28.
A fire of flowers has hit the blue horizon.
A flame of fragrance in springtime has risen.
The sky is cozened,
thinks the sun’s there imprisoned.
Perhaps in the earth it seeks its consummation
and so as flowers in a mustard-field has risen.
It is my ache that’s hit the blue horizon.
What I’ve wished to say for years has risen.
From some lost Phagun of mine a gusty wind
has returned with its unreason.
This Phagun, maybe, it seeks its consummation
and so as waves in a mustard-field has risen.
[1922? First published in Nabagitika, vol. 1, in 1922.]
29.
Tonight the fire-flames burn in a million stars
beneath a sky without sleep.
That grand marquee of heaven, drunk on light –
there was I once a guest, in another age.
But my mind –
my mind wouldn’t settle there.
So I sailed away across the ocean of time
beneath a sky without sleep.
Such dulcet whispers between land and water
in this green earth of ours.
Floral pigments dappling the grass,
light and darkness in their sylvan clasp.
I liked it here –
yes, I liked it so much here
that I thought I’d stay
and spend my days in play
in this green earth of ours.
[1922? Notation published in Nabagitika, vol. 2 (December 1922). In Prabahini (1925).]
30.
Lest he goes without telling me,
my eyes can’t go to sleep.
I stay near him as best I may,
yet an ache won’t leave.
The farer who by his faring’s error
has hit upon my heart’s border
may have his error’s spell broken
and go off upstream.
When he came, he
came by snapping my bolts.
He may run off
through the same open door.
The maniac that may rise in him,
stirred by a capricious wind,
may well not, so late in the day,
be barred by appeals.
[Santiniketan, summer (May–June) 1925? First published in the post-rains of that year (Bhadra 1332). In the play Chirakumar-sabha (1926).]
31.
Come to the kadamba grove, under the shady trees,
come bathe in the showers of the new monsoon!
Let your dark black tresses hang down;
drape your body in a cloud-blue dress.
Kohl in your eyes, a jasmine-chain round your neck,
come to the kadamba grove, under the shady trees!
Friend, let a smile flash from time to time
in your lips and eyes!
Let your honeyed voice sing a song in raga Mallar,
giving shape to the forest’s murmur.
In the dense downpour, in the gurgling of water,
come to the kadamba grove, under the shady trees!
[Santiniketan? Rainy season 1925? First published in the pamphlet of songs which accompanied the first performance of the musical play Shesh Barshan on 11 September 1925 (26 Bhadra 1332).]
32.
Lost to myself,
I’m feeling so high,
waiting for you to come.
Cup-bearer, won’t you
keep filling my cup?
This stream of juice,
nectar-filtered,
with a hint of musk,
sends its bouquet
along the wind and
maddens me from a distance.
Look at me, love,
with your own hands’ favour
just for a night
make me immortal.
Many are the flowers
that blow in Nandan.
Rare, rare is
such enchantment.
Where else could one
discover such fragrance?
[Agartala, February–March 1926 (Phalgun 1332).]
33.
So many times I’ve been along this trail
and never once lost my way.
Are its traces lost today?
Has the wild grass covered it all?
Still, in my mind I know there’s nothing to fear,
for a wind in my favour suddenly begins to blow.
I shall surely know you – the time will come –
for you know me.
Lamp in hand, I used to go alone.
Its flame’s gone out.
Yet in my mind I know the address is written
in the language of the stars.
The wayside flowers,
I know, will check my errors
and guide me gently
by their scents’ secret codes.
[Santiniketan, 8 April 1926.]
34.
Shiuli flower! Shiuli flower!
What an error! Such an error!
By what sleight
did the breeze of night
bring you here
to the forest shade?
No sooner it’s dawn
than you want to return.
Every day’s the same.
Why such longing?
There’s dew in your eyes.
What’s the idiom
of your goodbyes?
And your scent –
what does it portend?
Ah, away they go –
minute by minute
heaps and heaps
of bokuls also.
[Spring 1927. In the musical play Nataraj-riturangashala (1927).]
35.
The two of us had swung in the forest that day,
swing-ropes twined with chains of flowers.
Recall it, please, from time to time!
Never forget it, never!
That day the wind was laced, you know,
with my mind’s delirious chatter,
and in the heavens, scattered in plenty,
were similes of your laughter.
As we walked along the path that evening,
the full moon rose in all its lustre.
Ah, what a splendid hour it was
when you and I met together!
Now I have no time of my own.
I’m far from you and must bear it alone.
But the friendship’s thread I tied to your heart –
never untie it, never!
[Written on a train from Bangkok to Penang, 17 October 1927. Included in the musical play Shapmochan (edition of 1933).]
36.
The moon’s laughter’s dam has burst:
light spills out.
Tuberose, pour your odour.
The crazy wind – he can’t make out
who calls him and whence;
whomever he visits in the flower-garden
he fancies straight away, he does.
Sandal smothers the blue sky’s forehead
and Saraswati’s swans have escaped.
Moon, what d’you think you’re doing,
strewing the earth with all this parijat pollen?
Which of you women in Indra’s heaven
have lit yourself this nuptial lamp?
[1929? In the play Paritran (1929, revised version of Prayashchitta). The publication date of the play is May-June 1929 (Jyaishtha 1336). But there is a possibility that the play was first published in the Puja issue of a magazine two years earlier in 1927 (post-rains 1334). If the song was there then, its date of composition would have to be pushed back.]
37.
House-bound men, open your doors.
It’s swinging time.
In land and water and sylvan spots
it’s swinging time.
Open your doors.
Red is the laughter piled in polash, ashok.
; A red drunkenness marks the morning clouds.
The new-born leaves are tinged with ripples of red.
The south wind makes the bamboos murmur.
Butterflies dangle from tall grass-stalks.
The bee is after the flowers’ bounty,
playing on its wings its busker’s vina.
In the madhabi arbour the wind is fragrance-drugged.
[Spring 1931? In the musical play Nabin (published in Phalgun 1337, i.e., February–March 1931).]
38.
Where does the road end? What’s at the end of the road?
Desires, our labours’ prayers: where do they go?
Up and down
roll the waves of weeping.
Ahead us
the deepest darkness falls.
In which country is the shore?
In this trail of a mirage –
it seems to me –
thirst may not end,
and that’s the fear that clings.
Pain, helmless,
its sails ripped to shreds,
drifts nowhere.
[1933? In the play Chandalika (1933).]
39.
In the dead of night you brought me devastation.
What your feet broke was also blessed by them.
I’ll thread the pieces in a chain of blood-red stones.
On my breast they’ll hang and heave with hidden sadness.
You took a sitar on your lap and slid between notes,
pulled the strings sideways so cruelly that they broke.
You left it behind on the ground.
Its silenced song, I know, is your gift to me,
riding the Phalgun winds in phantom ascents and descents.
[This song has a slightly different poem-version, written in Sriniketan on 12 July 1939 and included in Sanai (1940).]
40.
You gave me the monsoon’s first kadamba flower.
I’ve brought you a present, my Srabon song.
I’ve kept it wrapped in the dark shadows of clouds,
this sheaf from my music’s field, its first gold corn.
You bring me a gift today;
you mightn’t tomorrow.
Your branches of flowers
may be bare by then, – who knows?
But this my song
will ride your amnesia’s tide,
return each Srabon,
boat bearing you ovation.
[30 July 1939. A slightly different poem-version, written on 10 January 1940, is included in Sanai (1940).]
41.
Take the last song’s diminuendo with you.
Speak the last word as you go.
Darkness falls,
there’s little time.
In the dim twilight
the farer loses his way.
The sun’s last rays now fade from the western sky.
From the tamal grove comes the last peacock-cry.
Who is she who searches the unknown
and for the last time opens my garden-gate?
[1939? Possibly published in Bhadra 1346 (August–September 1939).]
NOTES & GLOSSARY
Notes
(In these notes the word stanza refers to any kind of verse-paragraph, whether in metrical structure or in free verse.)
For convenience of reference certain works are referred to in the notes in abbreviated form, and their details are as follows:
Ketaki Kushari Dyson, In Your Blossoming Flower-Garden: Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo (Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1988).
Krishna Kripalani, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography, 2nd edition (Visvabharati, Calcutta, 1980).
Prasantakumar Pal, Rabijibani, nine volumes; the first two volumes were initially published by Bhurjapatra of Calcutta in 1982 and 1984, but are no longer available in that edition; all nine volumes are currently available from Ananda of Calcutta.
Rabindranath Tagore, Rabindra-rachanabali (Collected Works), the older Visvabharati edition in 30 volumes.
Rabindranath Tagore, Chhinnapatrabali (Visvabharati, 1963 reprint).
Rathindranath Tagore, On the Edges of Time (Visvabharati, 2nd edition, 1981).
Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (paperback edition, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1962).
Other references are given in full where they occur.
80-81. The Suicide of a Star (Sandhyasangit, Evening Music): When translating this poem, I had to decide whether the star should be a he or a she. The star is clearly anthropomorphised, but as I have explained in the Introduction, Bengali does not distinguish between he and she, so a decision had to be reached. In the first edition of this book, I had rendered the star as a he. It was a nerve-racking decision, as my gut instinct told me that this star should be seen as a female figure.
According to Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay, the author of the first major biography of Tagore in Bengali, this poem refers to a first suicide attempt Kadambari Devi is supposed to have made in 1880. He reckons that the poem must have been written in Calcutta shortly after the incident, perhaps in September of that year. Prasantakumar Pal rejected this suggestion, maintaining that the poem reflected no more than a generalised mood of youthful romantic agony. According to him, whether Kadambari had made an early suicide attempt or not cannot be definitively established, and even if she had, Tagore would not have referred to it in this way. Not only was the poem openly published in the Tagore family magazine Bharati in the summer of 1881, but it also uses the words jyoti (light, radiance) and jyotirmay (luminous, radiant). Pal argued that if the poem had any conscious reference to Kadambari’s presumed first suicide attempt, then those words would amount to deliberate and crude punning on Jyotirindranath’s name, something one does not expect from his sensitive younger brother. (See Pal, vol. 2, 2nd edition, p. 109, where Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay’s different view on this matter is also quoted.)
Translating the poem for the first edition, I accepted Pal’s argument and ruled out any conscious reference to Kadambari, but went on agonising over a possible unconscious connection. Suicides often do make one or two initial unsuccessful attempts at self-destruction, succeeding better in their final attempt, and there can be no doubt that any such failed attempt on Kadambari’s part would have been effectively hushed up by the family. A romantic toying with the ideas of unbearable anguish and frustration, and of escape through death, could have been part of the ambience of both the young people, Rabindranath and Kadambari. As a person who dipped a great deal in European romantic literature, Rabindranath could have even introduced some of these ideas to his sister-in-law.
In this connection we need to remember Tagore’s collection Bhanusimha Thakurer Padabali (The Songs of Bhanusimha Thakur), published by him in 1884 after Kadambari’s death and dedicated to her. The poems had actually been written much earlier and had been accumulating when she was still alive. Tagore says in the dedication that she had often urged him to publish these verses, but while she was alive, he did not do so. The poems and songs in this volume were deliberately written in a mock-medieval style, mimicking the old Baishnab poets. In one of these poems, Radha in a fit of love-pique, addresses Death as her Lover. She says she would prefer Death to Krishna and go to meet him, because Death would never abandon or hurt her, Death would never let her down. The poet, under the pseudonym of Bhanusimha Thakur, tries in an arch manner to dissuade Radha from this project. When in 1931, at the age of 70, Tagore published his Selected Poems under the title of Sanchayita, he chose this poem to begin the collection, thereby giving it a symbolic aura. It was as if he was saying to the dead woman, ‘I advised you not to, but you still went ahead and did it. Look – I am not guilty of your death in any way.’
Translating ‘The Suicide of a Star’ for the first edition, I reluctantly decided that any direct identification of the star with Kadambari had to be avoided, so translating the third person pronoun with a she was out. I persuaded myself that in view of the strong bond of sympath
y between the young poet and the suicidal but brilliant star, he was a logical enough choice. But deep down I was unhappy about this decision, because the original poem with its unisex third person pronoun kept twinkling brightly and ambiguously at me in the manner of a star-maiden. I felt that the poem was laughing at the translator’s predicament like a mischievous, cross-dressed Shakespearean heroine.
When I first undertook this translation project, I knew that I had to start my selection with one or two poems from Sandhyasangit, the first volume of his poetry that according to the poet himself was stamped with his real poetical personality. At that time I did not pay much attention to Tagore’s works from the very early years. Barring Bhanusimha Thakurer Padabali, which he admitted to the hall of his Collected Works, the rest of the early works had been banished to two volumes of juvenilia, dubbed Achalita Sangraha or ‘volumes no longer in circulation’, which effectively functioned as appendices to his oeuvre. These books had been out of print for a long time, and Tagore had been quite reluctant to re-issue them. They were really re-published for historical and archival reasons, and under pressure from his entourage. In the 1990s, in course of a completely different project in which I was involved – on how Tagore’s slightly problematic colour vision had affected his writings and visual art – I decided to survey all the volumes of the Rabindra-rachanabali in the older Visvabharati edition, including the two volumes of the Achalita Sangraha. It was then that I read the early poetic texts with proper attention. These certainly contain plenty of romantic anguish, but they also contain some more startling elements: violent imagery, the near-operatic explosion of jealousies, death-wishes, and wallowings in the idea of self-harm. Today we might be inclined to identify such material with the release of pent-up youthful sexual frustration. Here was the dark underbelly, as it were, of the God-fearing, Brahmo-Victorian nurturing the junior members of the Tagore family were receiving: the underground rebellion of one hyper-sensitive soul against a repressive regimen. Rabindranath did indeed survive the passage through such gruelling contradictions, and his subsequent personal bereavements to boot, by turning his entire life into one furious frenzy of creativity at multiple levels. But Jyotirindranath’s young wife, perhaps depressive by nature, more easily hurt, and trapped in a childless marriage with a talented and somewhat eccentric man ten years her senior, within a patriarchal setting where there were far fewer opportunities for females to express and fulfil themselves in non-domestic contexts, succumbed. Most critics agree that Kadambari’s suicide delivered a profound shock to Rabindranath’s psychology, maturing him. Looking at the early texts, one senses that the event caused him to pull himself together and move away from the edge of an abyss. One understands why Tagore was reluctant to re-issue the early texts.