‘I have written standing up in buses, on the fourth seat of a Mumbai local’: Jerry Pinto

Jerry Pinto is not just a successful and award-winning novelist and translator, he is also a poet. As he works on his second collection of poetry, his first consolidated body of work since Asylum in 2004, Pinto spoke to Scroll.in about this aspect of his writing, and how it ties in with the rest of his work. Excerpts from an interview:

You’ve been writing poetry since you were 16. How has the poet in you evolved over time, be it in terms of language, theme and overall style?
If you could have seen the poetry I was writing when I was 16, I am afraid you would have been rather underwhelmed. I was the standard boychick who thought that adolescent angst and a better-than-average vocabulary was enough to make poetry; that poetry was a diary entry with lines cut up at random.

I don’t know what to make of that young man but I feel sometimes like going back in time and patting him on the shoulder and reading him Margaret, are you grieving by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

So evolution was necessary because I was a diarist trapped in narcissistic self-regard. My attempts to break out were even worse. I remember Nissim Ezekiel coming to Elphinstone College to conduct a series of poetry workshops. Nissim started by having us all read a poem. He would comment on the poems he liked and he would say nothing about the poems he didn’t think much of. I read my poem and he passed over it without comment. I knew then that he thought it was a bad poem and I was hurt in the way young people can be hurt by the truth.

I don’t know how I got up the courage to go to the second workshop and to read a poem but I did. He commented on the second poem and his first remark – “This is a sound poem” – was the balm of Gilead upon my wounds. Then he did a Nissim, which was to ask why I’d started lines with weak words and had commas at the ends of some lines and not others and moved on. When he was leaving, he asked me whether I would like to submit it for the PEN magazine of which he was the editor then.

I don’t know what came over me but I said, “No. I think it’s too early.” I like to think of myself as being wise and knowing even then the perils of being published too early. But I suspect it was also something much more basic. He had hurt me by ignoring my first poem and I wanted to hurt him back by refusing his offer. This is called cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Since then, I have written thousands of protoplaems as I call them. They have the makings, the protoplasm of a poem but they don’t seem to get there. There are some real poems that I have not been able to rescue because on my shoulders sit a 100,000 anxieties. Some of them are:

Is this just clever?

Is this me? Or am I just channeling someone?

Is this of consequence or am I navel-gazing?

Are these even concerns I should have?

Could I read this to Nissim?

And today, where does poetry find a place in your life?
Writing finds a place in my life. I try to be disciplined about it. I try to write every day. But I find it difficult to mandate poetry. It’s about the moment when a poem presents itself. I do all kinds of things to get this to happen as often as I can. I read a poem a day in three different languages – Marathi, Urdu and English. I sit in silence with a pen and paper. I force it sometimes, writing down the first word, I or It or The and waiting like “patient love relaxing on a hill”. But often nothing happens and I try to respect the nothing too. Sometimes a poem happens but it turns into a nothing and then it is important to be able to recognise that and let it go.

Some Ways To Not Write a Poem makes for fantastic advice. But is it easy to give so much of yourself to a poem? Is it cathartic or a literary pleasure?
Each “speech act” has a revelation hidden in it. Your question here reveals a little about you. It is your you-ness that makes you ask this question. You expect an answer that is full of my me-ness. But in reality, what you will do on receiving my answer is to judge it against your you-ness.

With poetry, things are complicated because the “I” of every poem is not necessarily the poet himself. The poet may be taking on a persona, as Ranjit Hoskote and Keki Daruwalla do so often and successfully. They inhabit conquerors, other historical poets, travellers…But this act of ventriloquism is revelatory in its choices. And even in this magnificent subterfuge, we seek the person we know or the poetic persona we know. Finally, we ask ourselves, to what purpose has the mask been put on? To what end?

When I say “write what you know about”, I mean you must dip into personal experience and this is what everyone looks for in a poem: the sensation, the unmistakable sensation that the person has lived this and has brought the fruit of it to us for our delectation. Of course, you need craft after that. There are hundreds of people out there who went through the terrible times of the gulag but it is to Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam that we turn. Hundreds of men went through the World War I but it is to Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon that we turn. This is because they brought craft to their work.

You need experience, you need to go there and to come back, but it’s not enough. Poetry demands that you now step back and look at the mess and then make something out of it. This is also why people have such a suspicion of poetry; because of its artifice.

Catharsis, I believe, is what the reader should experience from my work. For me, the feeling is only one of relief, of a job done, of something finished and got out of the way. I don’t know how else to express it.

You’re consistently producing poetry, novels, and translations, and editing anthologies! Which format feels like your most natural voice and how do you switch from one role to the other?
There is no natural voice in anything I write. I sometimes fear that the natural voice may, for all of us, be strangled by the time we are in our teens. What is left then is an anthology of sounds that emerges from us and we persuade ourselves that this is me because this is what I want to sound like.

I don’t think there’s a format which feels close to me; there are only things I want to say. Sometimes I say them myself, sometimes I get it said by deploying other voices, by even commissioning people to tell stories. I find pleasure in laying these against each other, and finding a new narrative emerging from other voices.

And then there’s translation, which is a hopeless hapless search for another voice in a strange language. This requires the effort of renouncing Jerry Pinto and replacing him with another person entirely, and then bringing back what Jerry Pinto knows of both languages to create a new voice/old voice. Therefore, I don’t switch roles. I don’t have roles. I have me. I take this me to various places and I try to see what I can and cannot do. I’ve been successful at some things and failed at others.

Well, then how do you know what writing to discard and what to publish?
I’ve been very, very fortunate in my friends and my first readers. My first reader in almost every case is my sister Andrea. For my poetry, it’s my buddy Arundhathi Subramaniam. I trust her completely on most matters and if she says it works, I know it works. If she says it doesn’t, I put it away sadly.

But the next barrier that my work has to cross is my long-time publisher Ravi Singh of Speaking Tiger. More than anyone else, he knows my voice and what I can and cannot do. He does not let me get away with anything that he thinks is less than my best. I don’t want second-rate stuff to be out there with my name on it. And between the three of them, they make sure I don’t.

I’m curious about the space where all your writing happens.
I write when I can. I write when I want to. I write with anything that comes to hand. I have written standing up in buses and I have written on the fourth seat of a Mumbai local. Because, here’s the truth: I love writing. I want to write. I write.

Here’s a writing exercise then: personify poetry.
Poetry is your best friend when it’s something you seek out to read, to enjoy, to enrich your world. It will never lie to you, it will always leave you in a better place.

Poetry is like some old-fashioned deity when you’re trying to do it. It will vanish for years and then come back in a rush. It will bless the undeserving person next to you. It will mock your best efforts and when you have turned away, it will suddenly smile on you again.

Wonderful! Who have been the biggest influences in defining who you are as a poet, novelist and a human being?
I suppose the biggest influence in my life were my parents: my mother, whose mental ill health defined so much of my growing up; my father, whose stability and moral sense define the best parts of who I am today. I take responsibility for all the rest.

Intellectually, there have been so many guides and gurus. Again, Andrea, my sister, who keeps bringing me books I didn’t know I wanted to read until she gets them for me. Nissim Ezekiel, whom I met early and who became a friend. Leela Naidu, who demonstrated the power of charm combined with intelligence and beauty. Ravi Singh, without whom I don’t think I would have been a published author today. Adil Jussawalla, who has an idea for me to work on every day and my go-to guy for questions about the city’s intellectual life. Shanta Gokhale, my translation guru and a very dear friend. Naresh Fernandes, who taught me a lot about going the extra mile in journalism.

There’s Hutokshi Doctor, who taught me whatever I know about editing. Mehlli Gobhai and Jehangir Sabavala, who taught me what little I know about art. Jehangir Palkhivala, who was the first friend I had in my life and is now back in it as my yoga teacher. There’s also his wife, Rashmi Palkhivala, who actually turned me into a writer when I was bumping about the city as a mathematics tutor.

There’s Ranjit Hoskote and Arundhathi Subramaniam and the collective energy and hive mind of the Poetry Circle for the decade or so that I belonged to it. And people I’ve never met, poets whose voices I feel such empathy with: Kamala Das, Dylan Thomas, Soyarabai. I feel a complete list would take another lifetime to build. I have been so rich in friends.

What are you working on at present?
I am working on the second collection of poetry, which I hope will come out some time at the end of 2017. When the world was somewhat younger Arundhathi Subramaniam and I collaborated on a collection of love poems in English out of India called Confronting Love. This was supposed to be followed by Confronting God and Laughing Out Loud, collections of god poems and funny poems. We hope this third one will see the light of day soon, perhaps next year.

Three poems

Prayer

Lord of the linear narrative,
Show me the point at which I should begin.
Stop me when I have said as much as I should.
Regulate my voice, I boom too much
and my whispers are shrill.
Feed me words on those long, slow afternoons.
Allow me the grace of serendipity –
To find lost continents on my tongue.
Give me the gift of silence,
and then set me adrift.

Bedside

I watch your face hanging open
Your warm wet mouth, your tongue flickering
Your spectacles grimy, your hair alive
Your forehead broad and wasted
Your cheeks alternately limp and bulging.
I do not need to watch your body
I have tended it often
Eased its pains with capsicum plasters
And prayed I was easing your mind too
With my litany fresh off the shelf:
Tegretol, Anxol, Espazine, Hexidol
Neurobion, Arrovit, Shelcal, Diazepam.
I cross your palm with powder
And pray that you should not
Tell my future.
When I last lifted you off the floor
You were sitting close to my bed.
You did not expect to fall
Not under the knowing eyes of
Mother of Perpetual Succour.
I direct your gaze to the falling slipper
Of the child in her arms.
It falls, you told me some lives ago
Out of fear of the foretold future
I understand that slippage
But you? You live it.
Some nights you let me sleep in patches
I have grown used to it, relying on my
Ability to turn you off, and your pain.
I have survived to write these lines
To turn you, baste you and marinate
Our twinned lives into a poem.
But I wish I could keep
My heart unguilty, my love fresh
My thoughts wide-ranging, my eyes new
and that wound – inflicted on days of empathy –
raw and open.
There are many options I know
The glaze of stillness and the panacea of forgetfulness
Or the black snot that stained granny’s kerchief
A trust in the occult, born of grief.
A faith in God, born of habit.
So many options and I, on auto-pilot
Cross your palm with powder.
Outside, I turn my face to the sun
Laugh, play, pun, work, entertain, function.
I know from a few grim examples
And one bright shining one
How the world fetes facades.
I have grown used to seeing the one I devised
Reflected in your laughter-silted eyes.
Inside, I shrink from metaphor and magic
I have no beliefs here, only a watchfulness.
My world condenses into an ink-stain
As your voice trails after me from room to room.
I made promises for you, standing in the toilet
By the skull of the Cyclops that drank my piss
I broke those promises, one by one
And know that is why I cannot love.
Mummy, find it in you to forgive me
And I will try to be bigger than my guilt
And forgive myself.

Alt-Ctrl-Dlt

So easy to delete, backspace, or even
in extremis
Alt-Ctrl-Dlt all at once.
Alt
Against the parallel universes,
the parallel possibilities
the parallel lives.
Ctrl
The illusion
slips away
if you look at it
directly.
Dlt
Does not exist