Seeing the visible reality requires eyes, but seeing what lies beyond the visible requires vision. In a collection of poems that has this remarkable quality, I’m Your Poet, Nilim Kumar makes us eagerly turn the pages in anticipation of encountering a magical reality. Each poem takes us through an enchanting and estranging landscape of things, beings, and actions, soaking us in intense emotions and vivid visuals.

This is Kumar’s third collection of poems in English translation, and reading it is at once challenging and exciting. He is not a passive observer of reality; his poems are not personal, moral, or political opinions poetically veiled. They are an exploration of our sensibility as it strains beyond our ego, rationality, fears, normalcy, and the habits of the mind. No wonder the poet says, “I have chosen freedom in my poetic life.”

Heaven and hell, past and present

I’m Your Poet is divided into three sections. The first, with the subtitle “The Garden of Sleep” has poems imbued with a dreamy quality. Here the poet reflects on the nature of poetry and wonders if it could be compared to “a flowing river that goes to sleep under wild flowers”; elsewhere a poet appears as a fallen angel who “journeys from darkness to grievous un-present”; it is a world where “the oranges laugh gleefully like a bevy of young girls”; a world where the sea is ecstatic because a poet walks on it.

Yet, the “train older than history” as it travels from earth to heaven and hell reminds us of the present, of quotidian reality, of the sister who has committed suicide, of the friend killed by a bullet. The second section, subtitled “I’ll Start Loving You from Tomorrow” frequently invokes male and female figures, or “you” and “me” – sometimes even sea, moon, rain, or robot. They enact several scenes of love against varying backdrops.

a male robot
falls in love
with a female robot

they make love
by pressing a button  

they have a button
for kissing

and a button
to forget each other
when they are at work

— 'Robot'

These are love poems of a kind, but very unusually so. The lovers of these poems take human positions in a drama of existence that takes them through passion, sorrow, desire, and hope. The third section is titled “These Two Hands” and opens with a poem alluding to returning
to the womb. With their frequent references to grandmother, father, mother, and the past, the poems no doubt invoke memories of childhood. This is also the section that seems to contain poems using maximum unconscious material.

mother screamed at me
for playing with the dream
at dawn

making a face at mother I left with the dreams
to play with them elsewhere
mother cried

at midday while I was playing
tearing my shirt into pieces, the dreams left
making faces at me

at midday, destitute
I returned to mother 
seeking food

— 'The Dreams'

An illuminating imagination

Nilim Kumar is a poet of luxuriant images, vibrant imagination, unfettered versification, and passionate lyricism. His imagination draws abundantly from the culture and geography of Assam, yet time and again it leaps across time and space. He sees and paints the everyday world and the things in it with concrete detail but touches them with an illuminating imagination. In entering Kumar’s verse world, we enter a surreal landscape not limited by material reality. His sentiments are not strictly attached to everyday relationships, as they often draw from the depths of collective memory, history, and the personal past. His symbolism is not limited by loyalty to traditional sources.

I’m Your Poet is frequently self-referential in so far as there are many metapoems; the figure of the poet is invoked many times; similes and metaphors as well as themes and symbols speak of the poetic process.

A poem is about to die.
Look, how the poem tosses and turns.
The first two lines have collapsed.
The middle stanza has turned into a ball in pain.
Blood drips from every pore of the words.
Some words have dried up like sand.
The paper itself begins to crack as if it will fall to pieces.
The bodies of the words are on fire.
There is smoke everywhere.
And some words are in deep sleep, as if dead;
they have no idea what is going on.
Some words are trying to escape,
but they can’t flee from the paper.
Some hurt themselves on purpose
and lie unconscious in a pool of blood.
The last line is drenched in the shower of blood. 

Who wrote this haunted poem?

— 'A Poem is About to Die'

Pathos is very important to Kumar’s approach to versification. What makes him a great poet is the contemporaneity of the voices of the personas he invents to articulate specific situations of pathos. There is no simple autobiographical speaker in his confessional poems.

Instead, each poem puts forward a distinct voice emanating from a distinct situation – very particular, very singular. He doesn’t hesitate to voice a feminine persona either. What is even more remarkable is that even the memory poems, or invocations of memory, follow this pattern of non-autobiographical narration. Perhaps one may put it this way: the manner of versification is such that the voice, the references, and the memories all acquire a generality, a sort of multi-voiced view, and a level of impersonality.

Sometimes you read a collection of translated verse and feel that you are reading verse written originally in English – so competent is the translator and so effective their translation. But sometimes you read a collection of translated verse and are so deeply touched that you feel the urge to learn the language in which the poems were originally written. The translator of the latter kind, in my view, is truly successful. A translation that makes you hunger for the other forms in which the poems could exist is truly a resonant translation as compared to a competent translation that satisfies you with its rendering and doesn’t arouse any further desire in you.

Dibyajyoti Sarma’s English rendering of Kumar’s Assamese poetry is remarkable not only for the experience it offers in English but also for sparking in us that extra curiosity about how the poem must read in Assamese. One can easily imagine the kind of challenges a translator of a collection with poems such as these confronts. Indian verse translated into verse has often suffered at the hands of translators who try to make the poems work in English the same way as they do in the original. Sarma’s discernment is noteworthy, as his translations are compelling and a great introduction to the brilliance of this poet. The collection also contains a few poems translated by Nabina Das and Anindita Kar.

With an introductory note on Nilim Kumar’s poetry by Nabina Das and Ra Sh, and an interview with the poet by Subodh Sarkar, there are substantial resources to enhance our experience of his poetry.

Nilim Kumar is “Busy Writing Poetry, Do Not Disturb”.

I’m Your Poet: Selected Poems, Nilim Kumar, translated from the Assamese by Dibyajyoti Sarma, Red River.