Pallav
Ranjan, appreciated for his translation of Devkota’s poetry, presents
ten of his own poems in the collection Among
Strangers. The cover itself invites contemplation: a young man,
face and features completely blurred by a moving camera, seems to
move in two directions against a background of brush and bushes.
Not only is he among strangers in a world where the most familiar,
the most stable realities reveal their impermanence, but he himself
is not the same as he was. Among Strangers, he is continually becoming
a stranger to himself. This is the theme revealed both by the cover
and the contents.
The
title of the first poem in the collection “Godavari” gives the reader
the setting for the collection. Godavari means many things to many
Nepalese; for Ranjan it means childhood, tears, friends, loneliness,
classrooms, long nights in hostel bedrooms, encounters with “white
priests” (especially Fr. Thomas Downing), a kaleidoscope of deep
impressions associated with St. Xavier’s, the Jesuit boarding school
located there. All the poems in this single setting are variations
on a single theme of alienation from oneself and one’s surroundings.
In this way, Ranjan has created a poem cycle in a time-honored tradition
among professional poets.
Before
turning to the unquestionable merits of Ranjan’s poetry, it may
be helpful to point out two defects that run through the series.
Once these are out of the way, the good features will stand out
more clearly.
Firstly
Ranjan’s use of allusion, a standard poetic device, strikes me as
overdone and needlessly obscure. Only former students and teachers
of Godavari School (and not all of them perhaps) will catch the
point of “where we floated as angels appeared in Gretel’s dreams”
(poem 2, untitled). Or “run for the beans” (from “At the Villages”).
Or, after a rather pedestrian description of “the green color of
the swimming pool”, there is an obscure (except to the initiate)
reference to “its clear blue and the flaming ring.” If the book
is intended only for old boys of St. Xavier’s it should be stated
clearly. Or is the author writing only for himself?
Secondary,
the poems rather frequently lapse into prose. For example:
Those
that traveled
to
Narayanghat
And
waited for their
plane
tickets
Ranjan
has arranged the above lines into verse form but this cannot disguise
their prosiness.
As
a corrolary to this weakness, and perhaps a partial corrective,
Ranjan needs to take more seriously the very basic craft of determining
line breaks. He is not alone among modern poets in seeming to ignore
the way line breaks affect rhythm and emotional stressing. Denise
Levertov in her 1979 essay “On the Function of the Line” laments
that many gifted poets use the line break in a very haphazard way.
She then says, “Yet there is at our disposal no tool of the poetic
craft more important, none that yields more subtle and precise effects,
than the line break if it is properly understood.” This is a skill
which Ranjan certainly can acquire and apply to his future work.
Despite
these defects there is much to relish in this collection. Ranjan
has a great power to recreate sense impressions. Witness his first
poem “Godavari”. It is visual, tactile, audial all at once. This
poem also reveals his ability to suggest and evoke the pain of the
human condition, using a bare minimum of words:
Melting.
Quickly.
Been
here
and
gone.
White
ice.
Been
here
and
gone.
I
also enjoyed his skilful use of the poetic device of repetition,
especially when combined with alliteration, to emphasize unusual
combinations of words and ideas. The following example from “At
the villages” gives me some of the same enjoyment I receive from
the metaphysical poets.
So
we learned to lean against the
breeze.
We
learned to lean against the dawn.
We
learned to lean against heroes
strange.
We learned to lean against the storm.
Ranjan’s
developing sense of melody and rhythm is another virtue. It enables
him to create lovely lines that haunt the ear, such as these from
“Dancing Devils”:
The
rhododendrons flowered and
hillsides
slept,
White
priests smiled and children wept
Beneath
blue-green mountains as we
were
made
The
deer were barking as our destinies
shaped.
Ranjan
should have stopped with the final poem “Preserver Stone” and its
beautiful concluding lines:
Shaligram.
Shaligram.
Dipped
in purple
with
streaks of red.
Rock
that preserves.
And
what else?
Forgotten.
Unfortunately,
I feel, Ranjan includes an afterword on the last page of Among
Strangers. In editorial style it contains some of the deepest
emotions in the book. But after enjoying in varying degrees the
more muted emotion and striking imagery of his poems I was ill prepared
for the strongly condemnatory tone of his prose. It seemed to me
out of place to make an issue of the changing educational goals
at St. Xavier’s. To make matters worse he uses the plural form “we”
and “many of us” and “most of us”, like all generalizations this
alienates and distracts me from whatever point he wants to make.
I think, “By what right does he speak for others? Why doesn’t he
speak for himself?”
But
taken as a whole, Ranjan’s collection Among
Strangers has genuine value. Besides providing much enjoyment
his poems provoke important questions for himself and readers/listeners.
Who is a stranger? Who are these strangers we are among? Why are
they strangers to us? Or are we strangers to them? What keeps us
all apart? |