Beyond Land and Time

In Fields Fertile and Fallow

(Khєtє-prāntôrєy)

Translated by Clinton B. Seely

A simple creature had lived in many an emperor's realm

When finally one day he gazed four or five yards ahead

And saw no emperor anywhere, but still no revolution,

Only the silence of a peasant and his bullock

in the noonday field.

As afternoon in Bengal's fallow fields edged forward

Blending gradually with the rivers' estuaries

While Babylon and London rose and fell—

Yet he kept his back turned.

The late afternoon was such that laborer

With ladylove arrived.

When man dies his mummy's tomb sprawls out

In a mile of sunlight.

2.

Once again afternoon fades into estuaries.

The whole day a single peasant worked

The field with his bullock.

This century turns shrill.

Long shadows cast by trees

Stretch over Bengal's barren tracts of land.

Daylight hours here—and for this era—are over now.

And the peasant, unawares, caught in the remnants of

March-April twilight

Yet stands steadfast, gazing back at afternoon;

Nineteen forty-two, it seems.

But is it really nineteen forty-two?

3.

He holds no hope of peace nor passion anywhere.

He was born; he will die one day.

He had come to the field with the rising sun.

With sunset he departed.

He slept soundly, for he knew the sun would rise again.

The Scent of Sunlight Jibanananda Das

That night dew played

With memories primeval.

The wan plough of a peasant,

All those rich dark clods overturned by plowshares,

A world about a quarter mile in length

He worked constantly all the day and now lies

On an unturned plot, true or false?

4.

Blinded by the brilliance of a bloody flood, this simple creature

Finds no relief as yet.

Here the earth is rugged

With its cracks and fissures of an April field.

There are no more promises.

Mere stacks of straw extending for two, three miles,

And even then, not like gold.

Only the sound of sickles drowns out the world's cannons,

Pathetic, meek, homeless.

There are no more promises.

While water birds scurry to and fro, the river of the afternoon listens earnestly

To the tune of its own waters.

Has the cultivator, human being of today, arisen from an amoeba

Through some purposeless expansion

From a comedy of errors in a sea overspread with blue?

Buddhist shrines, the cross, ninety-three, Soviet myths and promises

Are all histories of eras ending. Life amid the shoreless mega ocean

Perhaps was fully cognizant of this, and Naciketa, more than Praceta,

Instantly became the favored model

For the first and final man in common mankind's light of sun.