‘Ghumiye Poribe Aami’ (I’ll fall asleep) from Jibananda Das’s poetry collection, Ruposhi Bangla (1934), has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam.
I’ll fall asleep one day on one of your star-studded nights.
Perhaps youth will still stick to my soul —- perhaps
I’ll be in my prime then —- that will be so nice! But sleep
Overwhelms me now—Bengal’s grassy green bed lies beneath.
Eyelids shut. Tucked within mango tree leaves, Kach insects doze.
I too will doze off like them in this grassy land I love—- in silence!
The stories stored in my soul will eventually fade. New ones —-
New festivals -— will replace the old —- in life’s honey-tinged slight.
In your forever busy minds -— when finally, you, youthful ones,
Will be done tearing grassy stems and leaves -— when Manikmala
Will come here to pick up crimson-red bat and kamranga fruits
On some mellow autumnal morning -- when yellow shefali flowers
fall on this grass as shaliks and wagtails fly far, far away,
I’ll feel the sun -- the clouds —- lying down in death-like stupor!
Jibananada Das (1899-1954) was a Bengali writer, who now is named as one of the greats. In his lifetime, he wrote beautiful poetry, novels, essays and more. He believed: “Poetry and life are two different outpouring of the same thing; life as we usually conceive it contains what we normally accept as reality, but the spectacle of this incoherent and disorderly life can satisfy neither the poet’s talent nor the reader’s imagination … poetry does not contain a complete reconstruction of what we call reality; we have entered a new world.”
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Fakrul Alam is an academic, translator and writer from Bangladesh. He has translated works of Jibanananda Das and Rabindranath Tagore into English and is the recipient of Bangla Academy Literary Award (2012) for translation and SAARC Literary Award (2012).
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