Poetry
Banalata Sen
বনলতা সেন
Jibanananda Das · 1942
Synopsis
The collection opens with his most famous poem: a traveller says he has wandered for thousands of years along the roads of the earth, from the seas of Ceylon to the seas of Malaysia, in the grey world of Bimbisara and Ashoka, as far as the city of Vidarbha, and has known only one moment of peace, at nightfall, beside Banalata Sen of Natore. The other poems bring in owls, cats, wild ducks and the harvests of rural Bengal, and other female figures beside whom the narrator comes to sit as the day fades.
Context
The poem that gives the book its title had already appeared in December 1935 in the second issue of the journal Kavita. The collection came out in 1942, in the month of Poush of the Bengali calendar, with twelve poems and a cover by Sambhu Shaha; it was its author's third. An enlarged edition, brought to thirty-one poems, was published by Signet Press in 1952 under a cover drawn by Satyajit Ray.
Who it is for
Short poems with dense, allusive images; translators agree that the music of Bengali does not carry over into another language.
Prizes and reception
The 1952 edition received a prize in 1953 from the Rabindra Literary Conference of Bengal; the title poem is one of the most frequently recited in Bengali.