I sailed across the seas balanced on my knees, each kneecap in a little toy boat and for sails the flaps of my big raincoat, open to catch the breeze.
TURNING THE DIAL
Nash your teeth in envy, Ogden, when you read this rhyme for I have turned the dial higher on the daftness amplifier and now it’s on eleven, which is two more than nine.
WHAT WE CALL
I sometimes wonder what we call a sea in which a brave dog swims desperately through tempestuous and perilous waves?
Rough! Rough!
CALLING MY BLUFF
Someone called my bluff earlier today while I was sunning myself in the park. “Here boy! Good bluff! Who’s a good bluff then?”
And it actually came running! I have seen some weird stuff in my time but never a bluff that runs. That was tough on my sense of fun.
CROOKED SMILE
Someone just told me that I have an old crooked smile and I must confess it’s true. My smile embezzled 100 doubloons from the East India Company in 1642
CHARGING MY PHONE
I am charging my phone.
The field is a large one but I think I’ll be able to gore it before it reaches the gate.
THE WINDS IN SEASON
Spring Summer Autumn Winter do your worst, blow your best. There’s a splinter in the sprinter. North, South, East, and West.
Winter Spring Summer Autumn put your boots on and come forth. Silver talons finally caught them. East, West, South, and North.
Autumn Winter Spring Summer scrub the dishes for the feast. Fools in clover are made dumber. South, North, West, and East.
Summer Autumn Winter Spring Arch an eyebrow, gape a mouth. Hark the harps unattended sing. East, West, North, and South.
SCIENTIFIC POETRY
Newton with a suit on Einstein eating limes Archimedes in a tree and that’s just three who rhyme.
Von Neumann in a bath Faraday on a trampoline Gödel playing castanets and that’s just three who don’t.
MY BROTHER
My brother is captain of a soccer team and he wants me to play in goal. And he says that if I refuse they will lose the game and he’ll weep and do some other melodramatic things. But why should I oblige him? Am I my brother’s keeper?
AS A SPOON
I went to a fancy dress party yesterday.
Most of the evening remains a blur.
But I know that I was the only man in the room dressed as a spoon.
Caused quite a stir.
THE BAD BANDIT
The bad bandit has been banned from banditry because his moustaches when twirled got out of hand on his face.
So he joined a band in which he plays a rubber band mandolin and now it’s only girls who twirl on the dance floor during the encore.
Not his whiskers anymore.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Cyclist, give way to horses. The forces of darkness will prevail if you don’t.
A sound of hooves removes any doubts you may entertain about whether your brakes still work– Surely they must fail.
The narrow saddle you ride upon is smaller than the seats the horses know. It would make a very poor paddle if you were ever forced to use a canoe.
The glowing sunrise lies beyond the hills but what keeps it rising? Hydrogen atoms pay the monthly bills.
Cyclist, give way every time: You are not as fast as a neighing beast. In a race you might be a semi-finalist but never a winner.
And what do you eat for dinner? Do you feast on apples and hay and drink nothing stronger than fresh water?
I very much doubt it. It seems to me you prefer to eat cakes and sip pints of strong Irish stout.
You are like a centaur mounted there. The horses will stare at you and your shoes and never forget this unbalanced fact.
Cyclist! Don’t presume to know the sources that continually fill your rubber wheels with airs and graces. Simply give way to the faces of horses.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Ratnottama Sengupta talks to Ruchira Gupta, activist for global fight against human trafficking, about her work and introduces her novel, I Kick and I Fly. Click here to read.
The White Lady by Atta Shad has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.
Sparrows by Ihlwha Choi has been translated from Korean by the poet himself. Click here to read.
Tagore’s Dhoola Mandiror Temple of Dust has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.
Pandies Corner
Songs of Freedom: What are the Options? is an autobiographical narrative by Jyoti Kaur, translated from Hindustani by Lourdes M Supriya. These narrations highlight the ongoing struggle against debilitating rigid boundaries drawn by societal norms, with the support from organisations like Shaktishalini and pandies’. Click here to read.
Ratnottama Sengupta travels back to her childhood wonderland where she witnessed what we regard as Indian film history being created. Click here to read.
Aditi Yadav explores the universal appeal of the translation of a 1937 Japanese novel that recently came to limelight as it’s rendition on the screen won the Golden Globe Best Animated Feature Film award (2024). Click here to read.
Love is a many splendoured thing and takes many forms — that stretches beyond bodily chemistry to a need to love all humankind. There is the love for one’s parents, family, practices one believes in and most of all nurtured among those who write, a love for words. For some, like Tagore, words became akin to breathing. He wrote from a young age. Eventually, an urge to bridge social gaps led him to write poetry that bleeds from the heart for the wellbeing of all humanity. Tagore told a group of writers, musicians, and artists, who were visiting Sriniketan in 1936: “The picture of the helpless village which I saw each day as I sailed past on the river has remained with me and so I have come to make the great initiation here. It is not the work for one, it must involve all. I have invited you today not to discuss my literature nor listen to my poetry. I want you to see for yourself where our society’s real work lies. That is the reason why I am pointing to it over and over again. My reward will be if you can feel for yourself the value of this work.”
And it was perhaps to express this great love of humanity that he had written earlier in his life a poem called Dhoola Mandirthat urges us to rise beyond our differences of faith and find love in serving humankind. In this month, which celebrates love with Valentine’s Day, we have a translation of this poem that is born of his love for all people, Dhoola Mandir. Another poet who writes of his love for humanity and questions religion is Nazrul, two of whose poems have been translated by Niaz Zaman. Exploring love between a parent and children is poetry by Masood Khan translated from Bengali by Fakrul Alam. From the distant frontiers of Balochistan, we have a poem by Atta Shad, translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch, for a fair lady — this time it is admiration. Ihlwha Choi translates poetry from Korean to express his love for a borderless world through the flight of sparrows.
Suzanne Kamata writes a light-hearted yet meaningful column on the recent Taylor Swift concert in Tokyo. Aditi Yadav takes up the Japanese book on which was based a movie that won the 2024 Golden Globe Best Animated Feature Film Award. Sohana Manzoor journeys to London as Devraj Singh Kalsi with tongue in cheek humour comments on extracurriculars that have so become a necessity for youngsters to get to the right schools. Snigdha Agrawal gives us a slice of nostalgia while recounting the story of a Santhali lady and Keith Lyons expresses his love for peace as he writes in memory of a man who cycled for peace.
In reviews, Somdatta Mandal has explored Tahira Naqvi’s The History Teacher of Lahore: A Novel. Srijato’s AHouse of Rain and Snow, translated from Bengali by Maharghya Chakraborty, has been discussed by Basudhara Roy and Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed Toby Walsh’s Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World. News and Documentary Emmy Award winner (1996) Ruchira Gupta’s daring novel born of her work among human traffickers, I Kick and I Fly, has been brought to our notice by Sengupta and she converses about the book and beyond with this socially conscious activist, filmmaker and writer. Another humanist, a doctor who served by bridging gaps between patients from underprivileged backgrounds, Dr Ratna Magotra, also conversed about her autobiography,Whispers of the Heart — Not Just a Surgeon: An Autobiography, where she charts her journey which led her to find solutions to take cardiac care to those who did not have the money to afford it,
We have fiction this time from Neeman Sobhan reflecting on how far people will go for the love of their mother tongue to highlight the movement that started on 21st February in 1952 and created Bangladesh in 1971. Our stories are from around the world — Paul Mirabile from France, Ravi Shankar from Malaysia, Sobhan from Bangladesh and Ravi Prakash and Apurba Biswas from India — weaving local flavours and immigrant narratives. Most poignant of all the stories is a real-life narrative under the ‘Songs of Freedom’ series by a young girl, Jyoti Kaur, translated from Hindustani by Lourdes M Supriya. These stories are brought to us in coordination with pandies’ and Shaktishalini, a women’s organisation to enable the abused. Sanjay Kumar, the founder of pandies’ and the author of a most poignant book about healing suffering of children through theatre, Performing, Teaching and Writing Theatre: Exploring Play, writes, “‘Songs of Freedom’ bring stories from women — certainly not victims, not even survivors but fighters against the patriarchal status quo with support from the organisation Shaktishalini.”
While looking forward in hope of finding a world coloured with love and kindness under the blue dome, I would like to thank our fabulous team who always support Borderless Journal with their wonderful work. A huge thanks to all of you from the bottom of my heart. I thank all the writers who make our issues come alive with their creations and readers who savour it to make it worth our while to bring out more issues. I would urge our readers to visit our contents’ page as we have more than mentioned here.
Our aeroplane
vanished one day into the void
without an explanation.
We were flying towards Bermuda
to attend a birthday celebration
but we never arrived.
Your ship disappeared
one afternoon while sailing slowly
north of Puerto Rico.
You were afeared it had sunk
to the bottom of the sea
in some unholy catastrophe
but it hadn’t.
And as for the submarine
cruising east from the Bahamas:
the crew were wearing pyjamas
when it mysteriously
passed out of this world
and entered a realm like a dream.
In a higher dimension
these three vehicles materialised.
Without our consent
they fell in love and began an affair:
an aeroplane snatched from the air
in a relationship
with a sailing ship
and a submarine involved with both.
What a complicated situation!
So many emotions entangled…
I almost feel strangled
by the melodrama
of the Bermuda love triangle.
THE FROTHIEST COFFEE
The frothiest coffee that ever there was
swung from a tether, for certain
because
it was the frothiest coffee
that ever could be
in history
apart from the brew
made frothy by you
for the numberless Counts of Ballyhoo,
all of whom despise tea.
But why did it swing from a tether?
I sigh when I’m asked
that question
and not for the reason
that it’s the
wrong season for asking it. Oh no!
I sigh because
sighs are wise and I’m
a kind of owl
with a reputation to uphold.
What kind of owl exactly?
A coffee loving owl.
I spoon the ground beans into a barrel
with a trowel
and then I add the boiling milk
and I whisk it
vigorously until my soul seems to sink
and cavort among
the bubbles of the wondrous foam
that turns this hovel
into a proper home, as only the frothiest
coffee can.
I hope you understand?
And now I ought
to say something more about
the Counts of Ballyhoo, who as you know
were enemies of tea,
and the youngest scion of that House
was Freddy Fiddledee
and he once decided to embark
on an epic journey in a wooden ark
because ‘motorcycle’
doesn’t rhyme with ‘embark’
at least not at this particular time.
And his mission was
to find out for certain if there really was no
blend of tea he might enjoy,
black or milky or lemony,
in cups or mugs on the decks of tugs despite
his renowned family’s
aversion to that brew: he wondered if there
might be something new
that the world could offer him:
a change from the inevitable coffees he knew
too well, hot as hell,
but there wasn’t.
Too bad! His voyage was a waste.
Let’s not be hasty
and think the poem is at an end.
There are two more lines to go:
this one and
the next one.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Published in 1972, this novel by Italo Calvino explores Marco Polo’s journey to China and is in the form of a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.
Last year I began work on a project called City Life, which will consist of fifty short stories that are each exactly 500 words in length. I don’t know where the idea for this project came from, but I suppose it must have been influenced by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Perhaps my project is a modest tribute to that magnificent author, my favourite writer of fiction, but there are differences in approach. His cities are imaginary; mine are real. I tell the stories of my cities from the viewpoint of the cities themselves.
I feel a little uncomfortable trying to compare myself to Calvino. I stand in his shadow. City Life will never match Invisible Cities, yet I am pleased with my progress so far. I have written 32 instalments to date. I am at present unsure how I will go about finding a publisher for the book when it is completed, especially as my ideal format is for the book to be published in a box, with each individual city on a separate piece of paper, meaning that the tales can be easily read in any order. I will deal with that issue in good time.
Meanwhile, the following two extracts are told in the voices of Bangalore and Colombo.
City Life: Bangalore
Bangalore in 1890sModern day Bangalore
Once I was a garden city, full of lakes and trees, an environment with a climate very conducive to good health. But someone in another country discovered the transistor and then the computer chip. How did these technological innovations change me? I rapidly became a major centre for the new industries generated by those inventions. I expanded, lost my original definition, acquired a new one. A human being who expands too rapidly does so because of misapplied greed and a reckless disregard of bodily danger. I had no choice in the matter. I turned into an electronics hub, one devoted to the money that can be made from computers, those miraculous and alarming devices.
Yet my appearance matches no true vision of an imaginary future. Do not suppose that I am clean and beautiful, filled with crystal towers and monorails of gleaming glass. My roads are clogged with traffic, I am dusty, cracked, prone to flooding, polluted and overstressed. My air smells of smoke and chemicals. I am ashamed of my lakes, plastic-choked and foamy with effluent. I have grown huge and ugly, I tremble with the urgency of the commercial transactions taking place inside me, as if I have a nervous disorder, damage to my spinal cord. Yes, I generate enormous wealth, but who for? Not for the majority of the inhabitants who fight for the daily right to survive.
We think of deserts as empty wastelands and we suppose that the addition of a thousand lakes would transform them into paradisal realms. But deserts can be created by intense ambition as surely as by weather patterns and geography. Cut down trees, build roads, pound the ground flat in order to erect buildings, absorb villages on the edge of the sprawl. The process is too late to arrest. It will keep going until I am unable to recognise myself in my dreams. Not that I sleep enough these days for dreams to be common. I am a restless giant. The noise of the traffic is permanent. It reduces at night but never ceases. The coming and going of freight trains keeps me awake.
But I am not yet ready for despair that resembles an infinite resignation. Every desert, even one manufactured for profit, should contain an oasis. Near my heart, at the centre of my flux, there is a certain street and halfway along it can be found the greatest bookshop in the world. Blossom Book House not only has a tremendous selection of titles, it also provides the burning desert traveller with pools of thoughtful quiet. I am a city that contains a bookshop. How can I enter and browse that store without turning myself inside-out? This is a mystery with a solution I intend to keep secret. Perhaps a city’s spirit can enter a human consciousness every once in a while?
I immerse myself in books full of pictures of the way I was. When I was the fairest one of all on my high plateau.
City Life: Colombo
Colombo
There is crime in all big cities, that’s a law of life, and a certain amount of crime occurs in me too. On the western shores of the island of Sri Lanka I recline, but it is difficult to relax for long. There are sirens, shouts, a scuffle. Someone is robbing pedestrians at knifepoint or breaking into a shop again. What is to be expected? There is even murder on occasion.
The police frequently arrest those responsible, but sometimes the best detectives are mystified by a cunning theft or abduction. They admit defeat. One day there is a spectacular homicide near the ocean. The perpetrator leaves no clues at all. The experts are baffled. At last, a forensics specialist comes up with the ingenious idea of turning the case over to me.
I am the city itself and must be fully aware of every incident that happens within me. If anyone can solve this case, it is I, the capital of my modest nation. When I am approached with the proposal, I agree immediately. There’s no need for me to examine evidence, which is non-existent anyway. The usual methods of the criminologist are suitable for human beings only.
I am a metropolis, not huge but significant enough, and the killing took place inside my body. I tightly shut my notional eyes and concentrate. Where do I feel a peculiar itch? In one of my southern suburbs, in a particular street. I narrow it down quickly enough, to a house and a room in that house. A man is sitting on a chair at a table. He is eating his dinner.
I speak to him. He is so surprised that he drops his spoon. But he is rather a resourceful person, able to recover his composure in a matter of moments, wide grin on his mouth, his eyes full of mockery. It is clear he feels safe from arrest, an assassin who carefully covered his tracks after the deed.
Securing his confession is the only way he can be prosecuted and he has no intention of admitting anything to a disembodied voice, a voice he assumes is his own guilty conscience toying with him in order to test the firmness of his resolve. I ask him questions about his movements on the night of the murder and he answers in an offhand manner.
He doesn’t even pause while eating his meal. He has an alibi, a plausible answer for everything. Half an hour of questioning and I am ready to give up. I tell him this and he smiles thinly and nods. I turn to leave. On the threshold of his consciousness, I suddenly stop and turn.
“Just one more thing,” I say, and I reveal that I am the city of Colombo, that he lives inside me and I’m aware of everything he has done. He is deeply shocked. His confession follows. How could it not? We might betray the people we love, but who willingly betrays their own home?
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Interviewing Bulbul: Remembering Mrinal Sen… Ratnottama Sengupta introduces Bulbul Sharma to converse with her on Mrinal Sen, the legendary filmmaker, reflecting on Bulbul Sharma’s experience as an actress in his film, Interview. Click here to read.
In conversation with Gajra Kottary, eminent screenplay writer, and a brief introduction to her recent book of short stories, Autumn Blossoms. Click hereto read.
Translations
Nazrul’s poem, Samya or Equality, has been translated from Bengali by Niaz Zaman. Click here to read.
Masud Khan’s Fire Engine has been translated from Bengali by Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
Let’s look forward to things getting better this New Year with wars tapering off to peace— a peace where weapons and violence are only to be found in history. Can that ever happen…?
Perhaps, all of us need to imagine it together. Feeling the need for peace, if we could dwell on the idea and come up with solutions, we could move towards making it a reality. To start with, every single human being has to believe firmly in the need for such a society instead of blaming wars on natural instincts. Human nature too needs to evolve. Right now, this kind of a world view may seem utopian. But from being hunter-gatherers, we did move towards complex civilisations that in times of peace, built structures and created art, things that would have seemed magical to a cave dweller in the Palaeolithic times. Will we destroy all that we built by warring – desecrating, decimating our own constructs and life to go on witch-hunts that lead to the destruction of our own species? Will human nature not evolve out of the darkness and chaos that leads to such large-scale annihilation?
Sometimes, darkness seems to rise in a crescendo only to be drowned by light emanating from an unknown source. This New Year — which started with an earthquake followed the next day by a deadly plane collision — was a test of human resilience from which we emerged as survivors, showing humanity can overcome hurdles if we do not decimate each other in wars. Bringing this to focus and wringing with the pain of loss, Suzanne Kamata, in her column tells us: “Earthquakes and other natural disasters are unavoidable, but I admire the effort that the Japanese people put into mitigating their effects. My hope is that more and more people here will begin to understand that it is okay to cry, to mourn, to grieve, and to talk about our suffering. My wish for the Japanese people in the new year is happiness and the achievement of dreams.”
And may this ring true for all humanity.
Often it is our creative urges that help bring to focus darker aspects of our nature. Laughter could help heal this darkness within us. Making light of our foibles, critiquing our own tendencies with a sense of humour could help us identify, creating a cathartic outcome which will ultimately lead to healing. An expert at doing that was a man who was as much a master of nonsense verses in Bengal as Edward Lear was in the West. Ratnottama Sengupta has brought into focus one such book by the legendary Sukumar Ray, Abol Tabol (or mumbo jumbo), a book that remains read, loved and relevant even hundred years later. We have more non-fiction from Keith Lyons who reflects on humanity as he loses himself in China. Antara Mukherjee talks of evolving and accepting a past woven with rituals that might seem effete nowadays and yet, these festivities did evoke a sense of joie de vivre and built bridges that stretch beyond the hectic pace of the current world. Devraj Singh Kalsi weaves in humour and variety with his funny take on stocks and shares. Rhys Hughes does much the same with his fun-filled recount on the differences between Sri Lanka and India, with crispy dosas leaning in favour of the latter.
Our stories take us around the world with Paul Mirabile from France, Ravi Shankar from Malaysia, Srinivasan R from India and Rebecca Klassen from England, weaving in the flavours of their own cultures yet touching hearts with the commonality of emotions.
In conversations, Ratnottama Sengupta introduces us to the multifaceted Bulbul Sharma and discusses with her the celebrated filmmaker Mrinal Sen, in one of whose films Sharma ( known for her art and writing) had acted. We also have a discussion with eminent screenplay writer Gajra Kottary on her latest book, Autumn Blossoms and an introduction to it.
Somdatta Mandal has reviewed Sudha Murty’s Common Yet Uncommon: 14 Memorable Stories from Daily Life, which she says, “speaks a universal language of what it means to be human”. Bhaskar Parichha takes us to Scott Ezell’s Journey to the End of the Empire: In China Along the Edge of Tibet. Parichha opines: “The book evokes the majesty of Tibetan landscapes, the unique dignity of the Tibetan people, and the sensory extremity of navigating nearly pre-industrial communities at the edge of the map, while also encompassing the erosion of cultures and ecosystems. Journey to the End of the Empire is both a love song and a protest against environmental destruction, centralised national narratives and marginalised minorities.” Meenakshi Malhotra provides a respite from the serious and emotional by giving us a lively review of Rhys Hughes’ The Coffee Rubaiyat, putting it in context of literature on coffee, weaving in poetry by Alexander Pope and TS Eliot. Rakhi Dalal has reviewed a translation from Punjabi by Ajeet Cour and Minoo Minocha of Cour’s Life Was Here Somewhere. Our book excerpts from Anuradha Kumar’s The Kidnapping of Mark Twain: A Bombay Mysteryintroduces a lighter note as opposed to the intense prose of Srijato’s AHouse of Rain and Snow, translated from Bengali by Maharghya Chakraborty.
Translations this time take us to the realm of poetry again with Fazal Baloch introducing us to a classical poet from Balochistan, the late Mulla Fazul. Ihlwha Choi has self-translated his poetry from Korean. Niaz Zaman brings us Nazrul’s Samya or Equality – a visionary poem for the chaotic times we live in — and Fakrul Alam transcribes Masud Khan’s Bengali verses for Anglophone readers. Our translations are wound up with Tagore’s Prarthonaor Prayer, a poem in which the poet talks of keeping his integrity and concludes saying ‘May the wellbeing of others fill my heart/ With contentment”.
May we all like Tagore find contentment in others’ wellbeing and move towards a world impacted by love and peace! The grand polymath always has had the last say…
I would like to thank our contributors, the Borderless team for this vibrant beginning of the year issue, Sohana Manzoor for her fabulous art, and all our readers for continuing to patronise us.
With hope of moving towards a utopian future, I invite you to savour our fare, some of which is not covered by this note. Do pause by our contents page to check out all our fare.
At the end of December
in the year 2023
I wrote this poem about a bee
who held a key
in his little legs, delicately.
He flew to a door in a big tree
and turned the lock
in the trunk
with a dramatic clunk
and I’ll remember
for quite a while
how slender was his smile.
Behind the door
was a cup of tea
brewed especially for me
in a clean teapot
but strained afterwards through
a smelly old sock.
Plus a ginger biscuit like the moon
that took up most
of the room in the gloom
of the tree’s interior,
and I was grateful for these gifts.
“Thankee kindly,” I said to the bee
as I dunked and drunk
from the porcelain cup.
Then unexpectedly he said to me:
“Nothing is free
in this material world. That’ll be
six hundred rupees.
I will take a cheque, pay up now
or by heck there’ll be a mighty row
and you will never
see tomorrow.”
That, to my sorrow, is a true tale
and now I avoid tea
offered to me by bees in a forest.
And it is why
I only accept
cautiously at best
black coffee brewed by butterflies.
LOST LOVE
We parted near the marble fountain
in the twilight of a magic year,
she was a scientist at the university
and said I was too simple for her.
She also said I was far too small
to make the affair feel quite right,
that our love was just a game but I
was an intriguing specimen all the same.
Although I have not seen her since
and indeed I have now lost all hope,
I suspect she nonetheless is watching me
through an electron microscope.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Rhys Hughes’ creative adaptation of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam[1] is a delightful read. Located somewhere between tribute and parody, it has recreated the tonal and prosodic rhythms of the original translation, quartet by quartet. Yet, there is a thin line between parody and subversion, and Hughes’s adaptation negotiates this with a tongue-in cheek flippancy.
To illustrate the close parallel of the original 1st quartrain of Fitzgerald’s translation and Hughes creative adaptation:
Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.
The original aubade is wittily recast as:
Awake! For the alarm clock next to the bed
Is ringing the bells that can wake the dead:
And Lo! The ruby rays of the rising sun
Colour the espresso machine a pinkish red.
This paean to coffee is replete with personifications –“Dawn’s lips are coffee-smeared”(vi).
Some of Hughes odes to coffee poke fun at the metropolis and its quirky inhabitants, the poem(s) capture the rhythms of life and its frenetic pace in the urban metropolis. Thus in quatrain 18, we get a glimpse, a veritable word-picture of the tube/metro train commuter:
I sometimes think that never blows so hard,
The commuter who is late, reputation marred,
To cool his coffee so he can catch his train
Before all the doors are closed by the guard.
Literary- and other-Histories of Coffee
In a ‘Brief History of Coffee around the World’, Garrett Oden clarifies that , unlike tea and alcohol which have been around and in use for more than five thousand years, coffee has had a relatively recent history. Although it has supposedly been around for over a 1000 years, its first verifiable documented use was about 500 years ago. Accidentally discovered by a goat herder whose goats turned unusually frisky after consuming some red beans, it became popular in Yemen and the areas surrounding it, the area we know now as the Middle East or as west Asia. The journey of coffee to Europe and beyond is replete with narratives of colonialism, plunder, pillage and scandal. This murky history was often forgotten as the roasted magic bean became a rage in coffee houses across the world.
The dubious antecedents of this heady brew derived from the magic bean is invoked in literary works such as Alexander Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’ where the effects of coffee are thus described:
“Coffee, (which makes the Politicians wise, And see thro’ all things with his half-shut eyes)/Sent up in vapours to the Baron’s brain new stratagems” to fulfil his nefarious designs. Closer to our own times, we have T.S. Eliot’s line in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ where his persona declares, summing up the urban ennui of his quotidian existence, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”, a line which is yet another testimony to the fact that coffee has become an inseparable and indispensable part of our everyday life.
Echoes of Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat are interwoven into each quatrain and the poems follow the chronology of the original sequence. From the chess board (p 56-XLVIX) to the image of the “moving finger” which is replaced by the “moving tongue” (LI, p58), in poem after poem, we have many hyperboles to capture the effects of this drink which stands for a way of life. It is a way of life familiar to inhabitants of the modern metropolis where one’s life is lived under the glare of neon lights, and where sleeplessness, stress are all par for the course.
Although the poems employs the resources of several figures of speech like metaphor, personification, hyperbole, perhaps the most apt and commonly used figure is that of bathos. It is an effect of anticlimax created by a lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial. A typical example is Pope’s line in ‘The Rape of the Lock’ where he says, “Great Anna, whom three realms obey/ Dost sometimes counsel take — and sometimes tea”: In Hughes’s case, “the cosmos is nothing but a frappucino” ,”the inverted cup we call the sky.”
The poems are crafted in a spirit of irreverent good humour and this book is definitely a little nugget, worth savouring. Even if (to persist in the metaphor) one’s cup does not run over, it is definitely a cup that cheers.
[1] The translation was first published in 1859. Omar Khayyam, an astronaut, mathematician, a philosopher and a poet lived from 1048–1131 and wrote in Persian.
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Dr Meenakshi Malhotra is Associate Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory. Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.
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