KJ
In Translation (KJ #71)
Rabindranath
Tagore (1861-1941), the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize, is widely
considered the greatest Bengali poet of all time. He is certainly one
of the finest writers of the world in the past century. Apart from poetry,
Tagore wrote novels, essays, short stories, plays, belles-lettres, travelogues,
humorous sketches, political commentary, creative non-fiction, literary
criticism — almost everything literary. He was also an accomplished
singer, musician and painter. His story “The Wrong Paradise,”
written in 1921, was a harbinger of the post-modern irreal imagination
and one of the earliest instances of absurd fiction in any Asian language.
It is taken from his 1922 collection of microfictions, Lipika
(‘Scribings’).
THE WRONG PARADISE
By Rabindranath Tagore
Translated from Bengali by Srinjay Chakravarti
I. The youth
was absolutely good-for-nothing.
He had nothing to
do, no work at all; yet he was busy all the time.
He would collect
small hollow squares of wood, into which he would pour dollops of mud,
and set little seashells. If you looked at one of these from a distance,
it would appear to be a hazy picture, with perhaps a flock of birds
in its sky; or maybe a blurred field, where cows were grazing; or the
jagged outlines of mountains, with maybe a wild waterfall here or a
snaking pathway there.
He stoically bore
the endless scorn his family heaped upon him. Sometimes he would pledge
to give up his eccentricities, but his eccentricities refused to let
go of him.
II. There
are some schoolboys who don’t study the whole year, but somehow
manage to pass their final exams. Something of this sort happened to
him.
He wasted his entire
youth doing nothing useful, but when he died, he learnt that he had
been allowed to go to heaven.
Still, his haplessness
didn’t leave him alone even on his way to paradise. The empyreal
messengers made a mistake, and delivered him to the heaven of the diligent.
In this heaven there
is everything anyone could wish for, except leisure.
Here the men always
exclaim, “Where’s the time to stand and stare?” The
women tell each other, “See you later, there’s lots of work
still left to do.” Everyone here says, “Time is invaluable.”
Nobody here says,
“Time is valueless.” “I just can’t cope anymore!”
rues anybody and everybody, and all revel in this lament. “I’m
tired of working myself to the bone!”: this complaint is the anthem
here.
Now, this new youth
couldn’t find any place where he could fit in. If he tried wandering
on the streets, he found he was blocking the rapid progress of some
extraordinarily busy people. If he spread out his blanket on a field
to try and rest for a while, someone would come and tell him that it
had already been tilled, and the seeds sown; he would ruin the harvest.
He would be evicted from wherever he settled down, and would always
find that he had to shift someplace else. There was no space for the
indolent here.
III.
An extremely busy girl came to the well-spring every day to fetch water.
When she walked down
the road, her anklets sang like the rapid notes strummed on a sitar.
Just before leaving
home on this day, she had swiftly tied her restless tresses into a bun.
Yet, a few adventurous strands were drifting down her forehead to peep
into her black irises.
The jobless youth
of the wrong paradise had been standing by the road, next to the tinkling
waterfall, still and silent like a dark tree.
The pretty, doe-eyed
girl felt pity for him, much the way a princess feels pity for a beggar
when she sees him standing outside her palace window.
“I say, don’t
you have any work?”
The youth replied
with a sigh, “Where is the time to do any work?”
The girl didn’t
understand what he was saying. She asked, “Do you want some work
from me?”
“That’s
exactly why I’m standing here.”
Now she was pleased.
“What task shall I give you?”
“These earthen
pitchers which you take with you for fetching water — if you could
please give me one of them —”
“What will
you do with these pots? Fill them with water?”
“No, I shall
paint pictures on them.”
The girl got annoyed,
and said, “I don’t have time, I’ll have to go now.”
But how can a person
who always works hard ever deal with the purposeless idler? Every day
they met at the waterfall, and every day he said the same thing: “Give
me one of your pitchers, I’ll paint on it.”
She gave in at last, and surrendered to him one of her earthen pots.
He took it immediately
and began to draw lines and striae, whorls and streaks, in all sorts
of colors, and shapes, and designs.
When he was finished,
the girl picked up the jug, and turned it round and round. Then she
frowned, and asked, “But what does this mean?”
The layabout replied,
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
The girl went home
with the vessel. Carefully hiding it from her family, she examined it
in different kinds of light, moving it this way and that, rotating it,
revolving it. At night, she would get up from bed now and then, light
her lamp, and look at those pictures.
In all her years
this was the first time she had seen something that was quite meaningless.
The next day when
she came to the well-head, it seemed as though a pause had crept into
the celerity of her footsteps. It was as if her feet, while moving,
were thinking of something, distracted by something — but what
exactly was it? It was something that made no sense.
That day, our idler was again standing by the wayside.
The girl asked, “What
do you want?”
He replied, “I
want some work from you.”
“What job can
I give you?”
“If you agree,
I will tie colored threads together to prepare ribbons for braiding
your hair.”
“How will that
help? What will happen then?”
“Nothing will
happen.”
Yet, many ribbons
were knotted, with many strings of many weaves and many colors. Now
she sat with her mirror in hand, lingering for a long time over the
process of braiding her tresses. The hours rolled by, and tasks remained
unfinished. A great deal of time was wasted.
IV.
Within a short while, large gaps began to appear in all the work of
the paradise of the sedulous. Those gaps were filled with tears and
songs.
The chieftains of
that heaven got rather worried. They held a meeting. They said, “Nothing
of this sort has ever happened in the history of this place.”
The archangel who
had brought in the shiftless youth came and admitted that he alone was
at fault. “I have brought the wrong man to the wrong paradise.”
The idler was brought
to the conference. When everyone saw his multi-colored turban and cummerbund,
they realized at once what a terrible mistake had been made.
The oldest chieftain
told him, “You’ll have to return to earth.”
The youth looked
rather relieved. He picked up his palette and brushes, packed up his
colors, and said with evident delight, “Ah! now that’s much
better.”
But the girl, too,
came forward and said, “I’ll go with him.”
The venerable old
chieftain was at a loss — it was clear he was quite distracted.
For this was the first time he had seen something that made no sense
at all.
* * *
Translator:
Srinjay Chakravarti, 35, is a journalist, economist, writer and translator
based in Salt Lake City, Calcutta, India. He was educated at universities
in Calcutta and New Delhi. Chakravarti’s poetry, prose and translations
have appeared in The
Continental Review and numerous publications worldwide.
His journalistic columns include essays and articles on economics, politics,
physics and literature. Chakravarti’s first book of poems, Occam’s
Razor (Writers Workshop, Calcutta: 1994), received the 1995 Salt
Literary Award. He also won one of the top prizes in the 2007 Dorothy
Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Poetry Competition for his poem “Ikebana
of the Blind”.
(Reading on YouTube, here).
Illustrator:
Amane Kaneko, whose images have graced a number of KJ articles, grew
up in many different countries, including India, England, Japan, Sri
Lanka, and Hong Kong. He graduated from Parsons School of Design, New
York with a B.F.A in Communication Design. amanekaneko.com
Copyright
held by the author
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