JAYANTA MAHAPATRA
(1928), poeta hindú. Su poesía es una mezcla de lirismo y elementos de la cultura hindú. Es conocido por ser el primer poeta hindú en ganar el premio Sahitya Akademi para poesía inglesa. Ha publicado más de veinte de libros de poesía.
Recibió el Premio Nacional de Literatura de la India en 1981. Es un poeta que escribe en inglés, con una profunda sensibilidad introspectiva y una mirada nueva ante los problemas humanos del país. Tiene un vasto conocimiento de la tradición milenaria de su cultura natal.
Libros de Jayanta Mahapatra
Poesía
Poetry
1971: Close the Sky Ten by Ten , Calcutta: Dialogue Publications
1971: Svayamvara and Other Poems , Calcutta: Writers Workshop
1976: A Father's Hours , Delhi: United Writers
1976: A Rain of Rites , Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press
1979: Waiting , Samkaleen Prakashan
1980: The False Start , Bombay: Clearing House
1980: Relationship , Greenfield, New York: Greenfield Review Press
Prosa
Prose
1997: The Green Gardener , short stories, Hyderabad: Orient Longman
2006: Door of Paper: Essay and Memoirs , New Delhi: Authrospress
2011: Bhor Moitra Kanaphula . In Oriya. Bhubaneswar, Paschima
La poesía, en Orissa
Poetry in Oriya
1993: Bali (The Victim) , Cutack: Vidyapuri
1995: Kahibe Gotiye Katha (I'll Tell A Story) , Arya Prakashan
1997: Baya Raja(The Mad Emperor) , Cuttack: Vidyapuri
2004: Tikie Chhayee (A Little Shadow) , Cuttack; Vidyapuri
2006: Chali (Walking) , Cuttack: Vidyapuri
2008: Jadiba Gapatie (Even If It's A Story) , Cuttack: Friends Publishers
2011: Smruti Pari Kichhiti (A Small Memory) , Cuttack: Bijayini
Presentamos en Círculo de Poesía un poema de Jayanta Mahapatra (1928), poeta hindú.
La traducción es de Aureliano Carvajal (1986).
http://circulodepoesia.com/2016/08/poesia-hindu-jayanta-mahapatra/
Esperando
Estoy sentado aquí, esperándola, sentado aquí
con la piel vacía colgando sobre mis hombros
como me he sentado tantas veces
junto a la misma ventana, en la misma vieja silla.
De vez en cuando observo mis cuadernos
me encuentro a mis palabras flotando
hacia el desierto al otro lado de la página.
Como el humo alejándose en la tierra ardiente
de mi propia carne. Cierro mis ojos cansados.
E intento no pensar en la piel dispuesta y tibia
de la niña de dieciocho años con la que estuve el mes pasado.
Estiro mis labios solitarios en una mueca imperdonable.
Giro el rostro hacia la oscuridad de mi recámara
y observo; pero yo no recuerdo ahora
cuándo fue que mi barba empezó a crecer.
Le permití al minuto desatar la hora sobre el suelo;
pero cada vez que regresaba, y yo tenía que hacerlo todo
nuevamente, con tal de relajarme.
Toco mis hombros; están desnudos, contritos.
Como la forma de una banca desierta bajo la lluvia.
¿Se me estaba acercando alguna especie de cambio?
¿O era la piel vacía del tiempo, esperando una excusa
para mover la sangre, para ocuparla en algo?
Allí están mis cuadernos, también mi bella esposa,
pero llevo con ellos mucho tiempo, mucho tiempo enamorado,
me han ido desgastando las orillas lentamente.
O tal vez no sean ellos mismos el motivo;
se trata del lugar de donde vengo, y de lo que
de pronto descubrí que deseaba en realidad:
la vida que mi vida busca, cuando llego a
resolverla; pero ha tomado otro camino
hacia donde no pude conocerla en absoluto,
mientras regreso al sitio en donde estaba, en la misma ventana,
sin pronunciar palabra, esperándola,
la piel vacía ondeando como banderas blancas en una guerra perdida.
Waiting
I sit here, waiting for her, sit here
with the empty skin drooping over my shoulders
as I had sat waiting many times before
beside the same window, in the same old chair.
Once in a while I’d open my notebooks,
find the words I had written float away
into the wilderness on the other side of the paper.
Like the smoke drifting over the burning-ground
of my own flesh. I shut my tired eyes.
And I try not to think of the quick warm skin
of the eighteen-year-old girl I met last month.
I stretch my lonely lips into an unforgivable grin.
I turn my face over in the darkness of my room
and peer into it; but I don’t remember now
when my beard started to grow,
I let the minute drop the hour to the ground;
but each time it came back, and I had to do this
all over again, to put my mind at ease.
I touch my shoulders; they are bare, contrite.
Like the shape of a deserted park bench in the rain.
Was some sort of change coming over me?
Or was it time’s empty skin, waiting for an excuse
to advance the blood, to keep it occupied?
My notebooks are there, my pretty wife too,
but I have been with them long, long in love,
and they have worn me slowly around the edges.
Or maybe it isn’t because of them, themselves;
it is because of where I came from, and of
what I suddenly realized I was really waiting for:
the life that my life seeks, when I go in
to answer it; but it had gone the other way
to where I couldn’t meet it at all,
as I go back to where I was, by the same window,
without a word, waiting for her,
empty skin flapping like truce flags in a losing war.
Deaths in Orissa
Faces of tree-bark and grief
hang against God’s hand in the world
that cannot lift itself up to help.
In the corners of women’s eyes
the rainbow breaks against the sunrise.
Nothing but the paddy’s twisted throat
exposed on the crippled bleak earth,
nothing but impotence in lowered eyes,
nothing but the tightening of the muscles
in Bhagyabati’s neck which her outcaste mother
would herself have liked to throttle to death,
nothing but the cries of shriveled women
cracking against the bloodied altar of Man,
nothing but the moment of fear
when they need a God who can do them some good.
Oh I am a poet who barks like a dog.
Open the window, I say, so I can breathe.
Let not my memory be like a tiger in ambush.
But there is this dangerously alive body
and only a baton or knife can tear it apart.
Genesis
The apple sits on an old examination bed
in the world's foyer.
The stony silence of the men staring hard
crosses the line of sanity.
Why do I think of this,
drowning in the depth of lost time?
Maybe nothing came from anything,
a long drawn-out yawn from nowhere.
Maybe my mother's soul set the apple free,
making it roll down the road.
And I look for the same sense of stillness,
hoping it will heal me.
The myth has its head stuck in the fork of a tree.
And the spirits of knowledge won't let it pass.
Of that Love
Of that love, of that mile
walked together in the rain,
only a weariness remains.
I am that stranger now
my mirror holds to me;
the moment's silence
hardly moves across the glass.
I pity myself in another's guise.
And no one's back here, no one
I can recognize, and from my side
I see nothing. Years have passed
since I sat with you, watching
the sky grow lonelier with cloudlessness,
waiting for your body to make it lived in.
Hunger
It was hard to believe the flesh was heavy on my back.
The fisherman said: Will you have her, carelessly,
trailing his nets and his nerves, as though his words
sanctified the purpose with which he faced himself.
I saw his white bone thrash his eyes.
I followed him across the sprawling sands,
my mind thumping in the flesh’s sling.
Hope lay perhaps in burning the house I lived in.
Silence gripped my sleeves; his body clawed at the froth
his old nets had only dragged up from the seas.
In the flickering dark his hut opened like a wound.
The wind was I, and the days and nights before.
Palm fronds scratched my skin. Inside the shack
an oil lamp splayed the hours bunched to those walls.
Over and over the sticky soot crossed the space of my mind.
I heard him say: My daughter, she’s just turned fifteen…
Feel her. I’ll be back soon, your bus leaves at nine.
The sky fell on me, and a father’s exhausted wile.
Long and lean, her years were cold as rubber.
She opened her wormy legs wide. I felt the hunger there,
the other one, the fish slithering, turning inside.
.