The loneliest poet

                                          By TISHANI DOSHI
READING the poetry of Jibanananda Das is like stumbling upon a labyrinth of mind similar to the kind one imagines Camus's "absurd" man toils through. His poems have all the ingredients of the modern man's anguish: pain, despair, yearning, set against a familiar landscape of the eternal, the eternal in this case being his beloved birthplace of Barisal, East Bengal, now Bangladesh. He approaches the world with the only tools the modern man can bring; the tools of reason, which are powerless to calm the anguish of the absurd man, because for the absurd mind, the world is neither rational nor irrational, it is merely unreasonable, and this conflict is at the very heart of Das's work.

To understand his world, one must first put into perspective the fact that he appeared on the Bengali poetry scene 40 years after Rabindranath Tagore, and comparisons to the venerable elder are inevitable. When put side by side, Tagore is the "traditionalist" while Das takes the "modernist" back seat, and while both poets are driven by an intense love for Bengal, the Bengal that is revealed to us in both cases is completely different. Das's poems are plagued by the modernist's desire to escape; his Bengal is achingly beautiful; haunting, savage, sad. Tagore said that "Our part is to appear on the stage of the air, to sound out tambourines and fling flashes of laughter." Jibanananda Das does not come storming out of his poems this way, instead, he's the wistful observer, his voice a quiet whisper in the background saying, this is how it should be, yet it is not... Almost in the same way Joe Winter deprecates his translation skills saying, this is how it should sound, but does not.

In the introduction to Naked Lonely Hand, Winter repeatedly warns us of his failings. Above all, he has been unable, he says. Unable to catch the timelessness, the special quality of awareness, the culture-specific atmosphere that inhabits Das's poems. He condemns his work as bland, lacking the right "Bengali seasoning." The job of the translator, he says, is to dive cleanly into a poem and fashion out a "sculpture of sound, that if it is finished will flow." For all his self-critical remarks, he has managed to keep original rhyme and meter for the most part and demonstrated quite clearly that he has indeed "lived" with these poems. In parts he has achieved that rare combination of technical brilliance while retaining the poems' original vision and momentum. Take these lines from "Songs of Leisure": 

The sad time of mornings is filled with the sound of idle flies;

By an enchanter's river, it seems, the country of the world lies.
Taking their leave on all sides here cluster all sunset's rays;
From the sea of summer floating comes the song of the sleep of eyes;

If poems are an approach to human reality, then Das's own life must be examined briefly. Unhappily married with two children, Winter tells us his career included a short spell in journalism and long periods of unemployment. He taught English at universities in Calcutta, Delhi and Barisal. After partition he left Barisal and never returned. When he was 55 he was hit by a tram crossing the street in Calcutta and died. He left behind five published books of poems and a large body of unpublished prose and poetry of which, Rupasi Bangla (Bengal the Beautiful), a collection of 60 sprawling one-sentence Petrarchan sonnets remain most astounding for their jagged language, meticulous rhyming structure and the uninhibited outpouring of love for rural Bengal which doesn't allow you to pause for breath as you read them.

In Das's poetry there is an overwhelming sense of longing to return — to that which is pure, to that which is the beginning, to that place which cannot be reached. It is a world inhabited with mythical women: Behula, Manasa, Kankabati, Lahana, Maitreye, and that most famous one of them all, Banalata Sen. Suicidal, fierce, fairies, women rising from the dead, eternally beautiful, conquerors of civilisations with lances in hand, stationed at the edge of distant skies. Women with cane-fruit-pale-sad eyes who haunt him. Women whom, like he says of Sankhamala, "once the world knows her, then it does not." His rivers are mythical too: Bonjhiri, Jolihjiri, Jalangi, Kalidaha, Kirtinasha, Nildana, Pakhli, but the ultimate manifestation is of course, woman as river, and for Das this is the Dhansiri, the very real river that runs through his beloved Barisal:

I will come back again to Bengal, to this Dhansiri riverside
Maybe not as a man — but a shalik, or white-crest kite;
Or a dawn crow maybe, new-rice-time, in misty flight
To this jackfruit-tree-shade one Kartik day will glide

Nature plays an important role in the imagery of his poems, but it is not of the ordinary kind, it is accompanied with a separation in his mind between that which he desires and the reality of the world that disappoints. The juxtaposition of village versus city plays out the timeless contradiction between nostalgia for unity versus a fragmented universe. Das is carrying Barisal within him but he approaches the human condition with the mind of an urbanised intellectual, so how can he not be trapped in the contradiction that bind these two worlds together, that coexist, despite of? Thus, he must reconcile these two things in his poetry: how "one of the many thousand village nights of Bengal" can almost become a woman — "long-eyed, soft-smiling," and simultaneously, how the beggars in Bentick Street reckon up the world's wrongs and rights, killing lice in their hair, "for the land they will go to now is called the soaring river/where a wretched bone-picker and his bone come and discover/their faces in water — till looking at faces is over."

Das's poetry is a search for awareness, for light, and for this he must sift through the darkness that is filled with half-truths, weariness and existentialist despair. Sadness and pain serve as the main trajectory with which he takes us to the other shore of understanding, where he must go and where we, as readers must follow. "We have wrung out the value of this long-lived world," he says in "1946-47", a long poem about partition. "There's no place for the soul in the world/today there is no significant knowledge... there's no glimmer of light... . There is only a soundless deathless surrounding darkness."

I like what Winter calls "blessed despair." He implies that there are two darknesses, one in which man has imprisoned himself, and another, quite separate darkness, in which we must examine the reality of the world, the chaos and brutality that surrounds us, and make not just sense out of it, but transform it into beauty.

I do not want to know any more where emperor turns clown —
Where Babylon once more is ground down small;
The colour of the fire of soldier's torches to my eyes' edge do not bring;
Stop the war drums — let the buffoon of kingdoms and empires duck into dark like an owl's wing.

In his translations, Winter seems to have encountered despairs of his own. "A Jibanananda poem scrapes through one. It hurts. And then one is owned by it." All too true.