Rabindra K. Swain is my father and also the translator of Soubhagyakumar Misra’s Dva Suparna (Ketaki Books, 2026).

The poet Soubhagyakumar Misra, in his mid-eighties now, is steeped in Upanishadic wisdom, from where the title is drawn, as well as in the Western canons of literature. Besides being an Indian poet writing in English, my father has been a consistent translator from his mother tongue, Odia, to English. I was privileged to be a witness to the translation process of Dva Suparna as it was going on. 

The translator decided not to provide any glossary for the poems’ references to the mythic past or to contemporary scenarios. Rather, he allows the poems to speak for themselves: “Before the rippling water went still, / before I melted in my reflection, / he called me by my name / and seeing the Malati creeper wilting / outside the Ashram, / he chastised me a little.”

In such cases, the lack of glossary doesn’t deter the understanding and appreciation of the poem, which springs from the individual to the universal. Such is the force of Soubhagyakumar Misra’s poetry.

Dva Suparna has retained its title in English translation. The collection was originally written in Odia, a language spoken by over forty-seven million people in Odisha, an eastern state of India, with over a thousand years of literature. The translator says nothing more than offering its implication on the inner title page, which runs like this: “The individual soul (jiva) is a bird sharing a tree with the divine and suffers through attachments to the world’s fruits before realizing its oneness with the Divine and attaining immortality.” Both the translator and the poet must have agreed about retaining the title in order to give a new flavor to English literature.

Dva Suparna was originally written in Odia, a language spoken by over forty-seven million people in Odisha, with over a thousand years of literature.

Although the title reads as two birds seemingly in eternal opposition, one eating and the other watching, the poet creates his own metaphor in the first poem itself: “If the sky were not as big as our old sky, only the white bird could fly / only the black bird could fly / never both the white bird and / the black bird at the same time,” thereby infusing a sense of coexistence of the quotidian and the spiritual. Misra’s use of plain incidents allows him to address difficult questions of existence without falling back on commitments. “Rain in Bhanja Vihar” depicts a man returning home soaked in rain. His wife says, “Ish, you got wet!” which points to regular domestic existence. At the same time, the speaker draws comfort from the realization (posed as a question): “Will the memory of this evening’s trouble, / the mountain, the snake’s hood, / umbrella / be a strong shield against / all defeats of the future?” 

In the first poem and the last one, the black bird and the white bird redirect our attention to both feasting and fasting. There is a connecting thread between them, interspersed with indulgence, indifference, moral poverty, and suffering, in poems, such as “M.T.P.,” “Somnath,” “Iran,” and “Sulochana’s Father.” Misra takes up ordinary characters and creates memorable situations and moods out of their lives. In “M.T.P.,” he talks about an economically disadvantaged husband who takes his wife for a tubectomy in an indifferent way. The sarcasm drips through when the lady doctor admonishes him, “You are an educated person.”. The poet’s voice is still more deadpan, thereby doubling upon the self-inflicted misery. 

But the two mythic women characters he deals with stand the test of time, anytime, anywhere. They are Ahalya and Shakuntala. These two eponymous poems once again take us to the near-root of men’s outlook toward women and, in turn, women’s built-in support system. An unassailable serenity reclaims the sense of womanhood, as Shakuntala says: “I came to my familiar riverbank. / I asked the boatman to untie the boat / and arrange the net, / … I asked the star hiding at the bottom / of my belly / to come out and play with me.” The poem ending the collection suggests that all our quests for finality are an illusion: “All the birds drop like this, / all happinesses end like this, / all the time passes like this, / but it seemed to me this is not— no, not at all— / the same bird listening to whose chirping / I had come this far.”

A distinctive feature of Misra’s poetic practice is to bring in a series of anecdotes, fragmented ideas, employing passive voice, to shift the essence toward the actions of humanity, while implying immediacy of tone in referencing a future time, which as a whole creates a volatile imagery where the world eludes certainty. The poet draws a well-balanced picture of contemporary lives in raw moments. On that note, the poem “Misunderstanding” begins abruptly, as all mundane human conflicts do: “all his arguments are fragile like the eggshells. / the words are smithereens of glass / eager to spill more blood.” Misra’s language is fragmented and implicit, and Swain’s translation is lyrical and consistent. Laying thrust on the consistency in coexistence, the poet’s take on the theme is exemplary in the poem “Door”: “Do not open the door. / Knowledge belongs to disbelief, to wound, / to the log drifting to the shore, to the need to sow / the seeds of mustard to trace the return path.” Alluding to the coming of God, Lord Jagannath, to the throne at Puri, the poet’s journey resonates with T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi.” Here, in Misra’s context, the self-sacrificial surrender is absolute.

Let our pursuit, however noble it is, go on, but the poet reminds us that nothing is worthwhile if it is not laced with compassion for those who suffer.

Let our pursuit, however noble it is, go on, but the poet reminds us that nothing is worthwhile if it is not laced with compassion for those who suffer. The psychological toll of the one who feasts is also of the one who suffers: “Whatever we break— / dolls, families, bottles, love relations— all of them would, / one day, take their seats around the dead body / of Sulochana’s father.” To drive his point home, the poet comes back again and again to his pet theme, the bird: “The bird lies before me. Would I be wrong to expect / you to bend at the same time as I do to take out the arrow?” The kind of compassion the poet seeks from readers traces its root to the killing of Krauncha birds in copulation by a hunter—the sight of which thousands of years ago helped Valmiki compose an epic, The Ramayan. 

Thus, the veracity of the collection lies not in being accepted or abandoned but in animating the creative vision. That, perhaps, forms the core of illusion or of clarity: of living, of fighting, of dying, of holding onto morals, more so, of the poet.

Ravenshaw University