(If some of the words are incomprehensible, it probably is due to poor print quality of the original from which the text has been scanned.]
World Literature Today
Kazi Nazrul Islam
Translation: Syed Sajjad Hossain
[Translator's Note: Nazrul Islam's obsevations on world literature written over 57 years ago in 1933, are remarkable not for his judgments on individual writers but for the light that they throw on the breadth of his literary interests. Many of those whom he characterises as giants no longer seem so. Some have been completely forgotten. But he quite correctly identified the two major trends in early twentieth century literature as realism and romanticism. What is also remarkable in a person who received no formal education is the extent of his knowledge of contemporary world affairs.]
Any observer who takes a close look at literature in the world today is bound to be struck by the fact that it has two distinct aspects. On the one hand it has the aspect of Shelley’s Skylark or Milton’s Birds of Paradise, eternally soaring upwards to explore a heaven which has no affinity with the earth’s grime and dirt, celebrating a world of fantasy and dreams. On the other hand it has the semblance of an offspring of Mothr Earth herself, clinging to its parents in the way a frightened child seeks the comfort of its mother’s bosom in the dark, or the way the myriad roots of a plant or tree appear to hold the soil in a deep affectionate embrace.
Not that literature in its aspect as a grimy child loathes Beauty and has no hankering after heaven. But it will on no account forsake this poor earth. It seems to be saying that if there is a heaven somewhere it needs to be brought down by our efforts to where we belong; the Earth has always been a slave to Heaven; we must, it claims, turn Heaven into a slave to the Earth. The gods in heaven feel amused at this arrogance and deride it as a gesture of pride in the demons, a madness in the low-born. The others react in their turn by scoffing at the boastfulness of the high lords and the baseness of the greedy.
It was thus that a war broke out between the two camps after the Great War.
The celestial gods frown and say that the arrogance of the demons has never had a chance against them.
The demon child on earth declares with gesture of defiance that what it demands is an explanation of why this so-called arrogance has always been humbled; it would like a show-down once and for all.
Ranged on either side are towering figures: Noguchi, Yeats, Tagore and other dreamers in opposition to Gorky, Johan Bojer, Bernard Shaw, Benavente and their likes.
These are the two most pronounced trends in world literature. It is not that there is none other. But what lies between the two extreme is comparable to an infant which loves to hear about heaven on this earth itself, whose heart is move to compassion when it is told about the sufferings of the imprisoned princes of the fairy tale, and which longs to mount a winged horse and set off to liberate her. It loves its mother but but fights no campaigns against heaven. This child does not think that heaven is a rival to earth; it is but a rich aunt, immensely wealthy. It know too that gods who dwell in heaven are unaware of suffering, that they are externally happy; but it does entertain any grudge against them on this account. It sings on its sufferings apart with only its mother for its listeners, and lets its tears soak the soil around it but it never tries to hurl defiance at the sun. To this group belong writers like Leonid Andreyev, Knut Hamsun, Raymont. They like Bernard Shaw and Anatole France are realists who have not steered clear of poison but they have assimilated it fully like Siva and have not been forced to throw it up.
Those who believe in rebellion and destruction want suffering to be ended not through an evolutionary process but by a sanguinary revolution. They would like the world to be remade in its entirety, and seek to replace it by something they would themselves create by their own labours.
Keats spoke for the dreamers when wrote:
"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." Endymion or when he said: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty."
To this the answer came from Whitman:
Not physiognomy alone –
Of physiology from top to toe I sing,
The modern man I sing."
While the great war did not spread beyond the Arabian Sea, this war of ideas is being fought everywhere in every country.
Capitalist Ravana and his bourgeois army with their insatiable greed for exploitation characterise the realists as the followers of Hanuman, the money god. Sita, they declare, rightfully belongs to the strong in the way Proserpine belong to Pluto, the king of the underworld. They set fire to the tails of Hanuman’s followers to punish them for daring to liberate Sita. The latter, that is, Hanuman’s followers, for their part retaliate by setting Ravana’s capital Sri Lanka ablaze.
World literature today presents the spectacle of Hanuman’s followers leaping about the same time that Sri Lanka is burning. If you cannot perceive this conflict clearly, all you have to do is to clean your lenses; no telescope would be necessary.
The Ramayana has immortalised Hanuman as Sita’s rescuer. He is adored all over India. Who can tell whether the realists who are heroically facing indignity and humiliation today will be similarly immortalised in the future?
I invite you now to accompany me on a journey to Sri Lanka. I have no intention of asking the Big Ones to accept his invitation and risk humiliation.
The first thing we notice on arrival is reminders of the date 14th December 1825 linked with the name of Merezhkovsky; it is also a date which recalls the banishment to Siberia of over a hundred poets and writers by Czar Nicholas. It was on the same date that Pushkin, one of the greatest poets of the world, was hanged. (Pushkin was not hanged; he died much later .. Translator)
But the date also marks a turning point in history, the emergence of the first songs of revolts against tyranny, the beginning of a violent revolutionary struggle. Saraswati’s lyre gives way to the sword. The struggle was soon joined by the oppressed in their thousands like Cobras responding to a snake-charmer’s lute.
Dostoyevsky wrote his Crime and Punishment during his exile in Siberia. Raskolnikov is a symbol of author’s own terrible sufferings, and Sonia an image of Russia herself, dishonored and wounded. In saying to Sonia, "I bow down not to thee but to suffering humanity in you." Raskolnikov uttered a sentiment which stirred the world to its depths. It was an expression of deep pent-up feelings which swept away Tolostoy’s platitude about God and Religion and let loose a deluge with the whole of humanity awaiting the birth of a new day on a floating ark like Noah’s.
The deluge was succeeded by a cyclone in the form of Maxim Gorky. Chekhov’s theatre now went to pieces, and the dramatist himself welcomed the new figure. Dostoyevsky hailed him as the person whose arrival he had been awaiting. Tolostoy, maddened by rage and fury, condemned Gorky as a man who "has one god and that is Satan." But the so-called Satan triumphed; Tolostoy’s condemnation left him wholly unscathed.
Gorky vowed not to be content with singing the triumph of pain and suffering, but to retaliate and wash the earth in blood that it might be purified. Millions responded to that vow, and the earth seemed to writhe like a serpent crushed under the wheels of a chariot.
The prophecies of Karl Marx, uttered in a country hundreds of miles away, sapped the foundations of the Czar's palace in Russia. Gone now are the Czar and his empire, and the entire capitalist order collapsed under the impact of the hammer and the sickle. Gorky himself, like Parsuranm, the wielder of the mythical axe, is probably feeling tired and exhausted today and may even have been ousted from the scene by a new generation of leaders. But his influence reigns supreme throughout Russia.
In the hands of this magician, Marx's economics has been transformed into a helpmeet(?) to progress; sterile stone has been changed to a Taj Mahal, and the world appears bathed in a serene light such as issues from a pale moon at dawn.
It is difficut to say whether Gorlky's successors have added anything worthwhile to his achievement.
Scandinavia must be mentioned next, for Norway claims to be a pioneer in the world of ideas in the same way as Russia. France and Germany also have a claim in this respect which cannot be ignored. Not Knut Hamsun and Johan Bojer alone but nearly all realist writers are in a sense the spiritual descendants of Ibsen. Hamsun and Bojer are part-dreamer and part-realist. The Suan of Bojer's Great Hunger reminds us of the ecstasy of which India's Upanishads speak. His prisoner who sang symbolises the Upanishadic exaltation which transcends both vice and virtue. Hamsun's Growth of the Soil carries echoes of Vedic hymns. The anguish and suffering which these writers paint, the sighs of the oppressor which resonate in their writings like the sound of weeping willows, have no parallel in the world's literature across the ages.
The stories of Legerlof provide some relief from the oppressive feeling which this literature arouses, and we welcome it with the eagerness ot a child which forgets its misery in the fairy tales it hears from its grand-mother.
Russia offers us the spectacle of Revolution, Scandinavia the spectacle of meek helpless suffering. Russia comes armed with a sword dripping with blood, Norway with pleading tearful eyes. Russia wants to end suffering by violence; Norway counsels us to pray to God for redress in the belief that He would not countenance injustice.
The unbelievers mock at prayer, make fun of tears; their sarcasm seems to change rain to hail-storm. Behind them stand Bernard Shaw, Anatole France and Benavente, while behind these figures their lurks shadow of Freud. Shaw dismisses love as nothing but an expression of the sex instinct, the urge towards motherhood. Anatole France wants the young to study Bazac and Zola first before trying to write.
Benavente is the least sarcastic in this group. He would smile but melts into tears. His advice given through the character Leonardo is that to forget the dead one must bury then deep in the earth. Man weeps only as long as he has hope to sustain him; he had better die if upon the extinction of hope he is unable to burst into a guffaw of laughter. Perhaps Benavente would regard the Taj as an attempt by Shahjahan to forget his love.
Benavente has no pity but he is no unbeliever like Shaw.
Unconcerned with all these two writers have quietly continued to chronicle the simple joys and privations of peasant life. One is a pole, Raymont; the other an Italian, Grazia Deledda.
But we cannot long enjoy these idylls. We are soon interrupted by a throb of the war-drums, signalling a conflict which is many centuries old. We see the fascist and imperialist armies advancing, with D'Annunzio, Kippling and others in their vanguard, Mussolini and his Black Shirts with them holding their banner high.
If from weariness I tend to close my eyes in sleep, I am awakened by the sweet voice of the dreamer Noguchi from afar, speaking of the sound of the bell that leaves the bell itself. He seems to be saying that he is not interested in the songs I sing for their own sake. He would rather savour the deep silences which come after, a message which lulls me back to sleep to the strains of hymns in honour of beauty in the rnidst of grime and dirt. I find myself awaiting a glorious new day as I listen in my grims to Persian nightingale and Arabian cameldrivers's airs or the voices of veiled Turkish maidens.
Meanwhile a mud-slinging match has broken out around me. Involuntarily in my sleep I cry, "Thou wast not for death, immortal bird."
Source: Kazi Nazrul Islam: A New Anthology by Rafiqul Islam (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1990)