Dawn • Jibanananda Das

Personal Translation

Just like Shamsur Rahman, and a lot of classical and modern Bengali poets, I was introduced to Jibanananda Das by dint of school textbooks. If I recall correctly, it was in Grade 7 when the first Das poem got introduced to the students proper; afterwards, in each progressing year all the way up to high school, a Das poem or two were common regimen for students who hadn't stepped into higher education yet. The first impression was certainly striking for me, I noticed a profoundly intimate language in his works. Sometime in middle school, I came across another of his poems, a translated-to-English one on a newspaper and it was perhaps the time I got the incentive properly to hunt down a Complete Works collection. Although the national curriculum only had focused on the "romantic musings on nature's beauty" aspect, it's only a fraction of the sum. When I was reading his works in depth, I came across a bold collection of poems that can be categorised as belonging to high modernism and surrealism. And I was engulfed in the stunning breadth of a poetic lens where topics like phenomenology, metaphysics, political history were the norm, notwithstanding his popular "nature's poet" branding, with which the poet cast a glance over that which cannot be discerned by traditional prose. Further down the rabbit hole, I was all the more enchanted when I had come across some outlier works where descriptors like "absurd fatalism", "decadent Pagan sexuality" or even "cosmic horror" would not be too far off. Across this massive span, however, the attribute that remains constant is the unshakable sense of solitude. Although there are some differences, I think that Das' life and works were not very dissimilar to that of Franz Kafka. If Kafka had successfully prophesised the absurd bureaucracy and surveillance of the present day Corporate-Cabinet coalition in works like Amerika and The Trial, then Das had woundedly written the elegies for the final hours of Ouroboros in works like The Ancient Gods and Dawn.

Dawn;  

The sky's sprawl, although soft, is coloured of grasshopper's blue  

Around and around, guava and sweetsops' green, blurred as when some rushed on a parrot's quill.  

A lone star still hangs there:  

As on a rural mating bed, and the twilightmost of their girls, 

Just like her;  

Or the Egyptian femme who dropped a pearl from her breast  

Onto my blue tankard;

Back there, thousands upon thousands years back, on one such night—

Like that pearl, and like that night,

A star still persists on the sky.

Agrarians have kept fire alit on fields, all night, to keep from the cold—  

A fire red like cockflowers,

Yet persists beyond those figleaves' gallops.

In the worn light of the sun, the reds linger submitted,

They have turned, like a skinny starling's wish and blemishes.  

Under the cascading dews of this dawnbreak

The forest and the sky,  

Like a peacock's blue wings, 

Glinting in the bluest of blurs.

Dawn;  

All night keeping from the leopardess' grip, keeping himself from going beneath—

Under a starless night, 

Through the mahogany of darks, the stark forests of Sundari and Arjunas;

Going and going, 

This beautiful dawn longed for by this beautiful, brown deerie!  

Come down has he, for this dawn and all its alleys.  

And eating from the reach of dewed grass, severing them from mouth to mouth, 

A pommelo as if.  

He comes down again, on sharp infliction of the river's cold.  

A sleepless, tired body to render from its coldness to emotions,

Or to cut through the womb of the dark to this bright muse of lightness' weaving;

Showering them with euphoria of life.  

Under this blue sky, coming down as a golden harpoon, the sun's—

Or to be let though this stunt of boldest stupor,

Or to be resonated upon does upon does of this transient wild hearth.

A strange sound—

The river's light then red like red clotted flowers.  

The fire resonates again— comes down prepared deer's warm, red meat.  

Under the starfilled sky, on their railings of grasses: many a old story, many some old stories relain;  

Smoke of cigarettes,  

Crudely aligned picture of some men and their heads, 

Unsorted—

Some zig-zagged rifles— coldness— 

Tremorless, innocent sleep...

Junktitled #8
Melancholia Mk. 2 XVI / Justine