Biography - Kumar Charaborty

Kumar Chakraborty is a poet, essayist and translator. He was born in Cumilla, in the year of 1964 . Currently he lives in Dhaka.His works include six volumes of verses, five volumes of essays on art and literature, a volume on the study of suicide and five volumes of poetry translations of Tomas Transtromer, Yehuda Amichai, Czeslaw Milosz, Fernando Pessoa and George Seferis.He writes both poetry and prose equally to explore different poses of the human mind at different layers of its exposures with various colors and shapes. His writings reflect the luxuriant growths of the state of inner melancholy, secular mysticism with attitude. Kumar Chakrabaoty, widely emerged in the decade of 90 in the last century.Most importantly his works are highly admired at that time Bengali contemporary literature not only for his touchy images but also for his diction,that is considered as a very unique a language of his won, and at the same time, his compilations are stunningly lyrical and spontaneous. Keeping all the sensual dealing so far, in all his texts,he is prominently found somebody as truly thematic,where he works extensively in vast and diverse areas where he has outstandingly mastery in creating magical metaphors with all relevant imageries,and may be for this very special dealings, Kumar's works are noteworthy and significant to the readers and critiques. He has been honoured with Humayan Azad Poetry award and Loke Poetry award in 2010.

 Poems

 

The Sea

One

 

If you feel soaked in gloom, come here, by the side of this silent river; you’ll feel

the sleeps once killed stir in your blood, and you’ll be able to hear the cryptic

voices of the metaphysical sounds.

 

The river too stores the images of the sea, eager contexts and invisible psychology.

 

We are actually itinerant birds fetching winter season and the songs of invisible

realms. When our skin becomes full, death summons us. We go back,

but do not prepare the sights into order. So, we become message stricken

again and again along the obscure front lines of the conflicting source

that is now rotating on.

 

If you feel stricken with pangs, come back to this river free from side effects;

it will tell you secretly of the sea that will turn psychologically rife even

without its visible presence.   

   

 

Sanatorium 1

 

I want to make a straight line out of the accumulation of tears that are shed, and curving that line I want to draw your portrait. A line does not have any form; it has only presence and time. I want to make pictures out of the impressed unreality of spending life with the help of time. Just after that I’ll right go to a sanatorium.

How life has gradually turned different! When I was in the northern course of the sun, death would come and daub colors all over my body, secretly. Even during my staying in the southern course of the sun, death began to erase the colors with tender green sponge. I’m now in a dubious course between these daubing and erasing, sabotaging and indifferent. Becoming a half-woman god, I pass my nights sleepless, and as a preparation of going to a sanatorium, I go on writing personal lyric for my sister on my wandering lines.

The sanatoriums ensure peace: those who are rootless from the world, those who feel no intimate relation with life, can find anchored roots here. They feel fervent. A sanatorium a place where lights turn into mirages; where a different and unique presentation is created out of the freezing point and boiling point because one day all the constellations assemble together; everything coagulates to create the desolation of fire.

All sanatoriums are situated in the magic mountains of Davos. When the expanded sky spreads roots on the earth invisibly, when contextual hills begin to fly tenderly, the light simplicities pop out all around me. I become infatuated with magical realism, and I once again make efforts to keep the connections of attitudes simple in the hope of expansion  

Trees were once humans, and humans were trees¾ with such eccentric thoughts I’ll keep lying still a year, and with deeper concentration, I’ll draw the vibration of the three dimensional wings of time. With complimentary colors, I may even draw the pictures of unknown hearts where perpetual mysteries will be portrayed. In this way the expansion of desolation and silence widens. In this way, then, the chlorophylls of blood turn yellow.

Opening my window, I find the whispers of wind, and the scenes of the desolate yellow hills where the adolescence of God has been passed. All the echoes have appeared with all the symbols of the horizons. I’ll come round this year. I’ll keep the flying symbols in my bosom pocket, and the white butterflies will settle on the blades of my hair. Then I’ll keep walking barefoot for the whole day. In the morning the leaves will drop down on me, and in the afternoon, I’ll come back with the portraits of Nietzsche and Binoy Mazumdar to your mammalian life. I’ll dangle them with the hangers of trees. This is my sylvan attitude.

Sometimes I’m a bland log of white wood in a yellow wood; the chops of axes have been dominating me a long period of time. I keep on lying flat in the midst of strange desolation, and counsel-rich mosses have accumulated on my body. When the night grows older, I keep on rolling, and the mosses scream in pain. I knock against the rubbles and get blooded. Thus the mysteries of my depth have increased. All my pangs have turned mountains. In that same way the deepest black holes have formed.

Living in birth means huddling tight together shadows¾very close to shadows, life nestling with life. Thus summer expands; thus winter appears, and classic glooms assemble under the shadow of almonds. Learning flights, birds leave their nests, but trees do not do so; diseases leave bodies, but life does not. In this way the lineages of birth are established, and following the same course, the individual circles disintegrate into smithereens. Pangs have their own colors; they do have the sense of being perplexed. Nothing more. My mind stagnates beside a twinkling star of the north sky.

    

I’ll devour a handful of sleeping pills, and then I’ll roam in the realms of sleeps flying with wax-wings. I’ll keep on flying, and resisting the disasters of sounds, I’ll continue my gossips with trees and birds up to death, up to birth.

I Am Nowhere

 

I am like the Orion in the midst of every moment; even in the two full stops

between birth and death I am a lonely aurora Polaris

even in contrast of thoughts when I go on walking through

the noisy silence of a prostitution.

Under the scorching sun, amongst the shadowy trees, in the dark hives

of fraudulence, or suppose in the midst of still-life mysteries assembling in the

outer house of the sylvan, when I pass the stored lives, there arises a question¾

what is more important between the flower and the root?

 

I’ve never thought of the location and the importance of

things without sights; the self-senses coming out of the shadowy

darkness of predetermined things make me tired because the footprints

of those who sidewalk life have been pressed sealed

behind the questioning mind.

 

The diverting noons and the shadow-circles become rounder,

and the shadow-figure trapped inside the body gradually exhales

like an ice-cold fish; now the rowdiness of monsoon birds touch

my feeling no longer. I’ll not be a poet because I have not been able

to reside in an attic, have I not been able to intricate the melodies

breaking words into rhymes.

 

Roots are expanding all around as I have been standing still long;

oh land, pyramids are erecting from my long lying backs;

oh stone, yellow duckweeds are begotten in blood; oh seas,

 

you say you don’t know, but I know I am still present because

I am nowhere.

Digging

 

Nothing remains intact in store;

everything gathers, melts

and drop down.

 

As afternoon appears, I expand myself;

I ponder of being desolate,

of touching your secrets;

how long I’ll remain lonely

with composing poetry!

 

The tendency of life grows

in contact of gregariousness. Reaching stillness,

I remain motionless pondering:

what role has the setting moon left

alone in the vast place of a wood? 

Mysteries

 

Every man has some silent mysteries of his own;

they make parabolic circles in his trance of sleep.

 

Observe the pearl baskets of your garden, out of your experience,

and the songs of some mysterious leaves that have dropped out from life¾

they leave away the signs of fire

and the life of restless summer heat.

 

You, while towards the port in an airy form,

were driven out of life by a gust; your afternoons

and introvert mornings tend to be longer like whims;

of course, this time in the course of silk-gambling,

there arises the song of the ones devoid of music¾

 

this insulated aquatic terrorism.

Seeing all these, Mesmerism, the crew of the white sailors

gone to the wrong direction. 

We too, observing the speed of the fleet of ships,

 can make out the fathomless mysteries.

 

Every human being has lunar mysteries;

after death mysteries, like bound ships,

leave the harbor and you behind alone like a sojourn

in this late hour.

 

 

My Expressions in the Vicinity of Autumn

 

Try to ponder, if you feel, on this relation

centering round trees; keep in mind

I am a flightless serene bird in the vicinity

of the folded negligence of the picture

of our lost serene life.

 

Once the sky, getting down low,

talked to me, and I turned free of life.

rain  has gone away in the same

mental posture as birds chirped narcissus

hypnotized with their own reflections,

and I am still left away alone with soaked hair

waiting for winter: I will go to the world

of new warmth, see the silent stature of

a palace, the tiniest whit of stationed men.

 

Really, everyone goes away; indeed everyone goes away.

The tamarisk bush becomes effusive with the sea.

Leaving language, poetry also becomes tangible to all men.

This going is besotted with the goes of life.

 

So, I am gradually becoming obscure,

and summoning you with drowsiness¾ oh autumn,

this time in the days of oblivion I will be your guest. 

 

At the Tavern

 

We’ll be present here before ice melts;

when evening has turned into brimming darkness,

with the simplicity of birds, we have to go on flying

till full night.

 

Here at this tavern, everyone keeps sitting face to face

lighting darkness¾an aesthetic picture like the nonstop lengthy rainfall.

In course of our coming, we forget our route,

and then losing it again and again,

we appear in front of it.

 

On the other hand, just under the Ursa Major,

all the distant worships and time   

behind the sign-shadows nowadays

ooze like blood.

Getting up from bed, I find blood in my eyes;

going to brush my teeth, I find blood inside my mouth;

at night going to take part in  intercourse, I find blood

oozing out of my penis in straight sprays.

Again, while playing the harmonium, I find the rids

blood-soaked.

 

We have united in intercourses in black and white,

have seen the streaks of our bodies bending away;

have tried to led this blind life ahead with the white canes.

These are the besotted movements¾feelings of shivering yellow warmth.

I gave them the vibrations of the advanced waves, the psychotic Chimbuk hill.

Having the sun set, in the inland of Moheshkhali

darkness plays with fatal water.

 

I have lost the keys of the days that turn into a box

that fascinate my love to take unbearable risks.

At first I could not make out; perhaps, this besotted plight

originates from the shells of dreams, this blind approach ahead.

 

Going to village, I found¾ all birds had turned into leaves,

and leaves into birds. I go on pondering¾ alas! In the roots of life,

in the midst of these glaciers and blizzards,

we reach darkness¾ in darkness alone,

all alone tonight to change the mask of life.....

 

Clues

 

Oh life, I have been inactively defeated for a long period of time,

for a long leisure; long ago a secret late autumn came and left me

a shower of gloom; I have not yet been able to dissipate the

extinct time of fog, in the defeated disasters of seasons.

 

The moist sunlight of late hours made the time impressive; I also was

in a close contact as if a white butterfly;

had rejoiced a lot in spring, but got tired again and again

under pressure of the self.

 

The animistic shadow was greater than all other pangs;

the mysterious gratified shadow of the Orion was longer

than the whole day. Those who have been assimilated in human crowds

already have, in their lives, the fettered identification of latitude.

 

I have been driven by the besotted charms, have I also been boozed

very soon in the ever rotating thought-current; I have ever created

the solar-vain out of booze and floating perspectives tirelessly.    

A monomaniac, I have seen the wizardry of dreams

in the enlightened darkness; out of all scenes, I have been in the labyrinths

of inner realm in the fundamental meaninglessness exposed by 

undercurrent of desires. Mental distress and dissatisfaction were predetermined;

I have taken life for death, death for life;

I have been impressed with the aesthetic disappointment

in the midst of purified joy; yet tiredness has appeared,

has appeared hand in hand with disappointment. Nothing to be set as pretext,

only feelings coming from a far away place like varieties. Desolation,

being summoned, responded and, like Buddha, the expansion

of our nerves, under the shadows of memories.

 

This undiagnosed disease summons ultimate condition without reasons;

I have gone on drawing still life in an eccentric disheveled mood

when life and perspective have conversed; I have come to know

soul dies before body does; life was defeated long ago

at the advent of materials prostrated to the inanimate, and body

disappeared in the course of time;

gesticulation has come from the far away blue where in real sense

the sky has broken in smithereens and all the lines of the silent heart

have come to the brain and intellect. In a deep boozed vortex of subconscious

state, I have groped for the silence of the shards of the broken sky

the anthropology of the blue lying in shards without any age-span

or physical appearance. 

 

Who does not want self-invisibility? Visibility has its own geometry,

all day long. I have turned this sense of body into the floating

weight of tiredness; I have said to my consciousness

get expanded behind the unused scenes; in the deep depth of skull

there appear abstruse signals; going to discover the meaning,

I have been prohibited; the speaking world is unable to make out;

it can only conceive surrealism the self-expansion of silence. 

Thus the lessons on origin from the metaphysical world

have been taken a lot; lots of pangs prevailed, and there prevailed

unknown zones; absence of wisdom was confined

to the fetter of sense whose numerical unities

have been disintegrated by gravitation; so I move on to and fro

having symbolist senselessness; having the process of thought

as an axiom, I have sensed the exhaustion of the whole.

Not illusion of truth, only splendor has made me hypnotized.

Life was of no use, death was also the same; this body-span

has been covered with these two outer weeds.

 

I take leave in this way; the reflection sealed in the mirror

does not let out sighs; Narcissus gave this color the pseudo reality

of this sense. I can sense the stench of the darkness that is going on

burning with the fire of a lamp as I will be disentangled

from the visible reality having company of Haiku at the hara-kiri night

as I am out of any appearance in a sudden difference

I have seen regularly that the unreal shadow of continuous moments,

in the shadow of memories and evening

has gone

has gone away

far away.

 

Maladies

 

I am informing you secretly, nothing so important,

nothing else¾ this is my own life-sign when I have been staved off;

he has informed me of his own affairs in a self-effaced tone.

 

When, in the plea of change, I have gone to the spot, near the rivers,

in bird watching expeditions, I have seen then also someone

leaves me near rivers and life and goes on playing behind dawn;

in real sense, the individual understanding of natural science

and desolation is really an inordinate audacity;

the sun rotates in mundane thoughtfulness¾

when migratory birds also move on with soft treads

having eager waiting controlled by distant silence.

 

Thus, having some disbelief and the weight of self-effacement,

 I have fallen into maladies.

At the advent of evening I begin to move restless

with my stationed feet under my own surprised emotion.

This is all I know by the bank of a blind river¾

someone, having all the outcomes collected together,

bids this life at an auction.

 

I prefer myself to be freed, if necessary,

behind life-oasis, maladies, light and leaves;

all the rest are irrelevant then. 

 

 

Claustrophobia

 

Pondering as human beings do

the ducks take to flights.

Leaving the bright stars back, they fly far away;

fly away those ducks.

 

I also ponder over flying, and keeping all the secret flights

depressed, I keep on same in utter depression, yet they all

go on with their petty flights;

I can realize that melody of those down falling sounds.

 

Keeping my eyes closed, once I look outside

and then inside, and I find trees having my expressions

in their forms; they are still and unexpressed;

taking disinclined life, clouds are running far away to unknown realms.

 

I go on pondering how I will spend the rest of life

and keeping awake, going to the roof, I set the watch of stars;

I go on seeing them¾with the short spans of their lives

how they swim in darkness.

 

This confinement inside near death tastes distasteful;

I am to get free;

I am to plod on barefoot towards the moon;

 

I am to keep standing silent having my feet sunk in sand.

 

God

 

1

 

I’ll make a kite out of yellow paper;

it’ll know how to fly away into invisibility.

I’ll fly it in this late autumn sky;

the bobbin will be in my hand,

and the thread will reach as far as it likes.

 

And then flying higher and higher,

when it will vanish invisible,

please, Almighty God, give your signature on it. 

 

2

Having the black holes on my back, I keep on walking

all the afternoon long of time.

The days that had life

go into night.

In the body of a red post box

where darkness is kept

letters reside in the space.

 

Though none will read them,

they wait in a neglected feeling

with their own theories and solutions

in a vibrating silence.

 

Life Equal to Its Span

 

Suppose all these are elements of my autobiography

devoid of any intent number,

a type of loquacious implied meanings

of all meaninglessness.

 

Keep in mind that there is a requiem of unsuccessful melodies in life

as the consternation of unknown bones lies under the soft skin.

 

Going to the origin and analysis, you’ll find

they have formed the silence of paper balloons

in different types of presentations:

they have hung rectangular frames of silence against white walls;

inside them they have made different orders of ending rhymes,

varied poses of scenes

and live eyelids of some inattentive instant moments

¾ when the introductions of life expand towards

the obedient existences.

 

Like many a collapsed domes, look,

the desires also get expressed, and

the poems learn how to forsake the sonnets of pompous voices.

 

The meanings of my inquiries and fixity

turn into mirrors and form their own reflections;

separation at last make life victorious in the eternal games,

and we become bereft of birth;

becoming silent, our sappy repentances seek the balance of night.

 

Keep it in mind, do please, that it is nothing else than my life equal to its span,

the obscure expansion of timelessness of the span equal to my life.   

 

Journal: 1418

 

When I begin to walk through an isle in a field, I feel reluctant to come back. I feel the fascination of an eternal path and a perpetual urge of walking on. Of course, I want a solitude on prey all around so that, while walking, she may touch me, and I also can have a touch of the cool tendon of her ear.

It is long since the connotations have left the words towards a far away desolation. I may have a chance to meet them today. May have a chance to meet the fallen leaves. I have learnt the meanings of the fallen leaves from a lonely wild fig tree. For a long time have I not gone to the grass barefoot; I have not been able to cause my self immersion reaching an immersed hizol.  

I’m walking on apace as if flying on air, and have opened all fragrant jars of love kept so long secret. Our last meeting was in the tunnel of love, then the restlessness of vanishing away through the tunnel. Love has taught me: the naked body turns into a mirror; the secret seas expose the pangs of conches. Union is required before separation, the dreams of a matador are to be left behind. The reference of love again reminded me of the notes of behag mode: lata uljhi sulajha jabey balma; for some unknown reason I happened to recollect the song of Ben Jonson: Drink to me only with thine eyes.  

 

I’ve reached the canonized sylvan edge; I’ll find darkness full to the brim at the trunk of dusk. Alack, dusk! It epitomizes our past, present and future attitudes. All sorts of darkness inherent in body will now be full of agony and express shades of other lives.

 

Now I’m an astronaut, going to the flight-edge of the sky. I have been away from flights so long, have not met silence in any dark night alone. Today, fluttering my wings and exposing my mind, I’ll fly. And I’ll meet those constellations that I lost billions of years ago, and also I’ll take part in a conversation with them in an inaudible language of the sky.  

 

Mysteries

 

Every man has some silent mysteries of his own;

they make parabolic circles in his trance of sleep.

 

Observe the pearl baskets of your garden, out of your experience,

and the songs of some mysterious leaves that have dropped out from life¾

they leave away the signs of fire

and the life of restless summer heat.

 

You, while towards the port in an airy form,

were driven out of life by a gust; your afternoons

and introvert mornings tend to be longer like whims;

of course, this time in the course of silk-gambling,

there arises the song of the ones devoid of music¾

 

this insulated aquatic terrorism.

Seeing all these, Mesmerism, the crew of the white sailors

gone to the wrong direction. 

We too, observing the speed of the fleet of ships,

 can make out the fathomless mysteries.

 

Every human being has lunar mysteries;

after death mysteries, like bound ships,

leave the harbor and you behind alone like a sojourn

in this late hour.

 

Departure

 

Take the body there; put it down slow and soft

lest the ground should be stirred.

The clouds have just started becoming invisible;

 

leaves are also dropping down slow.

 

 

The Dead

 

Everything, like earth and human, has the vicinity to the other¾

only their language and geography have gone separate.

Having the clouds as companions, the moon was loitering,

her feet wrapped in a wrapper;

and the breeze keeps standing on one leg.

 

We come in close contact of earth

trying to understand the conversation of the stationed ones.

 

They are speaking in a slow and low voice,

perhaps: come to our land devoid of alphabet on your snow cars. 

 

Signs of Quietude

 

The stagnant stupefied stream of melody¾ take it for my song.

 

At night, when the earth suffers from separation from day,

someone makes a wheel out of blood in the veins with knead;

on that wheel I start for the unknown realms.  

 

Oblivion also sometimes becomes stylist,

and forms still-statures like pyramids

in the dignified areas of nerves.

 

I got nursing in the lassitude of those gardens where

flowers shed tears,

trees form the colonies of silence.

 

The lament of birds and sky,

the humming like an unknown and

dejected support and this lonely sign

now arrange the signs of quietude

inside the unwilling existence.

 

Digging

 

Nothing remains intact in store;

everything gathers, melts

and drop down.

 

As afternoon appears, I expand myself;

I ponder of being desolate,

of touching your secrets;

how long I’ll remain lonely

with composing poetry!

 

The tendency of life grows

The tendency of life grows

in contact of gregariousness. Reaching stillness,

I remain motionless pondering:

what role has the setting moon left

alone in the vast place of a wood? 

 

Translated from Bangla by Dulal-Al-Mansur