Three Poems: Prayer, Estuary and River Island

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.

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?