DR PRITHWINDRA MUKHERJEE - 2
Poems by Sri Rabindranath Tagore all translated from original Bengali by Dr Prithwindra Mukherjee
Bodies Meeting
Each limb craves for every limb.
Union of spirit looks for union of bodies.
Body possessed by heart with the weight of heart
Longs to faint into your body.
Eyes endlessly drawn by your eyes,
Lips want to die inside your lips.
Thirsty the soul is bitterly wailing
To contemplate you with every limb.
Heart concealed in the pool of body,
Eternally I keep on weeping on its bank.
Pouring all my limbs in the yearning heart
I shall plunge into the mystery of body.
Day and night, my mind, my body for ever
Will get absorbed in each of your limbs.
[Kadi o komal, ‘Sharp and flat’, 1886]
Memory
On looking at that body it comes to my mind
Memories of hundreds of life, it seems.
Those eyes conceal thousands of pleasure forgotten
Like songs of springtime life after life.
As if you were my self-oblivion,
For time immemorial my pleasure and pain,
A host of flower groves of a new land,
A host of moonbeams of a new sky.
You are like the suffering of days of separation,
You are the bashful nights of love,
All that laughter, those tears, those flashes
Have assumed that honeyed body this day.
Therefore, night and day, by contemplating your face
Life appears to melt into an elsewhere.
Beauty asleep : still life
The evening twilight is bound by a spell.
On the canvas the evening star has not set.
Having undone her undulating locks
She sleeps resting her head on an arm.
Who is it who has helped her to fall asleep
In the midst of a permanent vigil on earth ?
Having culled from nowhere murmurs of silence
And has poured them for ever inside her ears.
An unending waterfall behind the image
Keeps on gushing in silent songs.
For ever the silent rustling of the forest,
For ever stands the bashful presence,
As soon as she wakes up, ashamed
She will cover her breast with her robe.
[Kadi o komal, ‘Sharp and flat’, 1886]
Total Union
Night and day, I weep, O Love, for a union,
Union resembling a hungry death.
Come and bind me, pluck me away,
Strip me of modesty, of raiment, of screen.
Come and steal this juvenile body,
Bereave my eyes of sleep, of dream of sleeping.
Rob this universe vast and awake,
My life and my death, for an eternity.
At the crematorium of union amid a solitary world
Where the creation has fainted with the extinction of the sun,
Shameless unclothed in two naked hearts
Let you and me become beauty infinite.
What an audacious dream, O Lord,
Where lies this union without You ?
[Kadi o komal, ‘Sharp and flat’, 1886]
Infinity, Miniscule
Infinite day and night in an effusion of Time,
Only one glimpse in its midst,
A lovely evening, a breeze,
The drunkenness of union between soft darkness and light :
Right at its core merely a tiny jasmine,
A shade of perfume with a drop of smile
Hardly approachable its tiny lips
Keeps on blossoming out of its joy
Before it falls even out of its joy.
Entire Infinity within that glimpse
Becomes a jasmine by the side of a forest.
Infinity manifests at the heart of the moment.
With the passing of the moment falls the flower,
Infinity returns within itself.
[Kadi o komal, ‘Sharp and flat’, 1886]
Meditation
Ceaselessly with all my heart
I remember You,
In the solitude beyond the world
I accost You,
Having robbed me of my life and death
You are there.
I find you shoreless,
My love, too, is matchless
That I carry within myself.
My whole heart
Like the sun at the peak of rising
Keeps on gazing like an eye
Momentarily dead.
Unfathomable, endless, a vagabond vision
Admits no barrier.
As if you were this generous sky,
As if I were this shoreless ocean,
In the midst of it rejoices the moonbeam of joy.
You are ever serene night and day,
Restless I am relentless,
Agitated, irresistible :
As far as I perceive from horizon to horizon,
You and I are one.
[Manasi, ‘Mind-born Muse’]
Parting Gift
I am Night, you are Flower. As long as you were a bud
Covering the dark sky, awake, hiding you on my breast
I kept watch on you with my legion of constellations.
As you blossomed with that beautiful juvenile face,
Dawn came, my term was over.
The nocturnal intimacy was rent by light.
You belong to the world now; bees humming all around
Resound in overtones of awe;
Birds sing, the wind blows; currents of felicity
Perplex the sprouting life.
I never possessed so much light and happiness
And song and life, I had offered
Mere sleep, mere peace, an affectionate quiet,
Merely a vigilant gaze, mere dialogue from mind to mind.
Did I offer nothing more ? When greedy dawn
Looked at you, in hundred voices hundreds of birds
Uttered your name, a drop of dew at that moment
Fell from mine eyes to yours. I disappeared.
That drop of melancholy, the parting gift
Will protect keeping moist your youthful face
From the glare of delight; flashing on that tear of Night
The smile of dawn will impart a peerless grace
Turning more beautiful your beauty in bloom.
[Manasi, ‘Mind-born Muse’ (3)]
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