The Poet of Famine

 

The revolutionary Bengali poet Sukanta Bhattacharya, born on 15 August 1926, died before he was 21.

The Wikepedia contains a brief page on him. It summarises his life accurately though inadequately in the following words:

“As a poet as well as a Marxist he wielded his pen against the Second World War, the famine of 1943, fascist aggression, communal riots etc. His poems, which describe the sufferings of the common people and their struggle for existence, look forward to an exploitation-free society.”

In a poem in his collection of poems titled The Passport (ছাড়পত্র) Sukanta wrote,

“Yet, the inevitability of starvation

Spreads through me terrible blight.

I am a poet of famine – in my nightmares

I hear footsteps of death every night.”

(তবুও নিশ্চিত উপবাস

আমার মনের প্রান্তে নিয়ত ছড়ায় দীর্ঘশ্বাস –

আমি এক দুর্ভিক্ষের কবি,

প্রত্যহ দুঃস্বপ্ন দেখি, মৃত্যুর সুস্পষ্ট প্রতিচ্ছবি!)

The self-proclaimed “poet of famine” possibly died as a result of starvation, of tuberculosis, two months and two days before what would have been his 21st birthday (and the Independence Day of a new republic), at Jadavpur T. B. Hospital in Kolkata.

Sharing my translation of an iconic poem of Sukanta. Its last line has also become a catch-phrase in Bangla.

I do not know who the great prophet was, who Sukanta addressed in this poem. Could he be the greatest poet of Bengal who had spread a message of love and beauty through his life? Rabindranath Tagore had been 66 when Sukana was born. The Bengal Famine that killed three to four million people happened two years after Tagore’s passing. It is impossible that Sukanta was uninfluenced by Tagore. Rather, like every educated Bengali, his social sensibilities and intellectual development would have been deeply influenced by the seer.

To the Great Prophet

Great Prophet! The hour of poetry is over,

Let our book be prose from cover to cover.

End the rhythm of words and rhyme,

The hammer of the prose – the call of our time!

The softness of the verse I shall tell,

Poetry, I must bid you farewell;

In the land of the hungry and the dead

The full moon is a lump of burnt bread.

 

 

হে মহাজীবন

হে মহাজীবন, আর এ কাব্য নয়

এবার কঠিন, কঠোর গদ্য আনো,

পদ-লালিত্য-ঝঙ্কার মুছে যাক

গদ্যের কড়া হাতুড়িকে আজ হানো!

প্রয়োজন নেই, কবিতার স্নিগ্ধতা–

কবিতা তোমায় দিলাম আজকে ছুটি,

ক্ষুধার রাজ্যে পৃথিবী-গদ্যময়ঃ

পূর্ণিমা চাঁদ যেন ঝলসানো রুটি।

 

Translated on 2 March 2021