“TODAY”
By JIBANANDA DAS
(A translation by Basudha Chakravarty from the original Bengali poem by Jibananda Das, who wrote it shortly before his tragic death
in an accident.)
You
seek the way that is the only way:
I
seek it no longer!
In
endless vacuum at last
I
have got some thing to cling to, with my heart, my mind;
Below
Stands the tiny, thatched cottage.
Behind
it flows the river tittering among the woods;
Her
water is muddy, clear, whirling:
It
has the likeness of a known kinsman.
Sometimes
it comes to standstill.
It
has, clasped in its arms, the field, the paddy, the growth
Of
pan leaves,”
the movements of king-fishers–
And
thus it has spread about its female-like body.
Nobody
is in my room–
But
there are some classical books;
There
are also paintings–the grandest of their kind:
Work
of four or five concentrated artists,
Artists
of
There
are also innumerable nests of birds
in the neem,
black-berry, nag-keshar trees around.
Yet
then the great world stirs in my mind;
Also
the endless hesitations, hatreds, loves, struggles of the earth:
They
demand our blood to kill the blood that emits all this poison–
And
the full price we will pay.
The
days of this century are all but worn out:
New
hope sends its message across the blue, bare void–
It
promises all that man yearns for–the woman,
the sun, the society that he sought:
But
only when this arena of
Fratricidal
strike will become quiet–
Not
before then.