Geet Chaturvedi
trans. by Anita Gopalan
THREE POEMS
MUSEUM OF KEYS
So we seek the keys of locks that secure our things.
The misfortune of unclaimed keys goes unrecorded.
If there is a key, it will have a lock too,
somewhere, lolling in trash,
or submerged in water, or gathering
an old rust.
Our language is a vast museum of keys.
Every letter, every word is a key.
But where are the locks?
When we use language,
we recklessly try to open keys with keys.
This is its inadequacy.
Our helpless dependence.
HEART IS A LOST CONTINENT
the house burned from a blaze of communal hate and I stick to it like soot flake : warm
comforts settle between us : am I a refuge or refugee? from trees, bird feathers fall like leaves
: ills rove the inauspicious streets at night : bad news rises like a water fountain at the
crossing : a muddy pond seizing the mic amplifies itself as an ocean : clutching on to the
story, little runnels of gutter water fall asleep : to escape the cold, rain shakes hands with fire
each of us, a spider busy spinning webs as far as our reach
each night, a dog barking like a madman, tells God our mischiefs
I think about the familiar scenes I read in a history book,
Desolate houses—Destructed splendor—Deserted streets—Women corpselike stretched
horizontal—Men statued vertical—Hunger careening like angry spirits—Silent ruins
supporting nothing—Road trespassing into land borders—The weltered tear—Salty blood
and somewhere: a name to my heart,
A lost continent—
where the ground thudded like heartbeat with aftershocks
from the flows of wind and fluttering poems
comes a rhythmic lull
that brings comfort just like that mother
who, with her weight of poverty,
old clothes and cooking pots,
lulled me in her womb
as she struggled between
nine long platforms to find the right train
dumbstruck by the sounds of an alien language
and an alien city,
meeting words curses swears with her thin brave
silence
my soul is a faraway city I dream of going
to, a city hewed out of a humming
and a lullaby, lit by lanterns of my love
in my room, the dead have settled: dead writers, dead painters, dead musicians : when was
the last I spoke a complete sentence, with syntax and grammar?
in the piggy bank of my
existences so many deaths have
piled that whenever life shakes
me
I hear a rattling sound from inside
A WRITER CANNOT REACH THE PLACES THEY DREAM ABOUT
I enter into the blankness of paper : and like Columbus set out to discover India : Any new
place I reach I embrace it as India : I am a wanderer : People think I am an explorer : In my
books, I can perhaps never reach the places that I dream about.
books, I can perhaps never reach the places that I dream about.
Life is like a librarian who
if you ask for Borges
will coolly hand you Paulo Coelho.
When Gregor Samsa woke one morning, he turned into an insect.
When an insect woke one morning, why didn’t it turn into Samsa?
To wake up is not always to metamorphose.
I’ve seen people setting down their waking in pushcarts to sell.
Flies hover over the waking that lies stark in the open cart.
Those who don’t get sleep will buy
slices of the waking and eat.
You smoke or you don’t,
you fear darkness or you don’t, no matter—
Dear poets,
gargle with fire.
Seek blessing from the tiny little matchbox.
Beauty that God is unable to create,
God leaves it to the poets.
God is incapable of poetry.
A book of poems is a world : open on three sides : imagination memory dream : and closed
on the fourth side : reality : One can neither enter nor leave from there : The reality binds
everything together : or : nothing of imagination memory dream would stay in.
Now I shall exit
the paper of my wanderings.
Should I return like Alexander
who never returned
home or like Gautama
Buddha who returned, yet
not?
You see, this paper is my field.
I give my life on it every day.
Nobody gives a damn.
Poets and farmers.
They are contemporaries.
Geet Chaturvedi is one of the most widely read contemporary Hindi authors. The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the Syed Haidar Raza Fellowship for fiction writing, he was named among Ten Best Young Writers of India by the Indian Express. He won the 2021 Vatayan-UK Literary Award for his contribution to Hindi literature. His works have been translated into twenty-two languages. For more information, visit his website at www.geetchaturvedi.com or follow him on Twitter @GeetChaturvedi.
Anita Gopalan is a translator and stock trader. She is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a fellowship in English literature from the Indian Ministry of Culture. Her translations from Hindi include The Memory of Now (Anomalous Press, 2019) and Simsim (Penguin, 2023) by Geet Chaturvedi. She has been published in AGNI, PEN America, Tupelo Quarterly, World Literature Today, Asymptote, Two Lines, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @anitagopalan