Kiriti Sengupta (Translator)
Approaching the Bundle of Love
I
The long night brakes your lenience.
I’m a silver salver and you, the flowers
arranged in it. The lights play gracefully;
the shadows as well. You are etched as
a fault in my memory.
Neither a lover, nor am I a poet.
Leaving the doors ajar the semblance shivers
in guilt.
A few lines written along the bends of the path
to remembrance…
They mourn—they whine,
drenched in the understanding of poetry.
II
I wake up with a sense of culpability
when you weep in sleep. Let your decay
diminish into dust as you detest me.
For several times I’ve been mortgaged to
my lifetime. Soaking showers from the past
I lose heart.
III
I walk back as the city lies
facing a side. You endorse
the doubt and descend deep
following the rhythm. Wrapped
in fog, a few words evoke the self.
I resonate across the corner.
You awake from a side.
IV
Music in the reminiscences is a defense.
Conservation dwells in water.
My transit toward monsoon stirs your soul.
Let it be.
I seek your approval—
O letters, you haven’t touched yet
a name intensely blue.
V
It’s night for the sleepless eyes. Mantra rises
to leave its mark. Give me your hands, I’ll let
you grasp the depth and length of the passage,
and its curves where movements halt.
VI
Only the nerves have been allotted
to the God.
The almighty is not a stone, or stems
of a tree…it’s not the soil either.
Until death we are nourished by
the mother’s inhaled air, which has
devotion, mercy, and all remedies.
VII
I can die of being liable for writing poetry.
I won’t accept defeat, no matter how sharp
your ways are…
Scenes may have a hidden spear, or
you can get plots ready with other weapons,
I’ll hurl words to make them blunt.
VIII
Liquor has seeped through the flesh.
Inebriation circulates in the stream of
blood. I’ve consumed several glasses.
Your taste didn’t help me reach a realization.
Once again I become a traveler and the road
breaks me to pieces.
Trance
The breeze meets your quiet lips to become stone deaf. You too have placed hands on a fragile branch. Not in your bloodstream but straight to your heart, your emotions return. Nobody has noticed yet: a river flows along the border of lifespan. For some time your eyes witness their initiation into shower. The vast moonlight sits on your navel to play a violin gently. I’m no longer a renunciate; you have a belly full of sunshine. What if it gets into a trance? What if it is induced to further stimulation? At the threshold the young cloud looks at its own lifetime. It flutters wings under your sleep and adds to the slumber. You are nowhere around my pain, but a period of time…some lights and shadows—the time for living a grief.
Note: English translations of Gourob Chakraborty’s Bangla poems published with permission from the translator.