A translation of three Bengali poems of Jibananda Das by Professor Fakrul Alam
THE GREAT WAR IS OVER
The Great War is over
And yet there is left its vast gloom
Our skies, light and society’s soul have been overcast
One has to intuit whatever light there is every day
The sky is dark; society vacuous; Existence
Disgraced; love dead; blood flowing fountain-like;
Knowledge becoming the bearer of an immense load of corpses
And of its own self as well!
GAFUR
“Gafur” I called out to him silently, and yet—
What sticks to my ears—wordless outbursts
Aren’t really artificial—incongruous—frosty –
“Where have your oxen wandered ?”
“They died a long time ago!”
It’s as if someone had lost a twin brother,
Or as if Hanifa was no more—didn’t seem to be
Anything anywhere anymore.
Gafur’s mouth returned to its normal shape silently,
As if a vast expanse of land had been walled off!
A NOBODY WALKS…
A nobody wanted to walk down the path as always.
How then could those closest to him get lost forever,
And disappear in some underground World?
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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