JIBANANANDA DAS

The Paddy Is Cut: Three Poems

Translated from the Bangla by Souradeep Roy

The paddy is cut

Can’t remember when we cut the paddy— hay lying all over the fields and farms
Bits of torn, dried leaves   broken eggshells— the cold nest of a snake’s shed skin.
Having crossed these elements, there, on that part of the field
some men, acquaintances of mine, are sleeping— how close, how dense they lie.

Someone’s sleeping over there— we’d meet ever so often before,
I’ve done them wrong on matters of the heart so many times;
yet there’s peace: a grasshopper of the greenest densest grass
the dark aftertaste of its thought and questions lingers over today.

Two of us 

‘You haven’t looked for me in a long time— I too haven’t looked
for you in a long time;— yet we are both under the same stars—on the same part
of this planet which receives the same sun; the old trails of this planet disappear,
love too is slowly erased, even the stars die one day,
or do they?’—  saying this he looked at his companion;
on this sunny month of Kartik when the sun consummates with the field
her heart is full of life.

Today, the two of them came together beside the stars which keep staring at the earth and sky
for the first time again—perhaps—yearning for something—solitary in their belief.
Reddish-yellow leaves and, with it,
the darkness inside the branches of the jambu, ashwattha, and banyan, tumble onto the grass;
they lie there peacefully, till the end of time.

Where the sky contains a lot of quiet, where there’s a lot of peace,
where people have come seeking refuge from the stars bearing the debt of time,
after the love that was once in their hearts have ended:
in this wide spread of a barren field are these two; with the tamarisk mango neem nageshwar trees
hemanta has arrived all around them;— the kite’s golden wing has turned beige;
it seems as if the dove’s feathers have fallen—the myna is no longer late in some random errand;
it will lift its hard bright yellow leg and sleep in the dew;
everything is shedding, dying here— taking leave, saying goodbyes due to the cycle of time.

Woman to her companion: ‘I know that the old trails of life gradually disappear;
— but what will our tired hearts live with,
tell me;— one day my rational mind wounded my heart a lot,
and then it withered away; and yet now I wonder
what if our love’s highest peak had not withered—what if love’s wonderful child,
our scarlet longing for each other, had not died, oh, from our souls—’
having said this, this disconsolate being covered her face with her saree’s end
and stood in the middle of the brimming kash forest feeling its weight on its knees.
A yellow saree, pierced with burr, dead grass; hay scattered all over in the month of Aghrayan
seems to fly from everywhere and, upon touching, kneads the skin softly;
a fog has created a roof over her head, dropped some dew;—

The lover thinks: ‘This woman—so beautiful—will find at the end of an ocean of stars;
where I will not be there, nor will there be such beauty, nor disappointment,
no fog anymore—will, on the shore, have a longing produced by her alone—a longing like love
which she’ll find and then suck out of a herd of ambrosial deers.’

You showed

On one fine day
you showed me:
a huge field — the dense heads of palm trees —  miles after miles of expansiveness;
a pensive humanless afternoon breeze
fades into the terracotta wings of a kite in the distant sky;
it comes back again like the tide;
speaks to me from window to window for a long time;
it seems as if the world is a country that lies across a sorcerous ocean.
Then
far away
very far away
this afternoon breeze spreads its legs like an ancient glamorous woman husking grains—
it sings a song, sings a song under the harsh sun.

With each passing afternoon it seems as though entire lifetimes pass by.

The softer moments of an afternoon;
shadows of antelopes, nilgais, deers come and go into a river;
a shadow of a white-doe
like a statue of a custard apple made up of gray kheer
remains still
the entire
afternoon.

Sometimes, smell of wood smeared with sandal-paste burning from a crematorium very far away,
The smell of ghee, the smell of fire;
an impossible emptiness.
Jhau, haritaki, sal trees against the dying sun
Piyashal, piyal, amlaki, debdaru—
in the heart of the wind there is longing, excitement, frothing for life;

 white pigeons who throw some of their whiteness away fly into the moonlight—in shadows,
at night;
an ancient stillness
of the stars among the stars.

There is a lot of darkness in the world beyond death
like the darkness, love and silence of this one.

Jibanananda Das (1899 – 1954) was an Indian poet, writer, novelist and essayist in the Bangla language.

Souradeep Roy is a writer, translator and academic. He is play based on the 1943-44 Bengal famine, How to Make Rice premiered in London in 2022. His earlier play and translation, A Brief Loss of Sanity, was published in the bilingual journal Kaurab. He is also working on his PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, where he is writing a history of the Bengal unit of the Indian Peoples' Theatre Association in the 1940s and the group theatre movement thereafter.