Jibananada Das’s poem translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam
GIVEN THE BOON OF ETERNITY
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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