⚝ Intercepted At March 18, 2026
হাওয়ার রাত (A Windy Night)
Jibanananda Das
Personal Translation (Circa 2024)
Last night was of a lucid wind— an uncountably starry night;
All night they played— jockey on my canopy;
It was swelling like a monsoon bay,
And on some cases,
It went on to sever a long count to the sky;
And on one or two cases,
I felt as if the canopy was being— in stations of my sublimed sleep—
The canopy was not over my head but,
Spangled to the sky:
There was no canopy over my head, on a local star it was smoothing like a white heron;
Flying!
Such splendid was the sky of last night.
All the dead stars woke up last night— with uncompensated space below them;
And I saw all the dead dear faces of the world, on it and beyond then.
On the summit of the dark sky, on figs of the trees, lover kites abound—
And like the tears of the kites,
The sky was glittering,
And all the dead stars.
Under and yonder moonshine, like the warm leopardquilt around Babylon's queen, stars were bustling on the sky.
It was such stunning— the sky of last night.
The stars which died eons ago, they too brought their dead skies there—
Into and about my window's calibre.
The beauties I saw dying in Assyria, Egypt—
Dying on a hopeless deed,
They too arose and assembled on the sky;
In the fastened bore of it, in the hassly fogs of it, carrying harpoons and flailings.
To trample over death?
To express the deep joys of being?
To erect the ghastly faces of being in love?
I became frozen into a standstill,
The deaf, blue torture of the sky severed me as if.
On the restlessness of the sky: sets of gallant wings;
Like earthworms, they effaced all along it.
And the wind with all its tallying intensities
Came down upon, through in,
And about my windowpane.
Shiye! Shiye!—
Galloping like lion's steady roars upon the jets of zebras' reach.
My heart swelled from the smells of broad green leaves,
Horzionscaped from the brave odour of days.
Like sexual roars of tigresses,
Finding satisfaction from the earth's broad braveness;
In the debauched cries of lifenesses.
There— then—
My heartstrings came undone! And my heartballoons,
Severed from the soil,
Sailed beyond the night's brunts.
Bringing its blue sail,
And then tethered to a far star,
Like a fierce vulture—
Slipping it around and about.
Junktitled #122
In memoriam Jibanananda Das III / নির্জন স্বাক্ষর