Fakrul Alam

Rabindranath, Jibanananda and the anxiety of influence

I If ever there was to be a case made for the kind of “anxiety of influence” Harold Bloom has perceived in English romanticism in Bengali poetry, surely it is to be made by examining the relationship that exists between Rabindranath Tagore’s verse and the poetic career of Jibanananda Das. Bloom makes the case in his The Anxiety of Influence for viewing poetic history as distinguished by “strong poets” who make “that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves” (Bloom, 5). He sees literary history as a site of struggle where the successor poet must perforce wrestle with his domineering precursor so that he can win the oedipal battle by disposing of the only begetter and thereby come into his own. It will be my endeavor in my paper to read an important episode in twentieth century Bengali poetic history as marked by just such a struggle between the two strongest Bengali poets where Jibanananda decides very early in his poetic career that the only way he could become a master poet was to break free of his ancestor, wary of the “anxiety of indebtedness” to the greatest poet Bengal had ever known, whose influence he knew he could not or would entirely overcome, but with whom he would have to grapple to break free. What I will do subsequently then is show the dialectical relationship of the two greatest poets of Bengal and look at the writings of Jibanananda in the context of his developing awareness of his own powers, and his need to get away from the anxiety of influence that began to obsess him as soon as

he attempted to be his own poet by getting rid of his poetic father’s powerful grip on him.

II But before turning to Jibanananda, I would like take a look at Buddhadev Bose’s characteristically brilliant essay on Rabindranath’s influence on subsequent poets, “Rabindranath and Uttarshadhak” which I prefer to translate as “Rabindranath and His Successor Poets”. Buddhadev observes that by the time Rabindranath was in mid-career as a poet he had begun to blaze so strongly that a whole generation of poets was scorched by him. In fact, he says wittily that the sun-poet’s influence was a huge problem, because as he puts it in Bengali, it was “upodraber moto”, that is to say, tyrannical and the cause of attenuation of all later poets who failed to exit from his orbit. Buddhadev implies that Rabindranath was too immense and too powerful for lesser talents who just didn’t have the wherewithal to withstand his radiation. As a result, the Bengali poetry of the period—that is to say, almost till the second decade of the twentieth century— was weak and undistinguished. It was all too easy to praise the sun-poet and his work but enormously difficult to survive him and come up with anything original, let alone brilliant, because of his overwhelming presence. It was inevitable for these minor poets to imitate him but it was also impossible for them to do so! Only Satyendranath Dutta, Buddhadev points out, could manage to stand out amongst the crowd of minor poets but he did so not in an exemplary fashion. Imitation was death for the rest but how would they know this? Bengali literature was immensely lucky to have got a poet as great as Rabindranath, but the price later poets paid for his cosmic qualities was too high for them. Even Satyendranath did not realize how difficult the task of poets had become because of Rabindranath’s brilliance; Satyendranath’s attempt to be different through stylistic excess only made him seem outlandish. What was worse, Buddhadev declares, was that Satyendranath continued to use the accoutrements of Rabindranath’s poetry—the seasons of Bengal, rural scenes, flora and fauna, the cloud and the sky, the sun and moon and patriotism. But while Rabindranath gave life to these elements because of his great originality and because his feelings for them were so profound, Satyendranath’s treatment of them was artificial and skin-deep.

The first poet to have successfully evaded the rays that scorched these minor and eminently forgettable poets, as far as Buddhadev is concerned, is Kazi Nazrul Islam, the premier and wholly original poet to have succeeded the sun-poet. Buddhadev says that he is aware that Nazrul’s unique upbringing as a Muslim and as someone who grew up in a place that was quite remote from Kolkata could explain why he alone escaped being burnt up by the blaze Rabindranath so unwittingly emitted on successors who stayed within his immediate orbit. Moreover, there was a tempestuous element in Nazrul and the diction and versifying that he brought from Arabic and Persian gave a distinctive flavor to his verse. That Nazrul had his faults, Buddhadev is willing to acknowledge, but he finds him exemplary for more than standing up on his own, breaking new ground for Bengali poetry, and carving his distinctive space. He was a comet that blazed a trail all his own despite the sun-poet’s mid-sky brilliance. Nazrul unknowingly paved the way for genuine successor poets to escape from the radiation emitted by Rabindranath because he showed that there was stellar space outside Rabindranath’s orbit for other comets to shine, or if we can vary the image, to evade the shade cast by this huge baat tree that inhibited the growth of all but minor plants in its vicinity. The Kallol poets emerged in Nazrul’s wake, emboldened by his example to resist and break free of the overarching ancestor poet. But that does not mean that this new generation of poets—or if we want to use Bloom’s word for them—“ephebe” poets—did not treasure Rabindranath. Quite coyly, Buddhadev talks about a young poet he knew— no doubt himself— who recited the archetypal poet’s Purabi poems as if intoxicated by them at night only to write about his verse critically the next day! But to express themselves in their own unique ways he and his friends knew that they had to stay as far away from Rabindranath as they could. And that is why the Kallol poets were determined to be post-Rabindranath poets. That is why also at the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, Buddhadev suggests, new poets emerged, having achieved individuation by revisioning the subject matter as well as style of poetry. He singles out Sudhindranath, Jibanananda and Amiya as poets who had cast off Rabindranath’s influence decisively—each

in their own way—determined not to live off the giant ancestor and to get off his shoulders. Jibanananda he felt had essentially “side-stepped” Rabindranath, while others he believed had internalized him, or if we use Bloom’s word and Oedipal cast of theorizing here, “repressed” him, so that they could write differently from the father poet. Consciously or unconsciously, they tried to avoid sounding like their great ancestor and found help in their efforts by turning to the modernist poets of the west. They wrote from the confidence that Rabindranath was in their genes and the awareness that while they owed a large debt to him, mimicry was what had deadened Satyendranath and his generation. They knew full well too that they would have to swerve away for their precursor, opting for discontinuity by embracing a strategy of difference.

III Like Buddhadev, Jibanananda was only too aware of the dangers all ephebe poets of his generation had been in because of the immensely strong precursor poet who preceded them; he too knew that they had to clear imaginative space for themselves by wrestling with Rabindranath, by appropriating him for their own purposes, and then by going clearly beyond him. Jibanananda too was aware that to be original was to be unlike Rabindranath; constant revision and daring would be the price for poetic liberty for him and others who wanted to clear out space for themselves and ascend to the galaxy of poets that would orbit the Bengali poetic universe forever in the sun-poet’s wake. Jibanananda, like Buddhadev, has left behind a number of prose essays on Rabindranath that not only make us aware of his immense respect and admiration for the gigantic precursor poet but also his consciousness of the necessity of not being consumed by the fiery path he seemed to be perpetually blazing even in his old age when their generation of poets was struggling to come into their own. The first of the Jibanananda essays that I am going to focus on here, “Rabindranath O Adhunik Bangla Kobita” (“Rabindranath and Modern Bengali Poetry”) seems to have been written soon after the sun-poet had passed away in 1941. It begins by acknowledging the large debt he had left behind for all his successor poets and stresses the difficulty of evading such an overarching influence. But Jibanananda believes that mere evasion

is not really the way out for the ephebe poet; better even to conform than veer off thoughtlessly as did Debendranath Sen whose attempt to be different from Rabindranath by imitating Bengali poets of the past made him only a curiosity and not worth emulating. It was only when the ephebe poet first appropriated Rabindranath and then immersed himself in his own age that he could hope to create a form and diction that would sustain him in his bid for originality and justify the necessity of being different from the ancestor poet. Satyendranath, according to Jibanananda, also failed to come out of Rabindranath’s shadow and shine on his own because he felt that formal excess alone would draw attention to him and not depth of thought; the outcome of his excessive experimentation with verse was only tinsel poetry and tinny sounds! Jibanananda declares in his essay that only the poets of the Kallol generation had succeeded in evading the radiation that had consumed all those who had not made the effort to move away from the sun-poet’s orbit or who had aimed to be different by merely resorting to extrinsic and facile experimentations. The Kollol poets succeeded precisely a) because they had sensitized their consciousness to the unique problems of their generation that Rabindranath did not have to confront, although to his immense credit he reflected his awareness of them in a few volumes of his later poetry; b) because they had struggled consciously or unconsciously with Rabindranath’s thought and language knowing that their age demanded a different poetics; and c) because they had cast their gaze away from Rabindranath and his kind of romanticism or religious worldview by looking beyond and above him. For them Rabindranath’s “Jibondebata” was no solution for the enigmas the universe posed to modern man who had no such inner assurance of an ordered universe. The modern Bengali poet thus took recourse to the wasteland poetics of Yeats, Eliot and Pound and the manner and method of the French symbolists, partly since they had found them spiritually akin but partly because the novelty of their poetics fascinated the new generation of Bengali poets. No longer happy with the techniques or verse forms of Rabindranath’s poetry, they would make a show of deference to Rabindranath but would stand poetically in line with Mallarme or Verlaine or Yeats and Eliot.

Rhetorically, Jibanananda asks, who had captured the waste land worldview of their generation better than Eliot? But it was not Rabindranath’s fault that the patrimony he had amassed in fifty years of writing had been so squandered by blind imitators who failed to see how acute a critic he had been for over fifty years of his own contemporary world; why hadn’t they learned to critique himself and others and invent themselves over and over again from him? Why hadn’t they understood from his work that constant critique always leads to stylistic innovation? Surely, the inferior poets had only imitated Rabindranath blindly and had not learned from him the dictum that one was original only when one was immersed in the existential problems of one’s age! In contrast, the Bengali moderns had enshrined Rabindranath as a classic of their literature but had taken Eliot and the other western moderns as models for dealing with the problems of a decrepit and fragmenting India in order to forge the kind of new poetics that their age demanded. Even Rabindranath, Jibanananda notes, was striving to take cognizance of this disturbed world and transforming his poetics accordingly. However, the Bengali successor poets would have to go decisively beyond Rabindranath and transform their poetics, although for them he would always remain the fixed foot of the compass from which they would depart, knowing that his fixity allowed them the freedom to roam. Four years after he wrote “Rabindranath and Modern Bengali Poetry”, Jibanananda came back to the topic of the sun-poet’s influence on his poetic sons in the 1946 essay “Uttar Roubick Bangla Kabya” which let me translate as “Bengali Poetry after Rabindranath”. Jibanananda begins this essay by lamenting that recent Bengali poets had been opting for what he terms—using the English word for his purpose—“cleverness”; the kind of cleverness so amply on display in the verse of e. e. cummings. But Jibanananda implies that there is no scope for mere cleverness in poetry. This was a negative development and cummings thus a poor role model; in contrast, in their revolt the young poets of the thirties had attempted to free themselves consciously or unconsciously from the poetics of Rabindranath and from his take on time and eternity through embracing much more meaningful western models and without abandoning Rabindranath fully. Their

movement away from Rabindranath was not a repudiation of his greatness or mere gimmickry but an essential act of self-preservation that did not diminish him in any way. His successor poets would never have among them another sun-poet like Rabindranath emerge but would shine in their own way and would make their age one of many poets and not a sun-centered one. No other poets would overwhelm all else like Rabindranath did any more or have his lasting presence because no one else had his immense capacity for growth as well as his innate brilliance. Three years after he had written “Uttar Roubick Bangla Kabya” Jibanananda published an English essay called “Bengali Poetry Today” where he picked up many of the points he had made in his Bengali essays on the post-Rabindranath poetic world of Bengal and Rabindranath’s ever-strengthening place in Bengali literature. He notes in this essay the distinct growth of the Bengali moderns and reiterates his belief that none of them would attain Rabindranath’s stature. However, he is sure that they had to veer away from Rabindranath and that change was healthy and inevitable for survival and individuation. He decries poets of the previous generation who had been content to be “spoon-fed on Tagore’s message and philosophy” (Jibanananda Rochnabali, vol. 3, 655). He notes that Satyendranath strove to be different but that mere technical ingenuity was not enough and that “the large measure of triviality of the content of his verses made even his technique suspect in the eyes of discerning readers” (ibid). No doubt including himself in the first person plural he confesses that “And we bit later realized that Dutta’s form more resonant than subtle, more clever really critical or important, required far more chastening before it could become the right medium for deep and suggestive poetry” (ibid). In this essay on the state of contemporary Bengali poetry, as in all his other writings on Rabindranath, Jibanananda shows that he believed that the bounty that Rabindranath had left behind was so immense that it was a great and unending resource for all his successor poets, as true classical poets always are. But confidently and unequivocally he declares that while it was proper to be grateful “that is no reason why the age of Tagore should not come to an end at a certain turning of the way where far-reaching social

and poetic changes demand of the age a perspicuous confession of what it believes or not, a new literature, and what is not less important, a new attitude to its literature” (Jibananda Rochnabali, III, 656). Ending his essay positively, he finds that he and his distinguished contemporaries had set modern Bengali poetry on “a very unique age of exploration, trial and achievement” (ibid), and implies tentatively that their total effort would in the future be deemed equal to that of Rabindranath’s in the preceding one. Jibanananda Das’s critical essays on Rabindranath thus reveal him to be duly respectful of him and his legacy but also confident that the successor poets would have to strike out on their own, swerving away from the sun-poet’s orbit, and searching for alternative traditions to ensure a lasting place for themselves in the Bengali poetic firmament. Not as outspoken as Buddhadev, he is nonetheless sure that blind imitation of Rabindranath was death. But he knew too that to ignore him was equally dangerous for the would-be Bengali poet; the way forward for his generation of poets was through him but not with him. Sounding almost Eliotesque in the last paragraph of his English essay, he declares oracularly that “the mature artist... arrives at his own philosophy and builds his own world, which is never a negation of the actual one, but it is the same living world organized more truly and proportionately by the special reading of the special world” (ibid, 657). This may sound stately and not rebellious and does not disclose the kind of preparation for the agon or conflict that the ephebe poet had to go through to deal with the precursor’s poetics, but Jibanananda is certainly much more radical in his poetry than in his criticism vis a vis Rabindranath. It is to his revisonary poetry therefore that we must now turn.

IV For sure there is no anxiety of influence in Jibanananda’s first and— it must be stressed—uncollected poem, which was published in a periodical when he was barely out of his teens. Titled “Borso Abohon” or “Welcoming the New Year”, this poem shows in its diction and accent as well as its subject matter the clear influence of Rabindranath. Unquestionably, juvenilia, there is no anxiety of influence here and only mimicry of the lyricism of the precursor poet in lines such as “Esho esho ogo nobin/ Chole

geche molin/ Ajke tumeo Mritubehin/Mukto Shemarekha” Jibananda Rochnabali I, 139), which I translate simply as “Come come o new/The worn out or faded has gone/ This day you are free of death/Limitless as the horizon.” No doubt one can hear Rabindranath still influencing Jibanananda benignly and from time to time even in Jhara Palak (“Fallen Feathers”), the first volume of poetry that Jibanananda published a few years later after the New Year poem in 1927, and that still has the accents of juvenilia. He would later say to someone who was intending to write the history of modern Bengali poetry in 1945 that he no longer thought that “the volume is of any significance” (Quoted by Seely, 48). He would therefore only publish three of the thirty-five poems of the volume in his 1954 selections from his best verse, Jibanananda Daser Shreshto Kabita. However, when considered in the light of Jibanananda’s subsequent evolution as a poet, these three poems, “Neelima” or “Blue Skies”, “Pyramid, “Shedin E Dharanir” or “Back Then This Earth”, are revealing choices for they show his preoccupation with universal history and a cosmic vision that took him away from the landscapes of Bengal and the present that are subject matters of the rest of the poems of Jhara Palak and that Rabindranath had made central to his poetry. But what is more interesting in the volume to someone trying to locate it in the context of Jibanananda’s oedipal poetic struggle with Rabindranath is his obvious desire to sound a lot more like either Satyenranath Dutta or Kazi Nazrul Islam or Mohitlal Mazumder than Rabindranath in the poems it collects. It is almost as if he is trying to swerve away from Rabindranath’s influence in the 35 poems of the volume by embracing these other poets and adopting their experiments with rhyme, rhythm or diction rather than seeking poetic succor from the true begetter. Indeed, so prominent is the influence of these poets on Jibanananda at this stage of his career that the soon-to-be legendary literary magazine Kollol where he was already being published noted in a brief and on the whole appreciative review that the volume’s only fault was that “it is obvious that he was unable to avoid being influenced by Nazrul and Mohitlal” even though “it seems that he has been able to incorporate these influences into his own personal style” (Seely, 50).There is a kind of anxiety of influence at work in these poems

then; Jibanananda is seeking out surrogate father poets, as it were, as he is leaving the gates of his poetic father’s house. It is almost as if Jibanananda is learning to be a strong poet by being aware of what Bloom italicizes in his book as “other selves”(27). As Anbuz Basu has demonstrated in his excellent and comprehensive introduction to Jibanananda Das’s work, Ekti Nokhotro Ashe or “A Star Appears” Satyendranath’s rhythms and sounds and even themes and Nazrul’s diction drown out the accents of Rabindranath’s versification that are also faintly present in the poems of this volume (Basu, 182-85). Nevertheless, by the time he published his first major collection, Dhushor Pandulipi (“Gray Manuscripts”), Jibanananda seemed to have wrestled free of all poetic ancestors, giant or not. That is why he could proclaim at the beginning of his song of himself as well as his poetic declaration of independence, “Kayekti Line” (“A Few Lines”): “What no one has ever known—the message I convey;/The tunes once heard—are spent—being old;/And there is need for what’s new;/That’s why I’ve come—and there’s no one like me!/I’m the crest on the wave of creativity” (Alam, 78). That is why he can declare with such confidence a little later in the same poem, “Listen to me treading; /Only my sound is new—all else is lost—or in ruins” (ibid). At the heart of Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of the influence is the idea that when two “strong, authentic poets” occupy the poetic scene, one of them proceeds to misread “the prior poet in “an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation” (Bloom, 30). For sure, it is possible to see Jibanananda for the first time systematically revisioning the Bengal rural landscape, its flora and fauna, and its seasons in the poems of Dhushor Pandulipi. Take the poem, “Mrityur Aage” or “Before Death” of this volume, for example. We have it on record that Rabindranath had liked this poem very much indeed for he singled it out for praise when Buddhadev sent him a copy of the literary periodical that he edited, Kavita, saying, “Jibanananda Das’s poems, full of pictorial beauty, delighted me” (Seely, 113). Later, when Jibanananda had sent him the published book containing the poem, Rabindranath amplified his praise of the young poet in the characteristically generous tone he took with younger poets thus:

“Your compositions have the essence of poetry” (“rasha”), distinctiveness (“shokieta”) and “the delight of one beholding the world” (“takiea dekhar ananda”)” (in Syed, 403). I wonder though if Rabindranath paused for a while to wonder what a poem like “Before Death” and other poems of the collection such as “Vultures” or “Camping” was doing to the Bengali countryside that he had stamped with his own unmistakably poetic persona in his poems and songs. The ephebe poet’s landscapes were quit unlike his in being full of the smell of death and in focusing on fallow fields, fog-filled and barren landscapes, and ever-spreading darkness Moreover, Jibananda seemed to set almost all of his poems in the Bengali wintry seasons of hemanto and sheet; the denuded, chilly landscapes he broods on overwhelm all other images and take the poetry away from the landscapes and seasons that Rabindranath himself loved to delineate, for he touched them habitually with fruitfulness, or gave to them festive lilts, or saw in them the impress of the deity, or humanized them with his warmth. Seen in the context of Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, it is possible for us to conclude that the younger poet has initiated a movement of discontinuity from the precursor by first appropriating and then denuding the landscape of the sublime that the precursor poet so valued. But what Jibanananda was beginning to do with some of the poems of the Dhushor Pandulipi volume was not only removing them of Rabindranath’s sublime but also initiating “ a movement towards a personal and counter-sublime” at his expense. (Bloom, 15) Also clear are the strong influences of Yeats’s poem, “The Falling of Leaves” as well as Keats’s ode to autumn; clearly, Jibanananda is resorting to western poetry and seeking out poets of that tradition to be influenced by even in his treatment of the Bengal countryside. I am reminded in this context of Eliot’s brilliant and ever thought-provoking essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” where he advocates for the writer the cultivation of the “historical sense” and recommends great labor as the only way of claiming one’s place in a tradition. As Eliot puts it so well; this sense must be acquired by anyone who want to excel in writing beyond his twenty-fifth year and will only come to those “who writes not merely with his own generation in his bones” but with

feeling that he must have in him “the whole of the literature of Europe” and “the whole of the literature of his own country” (Texts on English Literary Criticism, 462). Surely, to be his own poet and in his continual quest to seek alternative ancestors to escape the overwhelming one, Jibanananda is now appropriating the western tradition in order to forge a distinct poetics and a counter-sublime for his poetry. I have often wondered why Jibanananda concentrated so on the Bengali wintry seasons and why he penned so few poems on our rainy season or on spring in Bengal. Ponder, if you will, on these facts: a quick glance at the content page of Rabindranath’s Geetobitan indicate that he wrote around 114 songs on Borsha or the monsoons and 95 poems on Boshonto or spring but only 5 poems on Hemonto and 11 poems on sheeth. Consider then the bulk of Jibanananda’s poetry for when you come away from them you are left with the clear impression that the only seasons of Bengal that he felt obsessively drawn to were the wintry ones of Hemonto and Sheeth. Shouldn’t such an exercise at comparison lead us to conclude that Jibanananda was deliberately skirting the seasons Rabindranath had stamped as his own and embracing the ones that he had treated only sparingly in his poetry? Not only was Jibanananda evading the liveliness of spring or the magnificently moody Bengali rainy season which more often than not Rabindranath saw as bearing the impress of the deity, he was also making his own the exhausted and barren winter landscapes of Bengal as his metaphor for modern man in a landscape bereft of the deity and waiting for the end. Even when atypically Jibanananda writes a poem about the rainy season of Bengal as in “Sravan Raat” or in my translation “Sravan’s Monsoon Night” it becomes remarkable not only for its haunting beauty and sonic brilliance but because of its depiction of a silent, brooding sky, of life edging into “the earth’s stony skeletal darkness”, of a Bay of Bengal whose “passion has been all spent”, and of a poet who at the end enters through his mind’s eye “into darkness” (Alam, 82). Reading such a poem with Rabindranath’s songs of spring and the monsoons in mind, one can’t help wondering: where are the songs of spring? Where are the tempestuous qualities of the monsoons? Where has the God who left his marks on all of Rabindranath’s poems on the seasons abdicated in Jibanananda’s poems?1

Around the time or just before Jibanananda published the Dhushor Pandulipi poems, he had completed the manuscript of his brilliant Ruposhi Bangla sonnet cycle. Thinking of them now, I am reminded of Buddhadev’s comments on the way Satyendranath had mindlessly replicated the accoutrements of Rabindranath’s poetry— Bengal’s seasons, country scenes, the province’s flora and fauna, its skies and the love and reverence with which he gazed at his country. But unlike Satyendranath, Jibanananda revisions the Bengali landscape Rabindranath had stamped as his own, and he does so with no less love and vision than his precursor in his wonderful sonnets. What is more, he gives to the landscape something that his precursor did not do by taking it “to a range of being beyond that precursor” (Bloom, 15); that is to say by placing in that landscape presences from Bengali myths and legends. Indeed, he now ventures to see his Bengal in the context of the cycles of history. Decay and death, fogs and the chill of wintry landscapes, and all-pervading sadness suffuse the countryside; mythical men and women like Sankhamala, Chandramala, Manikmala, and Chandsagar, Behula and Loehana drift across it or are readied for funeral pyres where they were immolated. Anguished smells and exhausted silences pervade his landscapes; melancholy now seemed to have taken over “Bengal’s rivers, fields, flowers” (Alam, 49). Looking at such scenes the insomniac poet can only feel haunted by the evanescence of beauty and a denuded world from which the Spirit has abdicated totally. Or if we want to put the whole in Bloominan terms, the Ruposhi Bangla sonnets reveal the work of the successor poet who has emptied the universe of his precursor’s sublime and impressed it in his poems with a countersublime buttressed by myths and legends and cosmic casings. In the next revisionary move of the Bloomian successor poet that I have been casting Jibanananda as, he will walk the world alone, no longer carrying with him the precursor’s legacy, even if only to revision them. In this stage of his poetry, Jibanananda either develops images and themes that we already saw him working with in the Ruposhi Bangla poems by placing his characters in “ash-grey” worlds such as Vimbishar and the distant darkness of vanished cities such as Vidarba or Babylon (Alam, 62), or the darkness of

the stars. Or he will walk the streets of Kolkata lapsing in time as he wanders till he feels “In Babylon streets too alone at night thus had I walked/I know not why though thousands of feverish years have passed” (Alam, 78). No doubt encouraged by Rabindranath’s comments on his Dhushor Pandulipi poems, Jibanananda must have sent a few more of his newer poems to kabiguru after he had received his appreciative letter. What Rabindranath thought of the new poems that he had sent we have no record but the copy of the letter that Jibanananda wrote after he had received from him a response to his poems makes it clear that Rabindranath disapproved strongly of the turn the poet had taken. But the Jibanananda who wrote the letter to him explaining his style accounts for his revisioning of his poetics confidently and strongly, arguing that the tension and anxiety in his poetry that Rabindranath apparently disapproved of, did not make his poems any less poetic. Jibanananda stresses that serenity, on the other hand, was not essential for poetry and Dante’s Divine Comedy and Shelley’s poems were none the worse without it. He stresses with great conviction that some of Beethoven’s symphonies and sonatas are stirred by a spirit akin to restlessness and disquiet and that was their strength. It is clear from the tone of the letter that Jibanananda feels confident now that he can survive as his own poet, whether Rabindranath approved of the theme or style of his poems or not. What had happened of course was that the poems that Jibanananda began to write in increasing numbers after the Dhushor Pandulipi book, some of which Rabindranath perhaps saw either in the Banalata Sen, volume and/or little magazines and which were later collected in The Mahabrithibi or “The Great World” volume are full of turbulence and disquietude; they are wasteland poems, more often than not transcending the personal and cased with the tones of apocalypse. The models of these poems are primarily from Yeats and Eliot but some of them also seem to be inflected by images influenced by surrealism. From Yeats Jibanananda has learned to read what was happening in Kolkata in terms of a cycle of history coming to a catastrophic end and from Eliot he seems to have taken urban desolation, pervasive squalor and decadence as themes. The persona too seems to be taken from western models;

the lonely man in deserted midnight streets; grotesque characters; morgue scenes; corpses floating “forever in blue red silvery silence; nightmarish visions; “a dreadful dynamo of the world”. Jibanananda has moved as far away from Rabindranath’s universe as anyone possibly could in less than two decades since he wrote the poem welcoming the New Year in the early nineteen-twenties! In what Bloom calls his “revisionary ratios” the final stage in the relationship between the precursor poet and the successor is where as he puts it “the wheel” (Bloom, 16) has turned full circle until there comes a time when the precursor seems to be writing in the successor’s vein. Or as Bloom puts it, one has the “uncanny feeling” in tracing the relationship between two strong poets which was initiated by the “anxiety of influence” of the younger poet, there ultimately comes a time when the work of the precursor poet appears to be in the later poet’s vein. Did this happen in the relationship between the two poets? Not really, because as Rabindranath indicated famously in “The Crisis of Civilization” he would never commit “the grievous sin of losing faith in man” (Alam and Chakravarti, 215), and so he would never subscribe fully to the waste land poetics of his successors, but it is interesting to note that in at least a few of his later poems such as “Africa” he is on the brink of the kind of poetry that we see in the “Mahaprithibi” stage of Jibanananda’s career. Also, when I read a poem like “Chiradin Sohore Thaki” by Jibanananda which I have translated as “I Stay in the City All the time” about a city clerk’s life of drudgery and frustrated dreams, I can’t help thinking of Rabindranath’s “Banshi” (which Kaiser Haq has translated for the Essential Tagore as “Wind Instrument”) and its city clerk’s thwarted romanticism and despairing life. Perhaps here was a case when the ephebe poet had managed to seize a theme that the precursor than took over and made his own!

V For Jibanananda Rabindranath was the poet he had to go beyond despite his great love for him. As we have seen, he had to vacate the Bengali landscape of the sublime Rabindranath had impressed it with and establish his own counter sublime in that landscape in his poetry. But in the oedipal drama of the two greatest poets of Bengali poetry as in almost all father-son relationships, the last

word is the inconsolable state of the son at the news of the death of the father. That is why after the death of Rabindranath, Jibanananda wrote one of his most apocalyptic poems on the passing away of his great precursor and it is with that poem that I would like to end my presentation. Here it is in my translation: The world’s bustle is ended The last sleep is overtaking the constellations In a while their lights will go out The whole universe will hush in the dark. Love’s eternal fervor will fade In the quiet of that numbing darkness God’s handiwork will be done. The last sleep is coming to the constellations. That last sleep (Alam, 137).

1 I am reminded here also of the famous monsoon poet by Rabindranath’s long time associate and another great modernist poet, Amiya Chakravarti, “Brishti” or “The Rain” which begins with that startling declaration, “Kedyo Pabe Na Take Borshar Ajoshro Jaldhre” or “You will never find him in the monsoon’s unceasing water fall”.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. London: Oxford UP, 1973. Bosu, Anbuz. Ekti Nokhrotoa Ashe. Kolkata, Pustok Biponi. 3rd Revised and Expanded Edition, 1999. Bosu, Buddhadev. Sahityacharcha. Kolkata, 1996. Jibananananda Das Rachnabali. 6 vols. Dhaka, Oitijhya Publishers, 2006. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. In Texts on English Literary Criticism, Dhaka: Friends’ Annotated Classics, 2012. Syed, Abdul Mannan. Shuddhatama Kobi. Dhaka: Pathak Shamabesh edition, 2011.

Dr. Fakrul Alam is UGC Professor, Department of English, University of Dhaka and Director, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Research Institute for Peace and Liberty, University of Dhaka.

Agneta Falk

Dancing on a wing of a breath

The wind brought me here into a hidden corner on a rocky beach something about the light the sky and sea melting into one, into me the pounding waves feeling like I look inside and there she is, my mother and all the mothers before her dancing on a wing of breath becoming my breath and nothing can stop me now from releasing a torrent of tears for all those who’ve passed and those wandering over the earth in search of a new home

where bombs don’t fall.

Otherness

It’s not because I don’t love you that I can’t see your face, it’s just that I can’t face your face without eliminating mine. When you look at me, I turn away so I don’t quite notice your eyes. If only I could look at you without you looking back at me,

I could begin to see you, discover the curve of your lips resembling mine, that on the slope of your cheek runs a river as deep and dark as one I grew up near, as shallow and dry. And maybe, if you dared look back at me and see your tears filling my eyes, we could replace fear with love.

Agneta Falk was born in Stockholm, Sweden is a poet, visual artist, translator and editor. She’s has five volumes of poetry, as well as the co-editor of several anthologies, and is represented in many anthologies world wide. She’s a member of the Revolutionary Poets Brigade. She exhibits her paintings in the USA as well as in Europe. In 2018 she was the recipient of an International Poetry Award in Italy, the Regina Coppola Award.

Eldar Akhadov

Tree

Artillery shots. Foxtrot sounds. Villages and ancient manuscripts burn. And only the tree outside the window keeps waiting. Whenever you glance at it The mind darkens. Ice crumbles. A fiery moon ascends. And only the tree outside the window keeps waiting. Whenever you glance at it You wander around for days on end. Walls before you. Walls behind you. Nothing is any use. And only the tree outside the window keeps waiting. Whenever you glance at it Echoes turn into a watery abyss. Time collapses and vanishes. And only the tree outside the window keeps waiting. Whenever you glance at it You turn into snow falling. Into a whisper in darkness. But the tree outside the window keeps waiting for you For this tree is just like you. Translated by Richard Berengarten

Except you …

I tore all your photos. But it did not help. I remembered you. I went very far and never came back. But it did not help I remembered you.

I met with others and was loved. But it did not help. I remembered you. I got drunk - like dead, like a shoemaker, like a tramp, like the last creature. But it did not help. I remembered you.

I got married, had children, became home-grown. But it did not help. I remembered you.

I'm getting old. Everything is eroding from memory. Everything. Except you. Translated by Brian Henry Tomlinson

Eldar Akhadov Was born in Baku in 1960. He lives in Krasnoyarsk. A member of the Union of Writers of Russia and other writers 'organizations of Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan, a member of the Russian Geographical Society, Co-Chairman of the Literary Council of the Assembly of Peoples of Eurasia, a member of the PEN International Writing Club.

Sampath Kumar

26 March 1971

the smell of burning flesh filled the air rotting corpses sprawled allover the gluttonous scavenging vultures flew above as the wail of the raped and tortured resonated there were no men nor youths visible most butchered by the army the razakars padma and meghna once abound with fish carried the floating dead in thousands two weeks of decisive war changed all its history forever tearing the ball and chains an independent nation was born people unshackling from the misery and pains the sea of humanity returned by hordes in renewed hopes and renewed vigour the challenges met by one and all standing together shoulder to shoulder the fertile greens and the bloody war fly in the form of the fluttering flags high and towering as proof of the victory from every pole for all to see

The unopened envelope

he’s at the pub drinking shots after shots the distillate numbing his mood he thought he would visit her to demand from her the reason his ego prevented him how dare she

she did not find him fit to meet for one last time to bid a goodbye he heard she is getting married to a wealthy merchant’s son an errand boy knocks at his door to thrust an envelope from her no! he would not open and read put himself to more ignominy she is no different like most others he loathed

he wobbles back to the village there’s crowd, their mood sombre someone whispers ‘she has died’ he feels at his pocket the envelope hurriedly tearing open to read ‘take me away with you forever i shall wait for you at the crossroad’ she had written and sent over the boy and waited vainly in the dark she could not ever marry anyone else than the man she loved he is now walking back to the pub to drink and forget his miserable self the letter burning his soul forever

Sampath Kumar is an author, photographer and a bi-lingual poet (English and Tamil) and has his works published in Bengali, Hindi and Italian. His verse libre poems seldom have punctuations or uppercases.

Muhammad Samad

Crow

I find it difficult to make out the behavior of the crows of Ted Huges1 , They are somehow post-modern. The crows of Bengal are eternal like my simple mother. All through they talk about our good and bad, Hold meetings for freeing the world from garbage, And in the light of policy-decisions, they fly and run in sun and rain; and at the correct moment they broadcast their forecasts of danger. So, I love the crows of Bengal. All morning-crows are my younger sisters. They awaken my daughters and seat them at reading-tables. They send my father to the eastern sky with a plough, and call my soft mother to bow in prayer. They shout out to the world and say … Sister, get up and keep well - our throats are about to burst crowing, right now they will bleed! Translated by Kajal Bondyopadhyay 1 Ted Huges was Poet Laureate of England.

Tree: one

See time's nail is here pierced through my palm. Dig into my youth, and see how beautiful and blind is this furious burning, this life-giving love - this deep faith of the earth!

Unfold the layers of my body, and see how brightly shines the plough's blade there like the sixty-four arts of love-making of Vatsyayana2 , and there the gandham3 fruit. The pleasant episodes of the golden earth are only the noble epic of ancient blood - a storm, everything that makes the poet with his firm faith on fire and his roots dug deep into stone. Translated by Kabir Chowdhury

2Mallanaga Vatsyayana authored the Kamasutra, an ancient Indian text on love in Sanskrit literature.

3According to Islam, it is the name of a fruit of Heaven for eating which Adam and Eve fell in disgrace.

Muhammad Samad was born in Bangladesh. He is the Pro-Vice Chancellor in the Dhaka University. President Bangladesh Poetry Council. Poems of Muhammad Samad have been translated into many language that include Chinese, Greek, English, Swedish, Sinhalese. He has received number of awards for his contribution to Bengali poetry and literature.

Raja Rajeswari Seetha Raman

Portrait of a teacher

A teacher blossoms in the blue night to calm waves in a purple heart. A teacher keeps eyes on greenhorns to move them away from hilly zones. A teacher fuels wisdom with a divine pen to grow the world with prosperous degrees. A teacher arrives on a stormy night to raise awareness in creative delight. A teacher breaks the shell of horizon to swim steadily in the blue ocean. A teacher burns the raging thirst for knowledge to conquer the throne of all powers. A teacher a rising sun that keeps the desire alive from the cradle to the grave!

Lamentation of the universe

At daybreak i take a close look of the sun’s face it’s ember gets cooler.

At day light i look out for the look of an ocean it’s calmness in turbulence.

At twilight i had a good look of the moon it’s chilliness embers.

At midnight i caught sight of the sky’s appearance it’s sincerity is fading. The sky is long in dismal the sea is long in dismay the universe is long in somber!

Dr. Raja Rajeswari Seetha Raman hails from Malaysia. A bilingual poet, certified translator, researcher, literary critic, essayist and freelance lecturer. Her poems have been translated into 35 world languages. Recipient of twelve literary awards and prizes at International, National and State level.