“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 Bengal’s quivering blue
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 France, Italy, Bengal, the Kangra Valley;
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.