Yellow Road
I wonder about the road not taken—what it might’ve been like if English had never been foisted upon the world, or we were brave or lucky enough to forsake and banish it to Charn.[1]
That, instead of mastering a language with such a tendentious legacy as English, I was fumbling on this road, rather, writing verses day and night in Bangla, a very complicated, mellifluous bhasha, which, who knows, might’ve made me see the world in a completely different alo.
Take this couplet I found on cigarette packets while researching for my hybrid flash “An Elegy for Beedis”:
Proti taane tripti aane,
Je taane bhai shei jane
Almost pure accentual meter. End rhymes, inner rhymes. Ecstasy, irony, the whole experience rendered in laymen’s anonymous writing.
The transliteration I mustered in my dwindling Bangla:
In every inhale satisfaction’s guaranteed
Whoever inhales, brother, he truly knows!
I added a “!” to capture the excitement that’s inherent and palpable in my native tongue, but lost in the dry, clunky English.
In “Poet and the City,” Adam Zagajewski comes up with an ideal curriculum for a poetry school. One line I highlighted with my brite liner:
“…at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew…Thousands of lines of poetry in these languages would be learned by heart.”[2]
I wonder about Arabic and Persian poetry. How little I know in spite of having once memorized Arabic as part of post-colonial schooling.
How I’d wanted to learn to read for real, and yet never found the time or chance to take a breath and try my hand at the new-old novelty-familiarness of it.
How I’d never considered looking up recordings of those Poets and listening to them without caring about comprehension. How I didn’t realize that a lot wouldn’t even exist. And technology would, of course, ruin the few who do.
I think of the story a Professor told a few graduate students clustered in his office for our weekly private one-hour sessions about how in an Iranian café after dinner he’d gotten served tea and great poetry—from a waiter spewing out both for him on the fly.
I see that Persian blue out of the corner of my eyes; a light red cardamom-scented chaye before it.
I think about the political slogans in Bangla made by university and high school students in June 2024:
Chaite giye odhikar
Hoye gelam rajakar.
In my rough rendering of a transliteration, I see immediately that I cannot use “I” before the first verbs “chaite” and “hoye.” There is an implicit “we” here.
English is finicky about pronouns on a good day, dictatorial on its worst. The collective has to be specified as if it’s invisible and mute, has then to be brushed up, and fitted with a coat and tie for extra exposure.
We wanted rights.
We became traitors.
Poetry’s everywhere—but it just sounds better in non-English, in my Bangla.
[1] The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis
[2] Adam Zagajewski
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