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 What are the images that come immediately to mind when you hear the word 'India'? Something exotic, I'm sure: maharajahs, snakes, tigers, elephants, fakirs - and not necessarily in that order.
Think a little more, and perhaps Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, Gautama Buddha, Darjiling tea, silk saris, or cricket could occur to you. A curious farrago, that.
The same is true about Brazil as far as India is concerned. Even in Calcutta - which prides itself as the country's soccer and culture capital - few people have gone into some depth about that elusive Brazilian identity.
Pelé, of course, is a familiar icon. Or Ronaldo and Rivaldo - these names haven't been forgotten yet. And invariably Carnaval is spelled carnival, ideas about the samba are not at all clear, and Rio is blamed on Michael Caine and Demi Moore. "Gisele Bündchen is Brazilian? Are you sure?" That's typical...
Which is, of course, disheartening. That there is so little known about Brazil in India is ironic, since the club of the major emerging economies has them as members in the so-called BRIC (with Russia and China).
Economic analysts have vaticinated that these countries would be the engines for global growth in the next two decades. Trade links and financial transactions would only accelerate among such developing countries.
But such exchanges have had little impact on the cultural field, notwithstanding the postcolonial structure of both their heritages.
Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-87) might be arguably Brazil's finest modern poet, yet sadly few in this country have ever heard of him, let alone read his poetry - in English translation, of course.
(Since Brazilian modernists are little known even in Portugal, it is hardly surprising their work is not accessible in a former colony of the British Raj.)
What struck me in "Looking for Poetry" was a parallelism with the Indian thought systems - Hindu and Buddhist - which repeatedly iterate the evanescence of life, love, and desires.
Not just spiritual and religious viewpoints, the Indian world-view focuses on fugacity on a cosmic scale, the fleeting succession of civilisations and empires mirroring the rapid transitions in human lives. The poems of Tagore or Kalidasa are archetypes of such an ideology.
Mark Strand's excellent 1982 translation of "Looking for Poetry" in The Antaeus Anthology, which contributed to establishing his reputation in the West before Travelling in the Family appeared, yields a rich mine of such comparisons.
Drummond de Andrade refers to "worthless" yachts, shoes, dances and tirades, vanishing as they do "in the curve of time".
Then take a look at a strophe in a popular film song of Raj Kapoor, India's home-grown Charlie Chaplin:
Your mansions and palaces
Will only remain here -
What's all this arrogance, dears,
When you have to bow your heads
in the end.
Again, Drummond de Andrade's poem leaves a tang in the mouth reminiscent of a typical Indian sensibility when he writes how each word asks him whether he has brought the key to unlock it.
Isn't this echoed in Nissim Ezekiel's "Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher"?
In this, a sort of credo for modern Indian poetry in English, Ezekiel (1925-2004) declares that the true poet, or lover, or ornithologist does not try to "force his pace". "The best poets" always "wait for words" to come to them.
When Ezekiel writes of the poet who only speaks after "his spirit" has moved, he might well have been talking about Drummond de Andrade, who advised the aspirant to live with his or her poems before putting pen to paper.
He/she is also advised to enter the domain of language "as if you were deaf". Ezekiel captures the same spirit of poetry, referring to the restoration of hearing to the deaf and the recovery of sight (or is it second sight?) by the blind.
And while the Bene-Israeli from Bombay goes beyond the physicality of women, seeing them as "myths of light", Drummond de Andrade hums in "O Amor Natural":
"Love guides my verse"
and, as it guides, "weds soul and desire".
Drummond de Andrade belongs to Brazil's second wave of Modernists in the Thirties - and his work parallels the universal trends in Western literature, apart from attaining the pinnacle of quality and literary standards.
An icon of the highest triumvirate of Brazilian poetry - with João Cabral de Mello Neto and Manuel Bandeira - Drummond de Andrade and his engaged poetry are better known outside his country than his contemporaries.
After all, Drummond de Andrade's work is more accessible. Which is why ignorance about his oeuvre in India is discouraging in an era in which culture is becoming globalised.
"Your verse is running water, your lyricism has the power and delicacy of natural things," he wrote to Cora Coralina, but it could easily be descriptive of his own corpus. It could also sum up his approach if I refer once again to Strand's translation.
Poetry, says Drummond de Andrade, does not come from things as it excises "subject and object".
And when faced by the question raised by all his words -
"Did you bring the key?"
- Drummond de Andrade can confidently answer "I did", his quest for the ars poetica having led him to "caves of music and image", where language is concealed in the night. After all, as an Indian proverb says, the poet can reach where the sun cannot.
And when he blesses the poet's diction, saying it is transmuted "by neglect", it is much as Ezekiel says of "the slow movement" which "seems to say much more".
And like all the best poets, Drummond de Andrade had always waited for his words, a very Indian craving, his quest in the curve of time asymptotic till the horizon of his imagination.
Srinjay Chakravarti is a 31-year-old journalist, economist and poet based in Salt Lake City, Calcutta, India. His poetry and prose have appeared in various publications all over the world. His first book of poems has received an award from Australia. Contact e-mail address: srinjchak@hotmail.com
Copyright (c) 2004 Srinjay Chakravarti
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