After Muktibodh
The following is part of an ongoing project, a book-length response (incorporating creative translation) to a poem – “Ek Aroop Shunya ke Prati” (“To a Formless Void”) – by the Hindi modernist Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh. The section that begins “dirty kitsch che con cash hubbed...” is a homophonic translation of the third stanza of that poem.
cross-legged
lowliness common to bubble
blessed yokes i struggle to call
ptyx!
wanting
to separate from the labels
she must stitch
to make
—determinate
—the apparels for minnesota
she spits
paan at the rate of dawn
this jubilee just deliverance
from shift
for shift’s sake—in
sufficiency fists what
it’s not—what is
not it’s—it owes
all
it owns is barren
metal
all
it knows is the dim
inishing referent
it all comes down to
how many yards of linen
how many grams of wheat
all
it vows re
turns a rote o back
when I was
a Russian
peasant
/
once wanting
to separate from the municipal
sewer he must
daily dip in head to toe
he—laved in
SHIT’s
colossus
aufhebung—murmered
these magic words
om tat sat
—once
—twice
a count my cadence has
successively emptied out—count
less
bare
life—whose fantasy
of being
exempt peoples
—a world
—successively
—third
—thus
thus this civic
lyric lapses in
to measure
ment’s ends
—means
whose bituminous brothers
whose blistered sisters
every semblance
made ob
solete by the telos
every disaster desires
—a dictatorship of
dickens
—means
[ ], a rickshawpuller,
[ ], a vegetable seller,
[ ], a beggar,
[ ], a kabaadi
[ ], a truckloader
[ ], a drug peddler
share three
at least three commonalities
with each other
all six of them live in
the biggest industrial township of [ ]
all six of them were once employed as skilled workers
in the once-famous textile mills of [ ]
all six of them have been forced to take up
the menial jobs which they never before
thought worthy of doing
all six of them have been forced to conceal
their present occupations from their families
who work as seasonal labourers on single crop farms
in their native villages
all six of them have, not regrettably, found
an unfortunate confidence
in the other 49,994 skilled workers
who were rendered unemployed after
the big industrial textile units had shut down
in the early [ ]
LOWER LIMIT MUSIC
UPPER LIMIT “IF COMMODITY COULD SPEAK”
dirty kitsch che con cash hubbed
punk dark id dons a beige hen
too american non-gay bullion purr bait hay
bean-bean art-hay che cur guard day
coolie uncle lag a tar nee end
uncann(y)?
dunlhasanebula!!
ache-ache hung mien puta lien
puta lie yen quay sea
bulbul on key bun they begged tea yen
fir root bait tea hen!!
is illiad quote i quote i canny nikon quay babe jute queue che no i dicta
ache-ache puta lie mien lakh-lakh dry sty yen
ass ankh yah driest tea con
bandh they begged tea
is illiad too ummh o sir vague yeah
I SING THE TWENTY FOUR TONES
BETWEEN X AND OIKOS
left to sift my only foot
eroded in a flood of spit
what hell-fled glut of common
counts all my vowels will
continually shift
—quantity
till telos tells
a tongueless south
the sewage swallowed its sea
the dictionary stole its manna
coin a sore in place of
“in place of”
this source of all soars
all make meat of mouth
all clog ear with europe
all adorn the hole in air
my impenetrable bride
who never sweats
her ampersand leaf corpse
caress no softer than the sap-
dry utility of the null
gold hazards
o swollen gong of soul
o spent heart’s print
oar to air eager to fold
o it is bone in my ass
Aditya Bahl is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, including Name Amen published by Timglaset (Malmo). Excerpts from this engagement with Muktibodh have appeared in Social Text Review and Datableed. He is currently enrolled in the PhD program at Johns Hopkins University.