Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Multilingual poetry across generations
On Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s birthday, some Bengalis celebrate the poet by reading his poetry together in the homes of their family and friends. As the founder and host of Poetry of Diaspora in Silicon Valley (PoD-SV) poetry circles, I learned of this joyful practice from one of our regular attendees, a poetry lover called Jayanta, who happens to be a Bengali.
I loved this way to celebrate Thakur’s (as Bengalis call Tagore) birthday because I feel that so many poems remain buried in the pages of books. We can liberate them into the present by giving them voice and breath.
Reading poems aloud is consistent with the ancient oral traditions before any books. It is also a great way to connect with others. Even if someone declares that they just don’t get poetry, one can continue the conversation by telling them why and how the reader selected the poem they chose. Not knowing is full of possibilities. Poetic possibilities have the power to build bridges that last across generations and can cross continents.
Tagore and Xu Zhimo
In 2021, I wrote this article about the friendship between Tagore and his contemporary, the renowned Chinese poet Xu Zhimo. I learned of this from former Cupertino poet laureate Jing Jing Yang. Recently, the current Cupertino poet laureate, Keiko O’Leary, hosted a multilingual poetry reading at the Cupertino library. She opened the program by saying, “Language and culture can be used to divide us, but it is also a way to unite us.”
Jing Jing, like me, was one of the featured poets. She read us a new poem, freshly written in response to discovering that her grandfather had met the poet Xu Zhimo. Hearing Jing Jing’s poem brought me the happy memory of having celebrated the 2021 Chinese New Year by reading Tagore’s poem at the celebration hosted by Jing Jing with the grandson and great-granddaughter of Xu Zhimo.
Thakur & The Year 1400
Jayanta had introduced the Tagore poem I read then, and he was sitting right next to me as Jing Jing now read her poem. Tagore’s poem, The Year 1400, urges the reader, a hundred years into the future from when Tagore wrote it, to open their window to enjoy spring, just as the poet found joy in the springtime as he wrote. Behind the readers were lush green trees visible through the glass wall, with spring in the air.
Her poem moved me so much that when my turn came to read, I proclaimed how maybe someday in the future, a hundred years from now, our grandchildren might talk of how their grandmothers met by reading poems together in Cupertino. Jayanta too felt the need to open his reading of his wife Amita’s poems by first reciting the opening lines of Tagore’s poems, in Bengali.
Later that morning, Jing Jing shared a photo of her with the grandson and great-granddaughter of Xu Zhimo, and the great-grandniece of Tagore. She said, “Jyoti, you were invited to this gathering in Los Angeles in 2024, but you were in India when I called you to join me for this”. I was pleasantly surprised to learn this, since Jing Jing and I only know each other from reading and listening to poems together, with her reading in Mandarin and me reading in Hindi, with translations offered sometimes. Other readers at the program read in Welsh, Hebrew, Japanese, Mandarin, German, Urdu, Marathi, Italian, Spanish, Greek, and English.
Not lost in translation
A Japanese-American high-schooler wrote about her outsider-insider status on her visits to Japan as a 100% American who also can’t deny the 50% Japanese she embodies. She translated the poem into Japanese for the event. Many were surprised because we mostly assume all translations will be into the dominant English here. It is hopeful to see other languages being preserved.
Keiko, also a Japanese-American, urged us all to learn Italian as she introduced me to the poetry in the lyrics of the Italian band called Pinguini Tattici Nucleari. Another poet, Theresa Du, offered up a Chinese chant that had been a part of her rituals since she was a child, bravely translating it for us. The room full of poetry-lovers waited patiently as she hesitated in attempting to translate, while navigating the loss of rhythm and musicality of the chant.
The expectant silence that filled the room connected us all. The silence felt sacred as it mimicked the silences in poetry where powerful feelings are conveyed in-between the lines and words acquire fresh meanings beyond their usual ones. Generous listening with focused attention is a powerful love language that is hard to find these days. No matter what language the poet was reading in, there were embedded pauses where we could feel the connection between us as well as with our inner muses.
First drafts & revisions
Bradley Kind shared how he had started his children’s picture book, The Lost Orange Shoe, with an 1800+ word first draft and finally published it with only 350 words, after over 150 revisions. I tend to give up on my writings after one or two revisions, but being a programmer, Kind felt it was perfectly normal to have many versions of writing, just as there are many versions of software he codes.
In this age of Instagram, Discord, Tinder, and doom scrolling in the pursuit of instant gratification, who dreams of ‘a hundred years hence’? Even the mere act of sitting together to listen patiently feels revolutionary.
Poets in all languages are keeping this flame alive.
Come join us, as some of us plan to meet outside Smithwick Theater at Foothill College on May 9th at 6pm, just before we attend the concert by the band Indian Ocean. The band combines the ancient and the modern for their unique sound, just as we too embrace the past as we march forward. The imagination soaring to dream fresh dreams in the company of friends, brought together by Tagore’s visit to China, via Bengal in Poetry of Diaspora Circle, to trip to the City of Angels with the great-granddaughter and great-grandniece of the poets, connecting us thanks to the former and current Cupertino Poet Laureates.
It just might be the boldest form of protest against the insta-temptations and influencer-manipulations.
