Wikipedia quotes : "Binoy Majumdar was born in Myanmar (erstwhile Burma) on the 17th of September 1934. His family later moved to what is now West Bengal in India. Binoy loved mathematics from his early youth. He completed 'Intermediate' (pre-University) from the Presidency College of the University of Calcutta. Although he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering from Bengal Engineering College, Calcutta, in 1957, Binoy turned to poetry later in life. He was fluent in English and Russian and translated a number of science texts from the Russian to Bengali. When Binoy took to writing, the scientific training of systematic observation and enquiry of objects found a place, quite naturally, in his poetry. His first book of verse was Nakshatrer Aloy (in the light of the stars). However, Binoy Majumdar's most famous piece of work to date is Phire esho, Chaka (Come back, O' Wheel, 1962), which was written in the format of a diary. The book is dedicated to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a fellow-Calcuttan and contemporary of Majumdar.

Binoy has often been regarded by critics as a true successor of Jibanananda Das, the poet who revolutionized Bengali Poetry in the post-Tagore era. Like Jibanananda, Binoy drew his material from bountiful nature, the fields and the jungles and the rivers and the fauna of Bengal. But Binoy's originality lay in his attempt to relate the various elements of nature to one another through objective logic and scientific enquiry. In this respect, some critics like Aryanil Mukherjee, refer to the genre of his work as scientific field journal. Binoy Majumdar was also bold and revolutionary in his depiction of sexuality. He abundantly used vivid imagery which were sensually potent and Freudian in essence. In a series of pieces [Aamar Bhuttay Tel (My Oiled Corn-cob)], where he gives an explicit and graphic description of sexual intercourse. Binoy, once again, lays strong emphasis on the physiology of the process, and takes to a journalistic narration. Binoy has always been somewhat obscure among readers of Bengali Poetry. He was quite ahead of his time in breaking norms of contemporary literature. Some of his poems are difficult to decipher at the first go, and require multiple readings. His writings are unconventional because they often appear as neutral scientific reportage, and not poetry in its usual romaticized self. In this, Binoy readers can perhaps trace back his background as a Mathematician. Binoy builds up all his imagery, nuances, lyricism, and poetic discovery on the skeleton of scientific reasoning and factual observations. Binoy died in his maternal home in Shimulpur, West Bengal, 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 - 21^st 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

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

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