Prayer
Here, from sunset to sunrise,
there are innumerable touches, smells,
and memory’s thousand blind steps;
and I’m alone here, in the dark,
with all my insults, salutations
unaccepted, and my quiet, love-lorn anger.
And, because of the blankness
of memories lost, I’m here
on the deserted, abandoned road.
Even then, there are times
when the wind blows, filling in
memory’s void with unvoiced words,
and my nerves and bones begin to shake
while, in the distance, the smell of
sacred offerings, incense-sticks,
burning wicks and sandalpaste
seeps through the night.
It might not be accepted, but whatever
was offered to your body, is memory
in my breathing and blood in my veins
Estuary
Words: tremble, and be quiet.
All the cries that were behind you
are now thin and going thinner.
The loud voice, the scantiest beating
of the lonely pain, the wind restless
with aspiration, the air’s shouts, and so on –
all that are a part of history
are now tired, silent.
Here, there is only the sound of beating
and, in the distance, the meeting point
of the river and the sea.
Words: return with the tide.
Who knows from where you all came
Through the wailing
of the unrecognised wind,
through the lonely pain.
Now the wind’s once-intolerable cry
is thin and weak.
Go back in the dark, through
the bewildered beating of the dark.
A little ahead lies the estuary.
River Island
How strange that all the low moans
of all the married women
should come together, here,
from the earth’s ten corners –
those women who keep their soft lamentations
on their trembling lips, under
the lamp’s light, when slender wicks
burn inside the lonely temple.
The river island, silent, after midnight.
Does the body here feel
once again wet with moaning until
someone is brought, quilt-wrapped,
and burnt away, until
someone’s body is returned
to the banyan tree, the river, the air?
Who burns now and now goes out, time and again,
on the river island, after midnight?
ABOUT THE POEMS The work of one of the best Odia poets of the modern period, Bibek Jena (1937-1985), is very little known outside his native state and his native language. But as these poems demonstrate, Jena’s work offers everything that we ask of a lyric poet. His poems lock down a distinctive sound, abound in memorable images, and are steeped in a private and urgent language in which certain words and images—here, rivers and islands, the wind and silence, men and women preoccupied with private obsessions—echo off each other in poem after poem. The translations are by the poet Bibhu Padhi, and are taken from his forthcoming book of translations: Memories, Legends and the Goddess: Selected Poems of Bibek Jena (Rupantar, 2012). They might be seen, alongside Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s recent book of translations of Kabir and Ranjit Hoskote’s volume of translations of Lal Ded, as part of a thriving sub-stream of Indian poetry in which bilingual poets carry over a poetic ancestor or contemporary into another language.
Bibek Jena (1937-1985) is one of the best-known Odia poets of the modern period.
Bibhu Padhi is the author of several books of poems, including Painting The House and Lines From A Legend.
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