पुस्तक समीक्षा

 (डॉ. कुँवर दिनेश सिंह की पुस्तक ‘फ्लेम ऑफ़ द फ़ॉरेस्ट’ (‘Flame of the Forest) 32 चुने हुए हाइकुकारों के हिन्दी हाइकु का अंग्रेजी अनुवाद है। 

Of Nature and Human Emotions:

Flame of the Forest

    Kanwar Dinesh Singh’s book Flame of the Forest perfectly captures the essence of day-to-day life, emotions, thoughts, nature, and how nature and humans are the part of the same continuum. This book is a collection of translated haiku of 32 Hindi poets including the stalwarts Bhagawat Sharan Agrawal, Sudha Gupta, Rameshwar Kamboj, Kamla Nikhurpa, Shail Agrawal and Sushma Gupta among others. The sustenance of lyrical beauty even in the translation of Haiku from Hindi language into English reveals the rare poetic excellence of the author-translator. The literary exquisiteness in the precision of language blended thoughtfully with emotions and ethos with imagery and metaphors from life along with nature is captivating.

Haiku is a three-line poem with 17 syllables with its origins in Japan with ‘Nature’ and ‘Mankind’ being its core themes. As Wordsworth said, “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, the haiku poets with choicest yet lucid words wrap their thoughts beautifully. Haiku poetry got introduced in India when Rabindranath Tagore wrote about it in Japan Yatra and translated some of the poems into Bengali. The literary personas like Satya BhusanVermaji started adopting this literary genre and introduced it to Hindi Literature and the influence of the western literature acted as a catalyst to haiku writing in India. Themes like nature and everyday life events, personal and impersonal, are the core elements of haiku. Haiku evokes the emotions of the reader and it allows the reader to connect with it at personal level.

The Hindi poets in the book Flame of the Forest have dealt with the traditional themes of haiku verse, which include nature, human life and emotions and inter- connected them well so as to make the readers envisage an image live in their minds when they read it. The translator has done justice to the genre by keeping intact the meaning of the haiku rendered in other language without losing its essence. Kanwar Dinesh Singh has retained the Indian cultural ethos by not translating the culture-specific words such as Purnima, Phaga, Nima, Ravana and so on, so that the Indian audiences who are not familiar with the Hindi language but are aware of the Indian connotations could connect well and understand what the poets have tried to pen down in lyrical language with restricted words.

The Haiku in this collection are exquisite for their use of literary and rhetorical devices. In the first poem, Bhagwat Sharan Agrawal has compared human emotions with nature and uses metaphor as the rhetorical device. The poem begins with the wind blowing away the monsoon clouds which could also mean the sad moments in life disappearing and there is a hope of happiness reviving in the life of a person. But the next lines are suggestive of the residual anger within the person which has been compared with fire and the crop-fields being the person himself. Upon reading the whole poem, it implies though the rain has tried to quench the thirst of anger, yet it is not fully quenched and looks forward to a time sans anger.

The second poem begins with the notion that without ending itself, a cloud cannot depart from the sky. It is impossible for the cloud to disappear. The poet uses a metaphor as a rhetorical device and compares clouds with the emotions of human beings. The poet suggests that even after trying to eliminate all the negative emotions from the core, there are certain emotions like anger that cannot be removed. This non-removable is suggested by the poet by using clouds as a metaphor and implying that a cloud whose characteristic is to store moisture cannot totally disappear. Similarly, it is impossible to remove the negative emotions from a person’s mind. The Yin and Yang philosophy can be related to this poem. In order to have balance in life, nature and humans, both need to poise their good and bad elements.

The third poem begins with the suggestion that the flower has lost its essence. The poet uses flower as a metaphor and compares it to a human being. Thereby the poet in this poem implies that a person has lost all hopes and aspirations in life and feels dejected. In the last lines, the poet suggests that whenever one feels lost, one should not let that feeling overwhelm oneself and instead look for new things in life and start afresh. As it is commonly said ― with every destruction, there is a new beginning; the same philosophy can be related to this poem. One should never forget the past but, at the same time, should focus on the future. The poet here tries to compare Nature and its characteristics with humans and their emotions by deftly using metaphor as a rhetorical device.

The essence of various elements in Bhagawat Sharan Agrawal’s haiku verses has truly been kept intact by the translator Kanwar Dinesh Singh. The prominent feature of Agrawal’s haiku is the use of nature as a metaphor, besides relying on the Yin and Yang philosophy and encouraging one to have hope and be positive even if the circumstances are not in their favour.

Another poet I would like to talk about is Sudha Gupta who uses birds and forest as her tool to create imagery through her haiku poems. Her poem begins with the notion that a bird has ‘no more than single outfit’, which means underneath our clothes, we humans have the same body and blood that runs in our veins. The last line ‘Either wet or dry’ suggests that although we might have different hair or skin color, we are one and the same. The poet encourages us to look at everyone as equals no matter what. In the second poem, the poet uses Koel as an image to suggest the goodness and sweetness of her voice meaning that we are all good human beings. In another poem, she uses ‘East-wind’ as an allegory. The poet uses East-wind as a metaphor to depict the temperament of a teenager connotating the relation of the East-wind with the warmth that it brings along with it. What I like about this author is that she has beautifully used metaphors to paint the human emotions and, nonetheless, the translator also very ably and aptly renders the same emotions and thoughts in English translation which can be easily captured by the Non-Hindi readers. 

Flame of the Forest offers a unique experience of experimental poetry that comes like a fresh breeze to titillate one’s senses.

Flame of the Forest: A Bilingual Anthology of Hindi Haiku in English Translation, Selected, Translated and Edited by Kanwar Dinesh Singh, Geetika Prakashan, Bijnor (UP), India, 2020, pp. 108, Price Rs. 300, USD 10.

Dr. Anshu Surve

Assistant Professor

Department of English

Faculty of Arts

The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara