The following poem has been translated and transcreated from the eminent poet, Mohan Rana’s poem, “Kaal Chakra” (“The Wheel of Time”)
The Speechless Revolution
Wandering the labyrinth, before a mirror,
I recognize myself—as I drown
Like a whirlpool in my own reflection.
Time absconds as a scalded bat out of hell:
Even more fleetingly, the farther it recedes.
Milestones awaiting terminals shuffle names
Of old runways and their gliders
On squeamishly evolving cartographies.
There, I stand, behind an upturned window blind,
Forgetting some mildewed title I’d scribbled:
Future, past, and present—and then present, future, and past.
And lives are ceaselessly born, unnamed and unremarked,
In the dark cosmic womb, off the smithereens of stardust.
A Note on this Series
This series of transcreations from Mohan Rana’s poetry is an effort to capture the transitionality of ephemeral human experiences from one to another vehicle. As Mohan, the poet, himself tells me, privately, “Poetry creates its own spaces, discovers its own blanks, and fills them in of its own accord.” A poet who has written for several decades, Mohan believes that his acts of poetry are themselves “transcreations.” What he means is that even a poet cannot be wholly faithful to the para or the vaak, the preternatural spirit that speaks through human voices in the form of poetry. In this light, these offerings are not intended to convey a word-to-word transmission of Mohan Rana’s poetry from Hindi to English or perhaps not even the essence from one to another but are, rather, endeavours to capture the fleeting overlaps between human experiences. Even to call them transcreations might be somewhat erroneous. These lines are penned in the hope that the reader might be able to gauge the idea that we are merely vessels of an invisible entity. This series, therefore, does not aim to capture the mysterious and mystical truths concealed in the poetic utterances of one person writing from Bath, United Kingdom, by another stationed in New Delhi, India; it is merely a collection of representations of human experiences.
Original Poem in Hindi
काल चक्र
भूल भुलैया में घूमता आईने में पहचान लिए
ख़ुद ही हो गया लापता वहाँ
अपने ही बिम्ब में,
बीत जाता है समय बड़ी जल्दी
जितना दूर उतना ही क्षणिक हो जाता है
राह देखते हुए मील के पत्थर बदलते
रास्तों के नाम
नक़्शों में जगह
वहाँ अपनी एक खिड़की उठाए देखता
लिख कर भी उस किताब का नाम मैं याद नहीं कर पाता
कल आज कल फिर कल आज कल
लोग तो निरंतर जन्म ले रहे हैं अनाम
ब्रह्माण्ड के अँधेरे में एक तारे की रोशनी में
Photograph Courtesy: Jan Van Bizar, Pixabay.
About Mohan Rana
Mohan Rana, the eminent Indian poet of Hindi, was born in Delhi, and lives in Bath, in Britain. His most recent collection of poetry is Ekant Mein Roshandaan (Skylight in Solitude). He has published ten poetry collections and several of his poems have been commissioned for translation by the Arts Council England, among others. His writings have also been translated into several European languages.
Arup K. Chatterjee 