Translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam
If I Get to Live Forever
(Ananta Jebon Pai Jodi)
If I get to live forever — then forever, I’ll be all alone —
If I return to the paths of the world, I’ll see green grass
Sprouting — will see yellow grass scattering — the sky
Whitening in the morning — like a tattered munia bird,
Breast blood - stained in the evening — again and again I’ll see stars
And view a strange woman untying braided hair and leaving
Alas, her face devoid of traces of the setting sun’s soft glow
If I get to live forever — forever, I’ll walk the ways of the world
All alone. If I ever return to the world’s pathways, I’ll see
Trams, buses, dust. Innumerable slums and, broken bowls too —
Dark and dirty lanes; fights, people swearing; squinted eyes
Rotten prawns; I’ll see a whole lot of things interminably
And yet all this time I won’t get to meet you again — for eternity!
If I have eternal Life
( Anante Jebon Jodi)
Given the boon of eternity, I would walk the ways of the world eternally.
All, all alone — what if I would see lush green grass in full bloom then?
And what if I beheld the yellowing grass withering away — And view
The sky full of wan white clouds at dawn? Like a tattered munia bird
Blood reddened breast in the evening — I would see the stars repeatedly;
I would see an unknown woman’s hair drifting away from a loosened bun;
A woman who would leave — with a face bereft of the evening sun’s glow.
Jibanananda 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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