing the contradictions and contiguities between the two. His Tukaram renditions in English, according to Chaudhuri, “were as much translation as occasionally tough-guy reworkings”.

A poem like Kolatkar’s Teeth, shot through with the language of bhakti, is startlingly modern in its evocations. In Kolatkar’s hands, the anguished yearning of the medieval poet becomes existential angst.

Lord I am revealed

How my teeth gleam

My sides ache. My forehead

Yawns. I have unlocked

Like a monstrous

Pomegranate. Do not

Touch me God do not

Come near me, for all

Is grist to my grinding.

The second stanza unfurls a surreal nightmare only hinted at in the first, in which body parts morph, revealing a diabolical, grasping will of their own. “My nose crawls over me/ Like a prehistoric lizard comes back to life.” The poem’s evolution into this avatar of spine-chilling distortion is also seen in Crabs (reprinted in the Marathi section of The Boatride). Such horrific turns redolent of Ted Hughes also appear elsewhere in Kolatkar, for instance, in Sarpa Satra (Snake Sacrifice) of 2004, a tale of genocide and environmental depredation based on a frame story from the Mahabharata.

The dance with bhakti was to last through Kolatkar’s writing life, as was his obsession with the Blues. Both were fundamental to his poetic practice. Mehrotra notes: “One belongs to the secular world, the other addresses itself to God …. Each draws its images from a common pool, each limits itself to a small number of themes that it keeps returning to, and each speaks in the idiom of the street.” The Blues lyrics (in the third section, “Words for Music”) and bhakti translations included here are carnivalesque, bawdy, celebrating the lives of drunks, bums and homeless drifters. The language of money runs through both, as does the language of asceticism. In Door to Door Blues, a bum pleads:

i was wondering if you’d let me stay the night

i haven’t eaten all day i could do with a bite

…i won’t be trouble i’m used to sleeping on the floor

Please don’t bother i don’t want a blanket don’t want a pillow

In Tukaram’s We are the Enduring Bums, a communal voice, with which both poet and translator seem to identify, celebrates the homeless life:

We are the enduring bums

Thieves regard us with consternation.

When we go and beg

Dogs manage our households

A song lyric like Been Working on this Statue could easily become a musical classic sung by a Bob Dylan or an Elvis Costello, but even more exciting would be to hear Tuka’s We are the Enduring Bums, Kolatkar’s Taxi Song, Cold Stone Sober, or Nobody in Tom Waits’ curmudgeonly growl. Tape Me Drunk or A Fraction of a Second Before the Action Starts would be transformed by techno-experiment into eerie, pulsating soundscapes of urban decrepitude by bands such as the Gorillaz, Massive Attack, or Portishead. Closer home, a 2006 version of The Left Half in the play Dark Horse: Walking Down Kolatkar’s Lane incorporated Marathi and English versions of the poem, the Marathi verses sung live in ragas by Carnatic vocalist Savitha Narasimhan. The English translation was performed by actors playing Rakhmai and the pilgrim in the light of a single camphor blaze suggesting the temple sanctum at Pandharpur. The ringing power and resonance of Kolatkar’s verse brought tears to many viewers’ eyes.

Such appropriations of Kolatkar’s poems could give rise to the fears expressed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) about a monolithic culture industry that “impresses the same stamp on everything”. The ironing out of the idiosyncratic would have been certain death in Kolatkar’s case, and a growing distaste for the mainstream is perhaps why he renounced advertising and was so sceptical of prize culture and fame.

awards are also like silver nails in the poet’s coffin

they are a nice way of burying poets

who seem to have been around for far too long

instead of dying early

as all good poets should

on the other hand

a poet is under no obligation

to stop writing

just because he is buried

Gloomy prognostications might ring true when we consider the future of art in the cosmopolis, but not when we read a Neruda or a Kolatkar. Faithful servitors of the word, they move to no other drummer or tune, moving us out of habitual complacency for a fraction of a second before the action starts.