51---> shafiq & das

Name: Mohammad Shafiqul Islam

Hometown: Tangail, Bangladesh

Current City: Sylhet, Bangladesh

Occupation: English Teacher at Shahjalal University of Science & Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh; Poet; Translator of Bengali into English.

Age: 38

What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry is very important to me. It gives me immense pleasure, astonishes me, accompanies me at my distress, sometimes takes me far away from the mundane reality, engages me in a distinct thought process, and also makes me happy.

Poetry is a second presence in my daily life – I sometimes speak to poetry, and it also speaks to me. Poetry is what does not let me sleep, leaves me in a space that is both known and unknown. Poetry, to me, is breeze that spreads love and peace. In another sense, poetry represents what happens around us every day, what we experience in our quotidian existence, how we see the world, nature and human beings, and how we feel after a certain shocking or pleasant experience. Through poetry, we see reality in a distinct way, we travel around the world, through spaces, and we discover something new. We strive to imagine a safer world through poetry.

Poetry continues to live, keeps us alive, and we cannot survive without poetry.

Favorite Poem:

Out of many wonderful poems from around the world, I would like to mention one titled “Banalata Sen” by Jibanananda Das.

Why do you like this poet/poem?

“Banalata Sen” by Jibanananda Das is one of my favorite poems—it is indeed one of the most read and acclaimed poems in Bengali literature. The poem has been translated by several translators into English; I have read both the original and the translated version of the poem. Banalata Sen is the name of a girl who is a paradigm of beauty—she stands beside the most beautiful women characters presented by poets, writers and artists. Female beauty is glorified in the poem. Banalata is the poet’s muse who is his eternal inspiration in the creative venture.

The poet sets words in the poem in such a way that one is reminded of a great work that is created out of love—words in the poem are like pearls placed one after another to form an eternal beauty. Reading the poem means walking through a serene forest path surrounded by trees where breeze kisses the leaves with a sense of grandeur.

বনলতা সেন 

– জীবনানন্দ দাস

হাজার বছর ধরে আমি পথ হাঁটিতেছি পৃথিবীর পথে,
সিংহল-সমুদ্র থেকে নিশীথের অন্ধকারে মালয়-সাগরে
অনেক ঘুরেছি আমি; বিম্বিসার-অশোকের ধূসর জগতে
সেখানে ছিলাম আমি; আরও দূর অন্ধকারে বিদর্ভ নগরে;
আমি ক্লান্ত প্রাণ এক, চারিদিকে জীবনের সমুদ্র সফেন,
আমারে দু-দন্ড শান্তি দিয়েছিল নাটোরের বনলতা সেন ।
 
চুল তার কবেকার অন্ধকার বিদিশার নিশা,
মুখ তার শ্রাবস্তীর কারুকার্য; অতিদূর সমুদ্রের পর
হাল ভেঙ্গে যে নাবিক হারায়েছে দিশা
সবুজ ঘাসের দেশ যখন সে চোখে দেখে দারুচিনি-দ্বীপের ভিতর,
তেমনি দেখেছি তারে অন্ধকারে; বলেছে সে, ‘এতদিন কোথায় ছিলেন?’
পাখির নীড়ের মত চোখ তুলে নাটোরের বনলতা সেন।
 
সমস্ত দিনের শেষে শিশিরের শব্দের মত
সন্ধ্যা আসে; ডানার রৌদ্রের গন্ধ মুছে ফেলে চিল;
পৃথিবীর সব রঙ নিভে গেলে পান্ডুলিপি করে আয়োজন
তখন গল্পের তরে জোনাকির রঙে ঝিলমিল;
সব পাখি ঘরে আসে – সব নদী – ফুরায় এ জীবনের সব লেনদেন;
থাকে শুধু অন্ধকার, মুখোমুখি বসিবার বনলতা সেন।

BANALATA SEN

For a thousand years I have walked the ways of the world,
From Sinhala’s Sea to Malaya’s in night’s darkness,
Far did I roam. In Vimbisar and Ashok’s ash-grey world
Was I Present; farther off, in distant Vidarba city’s darkness,
I, a tired soul, around me, life’s turbulent, foaming ocean,
Finally found some bliss with Natore’s Banalata Sen.


Her hair was full of the darkness of a distant Vidisha night,
Her face was filigreed with Sravasti’s artwork.As in a far-off sea,
The ship-wrecked mariner, lonely, and no relief in sight,
Sees in a cinnamon isle sings of a lush grass-green valley,
Did I see her in darkness; said she, ”Where had you been?”
Raising her eyes, so bird’s nest like, Natore’s Banalata Sen.


At the end of the day, with the soft sound of dew,
Night falls; the kite wipes the sun’s smells from its wings;
The world’s colors fade; fireflies light up the world anew;
Time to wrap up work and get set for the telling of tales;
All birds home ─ rivers too ─ life’s mart close again;
What remains is darkness and facing me ─ Banalata Sen!

Translated by Fakrul Alam

49---> lindsay & spenser

Name: Lindsay Turner

Hometown: Kingsport, Tennessee

Current Town: Greenville, South Carolina

Occupation: Poet and translator, and I’m finishing my PhD in English at the University of Virginia.

Age: 32

What does poetry mean to you?

I just finished a long project about the work of making poems. For me, poetry is that activity of arranging language, really grappling with forms and words, and the meanings forms and words are charged with before you even get your hands on them. I like to think that there’s something valuable and necessary in that activity, however it gets done.

But that’s “poetry” from the poet side and not the reader side. As a reader—actually I think it’s hard to say what poetry means for people who read it, and that that’s part of what poetry is. In the same way that there’s no one way for people to be activists or to change the world, for example—I mean that it would be wrong to tell people how to do these things—poetry’s a space that has to mean lots of different things for different people. Maybe poetry helps hold spaces like that open, reminds us that they exist.

Favorite poem or poet /Why do you like this poem?

I never pick favorites. For a long time I’d hedge and say that Elizabeth Bishop was a favorite, but I have such trouble saying anything much about her poems. I’ve been on a Bernadette Mayer kick for a year or so now. I love her work because it helps me write about the spaces where I live, which is something I avoided for a long time. I’m trying to read through the collected June Jordan but I keep getting stuck reading her off-rhymes (I really like off-rhymes) over and over.

But here are a couple of stanzas from Edmund Spenser’s long elegy, Daphnaida, written in 1591. I know not everyone has this problem, but sometimes I catch myself thinking that poetry has to have some kind of intellectual interest, or at least interesting emotion. And then there’s this: poetry about stupid, repetitive, non-cathartic, boring, useless anger and grief. It doesn’t offer anything false. It just comes up out of the centuries and is right there:

'Hencefoorth I hate what ever Nature made,

And in her workmanship no pleasure finde:

For they be all but vaine, and quickly fade,

So soone as on them blowes the northern winde;

They tarrie not, but flit and fall away,

Leaving behind them nought but griefe of minde,

And mocking such as thinke they long will stay.

‘I hate the heaven, because it doth withhold

Me from my love, and eke my love from me;

I hate the earth, because it is the mold

Of fleshly slime and fraile mortalitie;

I hate the fire, because to nought it flyes,

I hate the ayre, because sighes of it be,

I hate the sea, because it teares supplyes.

‘I hate the day, because it lendeth light

To see all things, and not my love to see;

I hate the darknesse and the drery night,

Because they breed sad balefulnesse in mee;

I hate all times, because all times doo fly

So fast away, and may not stayed bee,

But as a speedie post that passeth by.

‘I hate to speake, my voyce is spent with crying:

I hate to heare, lowd plaints have duld mine eares:

I hate to tast, for food withholds my dying:

I hate to see, mine eyes are dimd with teares:

I hate to smell, no sweet on earth is left:

I hate to feele, my flesh is numbd with feares:

So all my senses from me are bereft.

‘I hate all men, and shun all womankinde;

The one, because as I they wretched are,

The other, for because I doo not finde

My love with them, that wont to be their starre:

And life I hate, because it will not last,

And death I hate, because it life doth marre,

And all I hate, that is to come or past.

______________________________________________________________________

Lindsay Turner’s first collection of poems, Songs & Ballads, is forthcoming from Prelude Books in 2018. Her translations include the Franco-Japanese poet Ryoko Sekiguchi’s book adagio ma non troppo, forthcoming from Les Figues Press, and The Next Loves, by Stéphane Bouquet, forthcoming from Nightboat Books. With Walt Hunter, she is the co-translator of a book of philosophy, Atopias, by Frédéric Neyrat, forthcoming from Fordham University Press. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina.