By Madhusree Chatterjee, IANS,
Book: “Unmasked Questions”; Author: Surender Bhutani; Publisher: Wydawca Indo-Polish Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Warsaw-based Urdu poet Surender Bhutani’s new anthology of English poetry addresses posers on religion, love, freedom, the changing world order, conflicts, metaphysics, literature and even economy – spanning the cycle of human sensibilities and the forces that govern life in this epochal era.
Bhutani, who has penned six anthologies of poetry and is often hailed as a leading Urdu poet by critics, delves into the dialectics of existentialist philosophy in his first compilation of English poetry, “Unmasked Questions”.
“One man’s passion for godhood/Consumed countless lives/Leaving behind a single image of a martyr!/This vain passion nurses/The pride of nations…,” he writes in “New Religion”, an Urdu sonnet translated by D.R. Goyal.
In his profound spiritual scape of the new religious order, the poet sees the prophet silenced by the rain of stones and the demise of truth till someone decides to rake it from “history after the passage of time to write about it”. And create new godheads.
“Images of truth will be carved on the walls/And the crop of new Churches will grow! Then, this new philosophy will lapse into a tradition and the stones will be chiselled into gods,” he continues.
Some of his interpretations verge on laments laden with pessimism and a heavy sadness.
The slim volume is multilingual. Bhutani’s English sonnets are juxtaposed against their pithy Polish translations by Boguslaw Zakrzewski, a veteran diplomat and a Sanskrit scholar.
Bhutani, who has practised journalism for the past three decades, is an expert on affairs of the Arab World, Eastern Europe and erstwhile Soviet Union. He writes for IANS.
The poet, whose verses had earlier been translated into English by Janusz Krzyzowski and into Romanian by George Anca, took to writing in English two years ago.
“After writing Urdu poems for 45 years, I switched to English unexpectedly in August 2007. Perhaps, I felt exhausted after repeating old subjects because of the narrowness of the language of Urdu poetry,” he said.
“Then it became a deluge from a drought. An avalanche of metaphors and parables started coming into my mind. It was a win-win situation for a self-ironist or critics may say: it became a comic routine,” he added.
The poet, as his work suggests, is a man of global outlook which sometimes peeps through the curtain of bleakness that engulfs his poetry. He prays: “Let life move beyond irony/Let there be some space/For us to breathe without irritation.”