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BINOY MAJUMDAR:: COME BACK, O'
WHEEL
An introduction to Binoy Majumdar's poetry
Aryanil Mukherjee
Binoy Majumdar (1934-2006) was a brilliant, eccentric, obscure and controversial poet
whose life and work await chapters of penetrating research. Binoy is an
extremely rare poet – it is hard to find a parallel in the western
hemisphere. There is an intense purity in his work in which geometry,
mathematics, and scientific logic couple with a unique lyric genre. Despite
being a fine and talented engineer, a brilliant, innovative mathematician,
a polyglot ( in all modes of use he was fluent in Bengali, English and
Russian) and an even more brilliant poet, Binoy led a rather distraught and
disoriented life of extreme poverty and isolation. He probably suffered
from schziophrenia and/or related mental disorders which was hastened by failed one-sided love (for Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak) and attempted suicide several times in his life. In the
1990s, the state government of West Bengal, upon request from his literary
cohorts, provided some support. It didn't restore his physical and mental
health. However, during his stay in the state-run hospital, he wrote a book
of skeletal poems - haspatale lekha
kobitaguchchho (Hospital Poems) which won him the prestigious national poetry award (Sahitya
Academy Purashhkaar) in the last year of his life. He remained largely
estranged and unnoticed outside the teeming ambience of the Bengali poetry
scene for decades. Today, however, after his demise, Binoy is beginning to
attract a huge following among younger poets. 
Born in Myanmar (erstwhile Burma) on 17 September 1934,
Binoy moved with his family to West Bengal (India) during the second world
war. He was educated initially in the prestigious Presidency College
(University of Calcutta) and went on to graduate in Mechanical Engineering
from Bengal Engineering College, Calcutta, in 1957. His first book of poems
- nokkhotrer aloy (In Star Light) was published
while he was in his 20s. It was however, his second book, aghraNer anubhutimala (Autumnal Sense Streams), later and more famously
republished as phire eso chaka (Come Back, O
Wheel, 1962) that received wide acclaim and gradually, gave Binoy
Majumdar a deep engraving on the mantle of Bengali poetry. phire eso chaka was written using a profoundly scientific lyric in the form
of a journal. This was a collection of love poems dedicated to his
contemporary Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (“chaka”, meaning “wheel” in
Bengali, was a funny truncation of Gayatri’s surname).
Critics have pronounced Binoy Majumdar as one of the ablest
successors of Jibanananda Das - the poet who revolutionized Bengali Poetry
after Rabindranath Tagore. No surprise Binoy drew from bountiful nature,
the varied flora and fauna of the riverine Bengal plains. At the same time,
scientific objectivism and systematic observation found a firm footing in
his unique lyrical voice. His ability to relate via simple laws of physics,
the various elements of nature to one another, smartly aided by objectivity
and scientific enquiry, makes his poetry absolutely remarkable and unparalleled.
His genre of work could be described as a scientific-artistic field
journal.
Binoy’s bold and revolutionary depiction of sexuality gives
his work another interesting dimension. He abundantly used vivid sexual
imagery in a series of poems like amar
bhuTTay tel (My Oiled Corn-cob), where he gives an intensely poetic but intricately graphic
description of a sexual intercourse. Binoy emphasized the physicality of
the process of cohabitation by trying to narrate scientific truth through
essentially journalistic observations.
Binoy’s approach to poetry in a certain sense is rather
unconventional because his work gives the impression of neutral scientific
reportage and is themed on strange natural observations – for example, the
changing shape and position of the sun during a solar eclipse. A great
poet, left much ignored and unnoticed for the most part of his life, Binoy
died in his maternal home on December 11, 2006.
New POEMS
Can offer love
I can offer love if you have enabled
acceptance
Your amorous hands shed it all –
laughs, moonlight, pain, memory,
nothing holds.
That has been my experience. The
doves never fly
in moonlight; yet love, I can
offer.
Eternal, easy this bestowal – just
not to hinder
the sprout, not to let it turn
pale yellow
in the repressed unseen of light, just
to keep it green.
It’s that easy, yet pain hands me
a death stone
so I never err, never fall in
love.
Your acceptance remains disabled.
Dove, you’re never hurt
if you fell from the branches, you
take wings.
With the everlasting smile of an ancient
painting
I know you’ll leave; wound and agony will silence me.
Translated
by Aryanil Mukherjee
Heard as a child
As a
child I had heard about carnivorous flowers
But I haven’t found them inspite of this prolonged search.
Lying on the bed in my tent I have seen the sky sprawl,
I have learned all nearest and brightest stars, which in
true
proposition, are in fact not stars but planets, cold and
dark planets.
Hopeless, inlaid in decadence, bored with dissent, I too
alone, lay on the floor – wasted worm-eaten skin and pulp.
O’ reproach, self-abhorrence, look, what pallid fruit.
Sometime back pure moonlight fell on soul, on metal fragment
Lightning, caused by casting light, it needs special metals.
No volant birds, except the pigeon, come near humans
today.
They fly in with ease, pick up the given grains and leave
Yet successful moonlight eternally inspires man.
We walk through airs of distinct state and quality;
poisoned, perfumed or icy which only our environment
is limit-ranged to.
To live is not to be space-indulgent
Therefore, O’ reproach, electric repentance seems just,
Very few books have an appendix.
(Written - 21st September, 1960)
Translated
by Aryanil Mukherjee
Speaking in a foreign tongue
With the caution of speaking in a
foreign tongue
I come to talk about you; past deeds
thwart.
My lady of luster, the worm-eaten poets
who aren’t painters, know fanciful
artification may
let your hair fall on the portrait,
draw lips and all
but misses out on the delicate grace of
its owner;
hence we have meditation and divers.
What do you think? Is it an immature
outcome too?
Or a compounding query if animals with
deep-rooted
fur could have clothes made out of
their skin?
Translated
by Aryanil Mukherjee
Just
like music
You just like music;
such disinterested in orgasmic moaning
you seek shelter in a park.
The pale, felled tree has stopped singing.
Yet its roots continue to resurrect buds –
they gaze, faces of nonchalance, unchanged since the fall of
the
Gupta Empire, wood sculpture as if; ecstasy of the
bloody centuries transformed into grief-waves of monotony.
I am a tree, a teacosy left behind by the ailing’s bed
decrepit dusty languid. No overflowing Indus,
not a single infallible natural calming hand around,
that if caresses my forehead, past erases along with
present.
Malady deep though, poor poet, but not contagious
never transmitted to flower-bodies, never will.
Translated
by Aryanil Mukherjee
The
doctor is me
I am the doctor, whose mistreatment led
to his death which makes me frigid with
pain.
I meet him though, the corpse, in some
phase of return
when an eternal sunshine lights up my
heart.
I keep asking myself if it is normal to
talk to a corpse;
when our eyes meet I am so bashful and
scared,
I look away; body heat of fevered humans
warms the viscera of strange
flowers; and I look for them!
Translated
by Aryanil Mukherjee
When the
noun
When the noun does verb with me
at times with both legs , wraps around
the
pronoun’s waist. And I do the verb in
numerous ways like
I go chest down upon the noun and
in two pronoun hands I hold both
shoulders of the
noun while I do the verb.
And then in many repeated smaller verbs
as I’m lying
down and sometimes long, longer verbs
too.
Then in another action keeping two
hands of the noun
on its two sides I do the longest verb
and I look at
my noun and observe the pronoun while
the noun’s apex
is inside the noun and its base hangs
outside.
Translated
by Aryanil Mukherjee
Moon and
the corncob
Transfixed, I stare at the moon cave,
on the floor
where stands moon, in the middle of a
clear day,
I gaze winkless at the moon cave, its
grass mowed short.
Cave’s outer fold shows through the
grass.
From its hidden mouth the fold has
crept out in the open
towards abdomen. When moon walked up to
and stood
on the bed, I asked, ‘no oil massage
today?’ and the moon
replied, ‘sure we will, but wait a bit’
and then she spread the
oilcloth on the bed, extending it to
cover under the pillow
and she goes to the wall rack to fetch
the oil bottle,
pours a bit on her left hand and firmly
grips the corncob.
Even before she held it, the cob was
already erect.
Me and the moon stood face to face on
the floor
As she massaged the corncob in one
hand.
Translated
by Aryanil Mukherjee
Moon and
the corncob
Moon said, while smearing oil on my
corncob
‘your cob is so thick’. I didn’t
respond to it but directed her otherwise
‘smear some more oil on the cobtip’,
but moon paid no heed to it
although she heated it up, the cob, I
mean.
She applied the rest of the oil on its
body and all around and when
done, the moon got up from the floor
where she sat and
walked up to the bed, which too was on
the floor.
Moon slept with her head on the pillow
and raised her legs,
I knelt, took off under my knees, my
shirt and warm trousers.
Then I see the cave, its mouth closed,
even as I spread the legs out
its stays put , completely closed. When
the moon tries to get a grip on the corncob
from where she was lying on the bed, I
said, ‘Wait, let me see if I can get the
cob in myself’ – she readily withdrew
her hold
and as I leaned forward pressing the
tip against the cave door
the corncob slipped in at ease.
Translated
by Aryanil Mukherjee
A few complete poems from phire
eso chaka ( Come back, O Wheel) - Binoy's innumerably reprinted, redesigned, replenished and
refabricated book and his most talked about poetry collection – are
translated here
8th March, 1960
One bright fish flew once
to sink back again into visible blue, but truly
transparent water - watching this pleasing sight
the fruit blushed red, ripening to thick juices of pain.
Endangered cranes fly, escaping ceaselessly,
since it is known, that underneath her white feathers exist
passionate warm flesh and fat;
pausing for short stalls on tired mountains;
all water-songs evaporate by the way
and you then, you, oh oceanfish, you...you
or look, the scattered ailing trees
foliaging expansive greenery of the world
churn it up with their deepest, fatiguing sighs;
and yet, all trees and flowering plants stand on their own
grounds at a distance forever
dreaming of breathtaking union.
Translated
by Aryanil Mukherjee
27th June 1961
Like wet gorges our feel
limited, confined; valleys, woods and hills
all covered in fog and clouds for the past few days.
Tell me how much of the multitudes of earthly taste
does the failed buds of a cat’s tongue feel ?
Yet all the crisp and subtle, sharp experience,
like flower thorns or the incisiveness of orbits
of distant stars, of the far beyond.
Anyway, despite it, the stupendous air of the sky
not large currents, fluxes with crosswinds.
Unsuppressed by the conflicts of these uncertain
excitement, the pine still grows erect
like true desire, towards a lightening sky.
Translated
by Aryanil Mukherjee
1st July 1961
I politely woke up in the morning to a flowering hope.
My future, firmament were lit up
by your talent, preserved like tinned meat.
Nervously, I conjured up a joint meeting of tea-thoughts,
thoughts of fresh air from the eternal summit.
You inexistential, as imaginary as a visual aberration
or maybe extinct, dead.
Or have deserted me like your illegitimate newborn, by the road.
I think of life, after the wound heals
I know it wouldn’t hair anew; pain sits
calm on sorrowed thoughts like a nocturnal fly –
on the way back from hospital, in momentary mind.
Sometimes unawares, I know, the pain will wither
with the falsity of a child urinating in sleep.
Translated
by Aryanil Mukherjee
If you never come again
If you never come again, never blow through these steaming regions
like cooling drifts of the upper air, even that absence is an encounter.
Your absense is as of the blue rose
from the kingdom of flowers. Who knows, some day
you may yet appear. Maybe you have, only you are too close.
Can I smell my own hair?
Marvellous sights have been seen.
A full moon was to have risen last night --
only a quivering sickle appeared!
It was an eclipse.
I have given up strewing grain on the ground
to have the birds join me at lunch.
Only when the baby is cut adrift
does it have its free hunger and thirst;
like taking off a blindfold to be confronted with
a curtain, being born
into this vast uterus, lined with a sky porous with stars.
Translated
by Jyotirmoy Datta
What is needed is a sudden turn
What is needed is a sudden turn
leaving the swift hand that plucks butterflies out of the air
gaping at a loss.
The others exist pale and ghostly as stars
brought to brief life by a total eclipse of the sun.
But I cannot change my course now; can the leopard
unspin its leap in midair?
Moreover, they may still be wrong. She can yet appear.
Cream rises only if one lets boinling milk stand and cool.
Translated
by Jyotirmoy Datta
The pain remained with me
The pain remained with me a long time.
Finally the ancient root was cut --
from immersion I emerged blinking into light.
I am restored to health now though the season is gray.
Surgery everywhere; this tea table was once the flesh of a tree.
Translated
by Jyotirmoy Datta
More sample translations from his
famous book Phire Eso Chaka (Come back, O Wheel) :
sample 1
The blue stone on my ring shimmers with unquenchable thirst.
I fear the day of my death will be one like this.
Because in some distant age, you had an assassin
for enemy, you live like a rose encircled
by thorns. And I, like a letter gone astray,
have come to the wrong address.
sample 2
flowers have no room for geometry or even its traces
they are all mixed up into a singular mess
geometry makes the landscape
all those lines we use in poems
sample 3
from time immemorial have these poems existed
like serene mathematics
lying in an unseen corner
awaiting discovery this autumn evening
in the Bakul grove under faint moonlight
sample 4
length, weight and time - these three worldly units
are talked about too often
like there's nothing else in the can...
also a unit that measures light, or
how audible are you could be measured too
in our world, man-day is another unit
Sample
1 is translated by Ron D.K. Banerjee. Sample 2-4 are done by Aryanil
Mukherjee.
Jyotirmay
Datta, a
celebrated poet and editor, was Binoy’s contemporary, simpatico, his patron
and rescuer-in-chief. His translations are taken from -
Majumdar, Benoy. Seven Poems by Benoy Mojumdar, tr. Jyotirmoy Datta. Hudson
Review v. 21 n. 4 (Winter 1968-1969), pp. 648-650.
Binoy Majumdar's photograph: copyright Abhijit
Mitra, Kaurab
Page last updated Apr, 2020
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