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A Stressful Time FROM Kalpana (1900) |
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Introduction :
RABINDRANATH
TAGORE (1861-1941) is
India’s greatest modern
poet and the most brilliant creative genius produced by the Indian
Renaissance. Tagore being both a restless innovator and a superb craftsman, the Bengali
language attained great power and beauty in his hands. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.Tagore’s poetry has an impressive wholeness: a magnificent loving warmth, a compassionate humanity, a delicate sensuousness,an intense sense of kinship with nature and a burning awareness of man’s place in the universe. He moves with effortless ease from the literal to the symbolic, from the part to the whole, from a tiny detail to the vast cosmos. ‘He is religious in the deepest sense, wavering between a faith that sustains the spirit in times of crisis, or fills it with energy and joy in times of happiness, and a profound questioning that can find no enduring answers. The present poem has been translated by the bilingual writer Ketaki Kushari Dyson, who lives in Oxford. Poet, novelist, scholar, translator, linguist and critic, she is one of the outstanding Bengali writers of her generation, and has published several books in Bengali and several in English including In Your Blossoming,, Flower-Garden:Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo. Text Though
the evening’s coming with slow and languid steps,
all music’s come to a halt, as if at a cue, in
the endless sky there’s none else to fly with you,
and weariness is descending on your breast, though
a great sense of dread throbs unspoken,
and all around you the horizon is draped,
yet bird, o my bird, already blind, don’t fold your wings yet. No,
this is no susurrus of a forest,
but the sea swelling with a slumber-snoring thunder. No,
this is no grove of kunda flowers,
but crests of foam heaving with fluid palaver. Where’s
that shore, dense with blossoms and leaves?
Where’s that nest, branch that offers shelter?
Yet bird, o my bird, already blind, don’t fold your wings yet. Ahead
of you still stretches a long, long night;
the sun has gone to sleep behind a mountain. The
universe - it seems to hold its breath,
sitting quietly, counting the passing hours. And
now on the dim horizon a thin curved moon, swimming
against obscurity, appears.
Bird, o my bird, already blind, don’t fold your wings yet.
Above
you the stars have spread their fingers,
as in a mime, with a meaning in their gaze. Below
you death - deep, leaping, restless -
snarls at you in a hundred thousand waves. But
on a far shore some are pleading with you. ‘Come,
come’: their wailing prayer says.
So bird, o my bird, already blind, don’t fold your wings yet. Ah,
there’s no fear, no bonds of love’s illusion;
there’s no hope, for hope is mere deceit. There’s
no speech, no useless lamentation,
neither home nor flower-strewn nuptial sheet. You’ve
only your wings, and painted in deepest black,
this vast firmament where dawn’s direction’s lost.
Then bird, o my bird,
already blind, don’t fold your wings yet.
[Calcutta, 27 April 1897] copyright :Estate of Rabindranath Tagore/Visvabharati
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