Subimal Misra
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A backgrounder
(Written by V Ramaswamy), February 17, 2023: The Indian Express
A chance online encounter in 2005 with writer Mrinal Bose led to my taking up the translation of the early stories of the Bengali ‘anti-establishment’ writer Subimal Misra, and subsequently embarking on a long-term project of translating Misra’s short fiction. I had never heard the author’s name before, and although I had been a voracious reader of literature in English, I hadn’t read a single work of Bengali literature in Bangla till then. All I possessed was a close familiarity with the language through living in Kolkata and having been engaged for two decades with grassroots social and public action in my city. I had learnt to read Bangla in elementary school, but that was rusty.
As I was soon to discover, Subimal Misra — who passed away on February 8 — was known as the anti-establishment writer, who published only in non-commercial little magazines, and, occasionally, books on his own. He had begun his literary journey in 1967 — the year of Naxalbari. It was the ideology he most closely identified with, even though he was also critical of many aspects of it. Like the author whose voice was undermined by the unreliable narrator of his own creation — his early life is as much shrouded in mystery as his books are difficult to find.
He chose to depart from conventional narrative fiction, and wrote stories and novels that he called ‘anti-stories’ and ‘anti-novels’, where the way of writing predominates and tries to challenge the reader’s preconceptions, encouraging a discursive, deeper understanding. He made the cinematic language of (Soviet film director, screenwriter, film editor and theorist, Sergei) Eisenstein and (French filmmaker) Jean-Luc Godard his own, as he did (American writer) William Burroughs’ cut-up method.
He was scathingly critical of the mores of the bourgeoisie and the bhadralok, and wrote empathetically about the underdog, the subaltern, and about sexual perversion. His 1969 story, “Haran Majhi’s Widow’s Corpse, or the Golden Gandhi Statue”, and his first collection of stories, published in 1971 with the same title, took Bengali readers by storm. With two more powerful collections in the following years, he was the uncrowned prince in the world of ‘parallel’ literature in Calcutta by the end of the 1970s. In the following decade, he self-published his ‘anti-novel trilogy’, as well as a collection of essays that included a manifesto of the ‘anti-novel’.
I clearly remember my early translation efforts. Misra’s ‘stories’ were like nothing I had read before, whether in form or content. So, I looked at the trees and not the wood, so to speak, and simply focussed on words and sentences. I even managed to render a vulgar rhyming folk ditty in the story, ‘Uncle Seer’: “Twixt mother and wife, discriminate not a whit/One bestows milk and the other a tit!”.
It was when I began working on the second Misra collection, Wild animals prohibited, that I confronted translation challenges that I felt were insurmountable. Misra had told me that since he departs from the narrative form, the emphasis is on language. I had to repeatedly contend with the impossibility of meaningfully translating various stories. After I read out my draft of the story ‘Blue Phosphorus’ to Misra, he told me that the translation should not be logical but dreamy, like Lorca or Borges. He wanted indirect words, not direct ones. He wanted me to ingest Pablo Neruda and Paul Eluard. Finally, on his advice, the story was dropped.
Until 2013, I was able to consult Misra on the translations of his stories. Thereafter, I was entirely on my own. Any inquiries were met with his habitual response of “whatever you think appropriate”. I also had to undertake a fair amount of reading in order to acquaint myself with Misra’s work. In effect, I was a barefoot scholar-researcher and anthologist, besides being a translator.
Then came the anti-novel, ‘This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale’. I undertook the first round of translation without a clue about what it meant. Understanding dawned by and by, over multiple rounds of further work. I was also fortunate to have as editor Rahul Soni, one of the finest literary editors in the country. That the translation went on to be critically acclaimed in India and the USA was immensely satisfying.
The fourth and final collection of anti-stories, ‘The Earth Quakes’ (forthcoming), presented a different set of challenges. One story had an impossible-to-translate title (rather like the made-up words in the poem Jabberwocky). It had two narratives running parallel, one of which was in the Bengali of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. As I was translating it, I got an inexpressible sense of the mighty genius of the author, of the true nature of his literary-social-cultural endeavour — which also meant the demise of the translator, in the sense of the work being untranslatable.
Misra had written in the preface to ‘The Golden Gandhi Statue from America’ that readers ought to view his stories like stairs to be ascended, in order to comprehend the latter phases of his writing. I had to grow in various ways, beginning from my engagement with the Bengali language – and also simply by reading and rereading Misra – in order to rise up to the project of translating his work. And so, I am happy that through my labours, I have been able to provide readers in English with a grand Subimal Misra staircase!
