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Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) is wildly popular in West
Bengal and Bangladesh. His poetry is modernist in its
despair and doubt and difficulty, more traditional in
its affiliation to Nature. But never has Nature spoken
with such a sharp sense of the actual. This selection of
50 of Das’s poems is the first in English to follow the
forms of the original Bengali, the loose long line often
employed, the breathless sentence, the jagged structure,
the underpinning rhyme. He is indescribable, except by
an example of his work. Here is the title poem to this
collection. (It follows the original in its lack of
rhyme and in every main particular.) Phalgun is a month,
mid-February to mid-March.
Again in the Phalgun sky the darkness
lowers:
as if a mysterious sister of light, this
darkness.
Like that lady who has always loved me
and yet
whose face I have not looked upon,
that very
lady,
the darkness deepens in the Phalgun sky.
I
seem to hear a tale of a lost city,
the beauty of an
ash-grey palace wakes in my heart.
On the Indian Ocean shore
or else beyond the
Mediterranean coast
or out beyond the Sea of
Tyre
not now, but once, a certain city stood,
a
certain palace,
a palace of the richest
furnishings:
Persian carpets, cashmere shawls,
round-sheer pearls and coral
of the Bering
wave,
my lost heart, my dead eyes, my extinct dreams
and desires,
and you lady –
all was once in that
world.
Orange sunlight was everywhere,
cockatoos, doves
were everywhere,
everywhere the deep shade of
mahogany-leaves;
orange sunlight
everywhere,
orange sunlight;
and you were there;
for God knows how many centuries I have not seen the
beauty
of your face,
nor sought it.
Phalgun’s darkness is here with a story from over the
sea,
a pain-filled outline of exquisite domes and
arches,
the smell of pears, now gone,
ash-pale
parchments in profusion of lion-hide and
deer-skin,
glass panes rainbow-coloured,
and at
curtains coloured like peacocks’ fanned-out tails
a
momentary glimpse
of rooms, inner rooms, more rooms,
further rooms –
a timeless stillness and wonder.
Curtains, carpets spread with the blood-red sweat of
the sun!
Blood-crimson glasses of watermelon
wine!
Your naked lonely hand. . .
your naked lonely hand.
The poetry of Jibanananda Das resists generalisation.
It is very much an experience of its own. (The name
means life-delight – jiban-ananda; das means servant.)
Now it is possible to read him in English with the ease
and fluidity of the original. Joe Winter’s Naked Lonely
Hand is published by Meteor Books, in agreement with
Anvil Press Poetry, for sale exclusively in India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and in open market
in all other territories outside the European Community,
U.S.A., Canada and Australia. |
