AUDITY FALGUNI

Pias Majid, born in 1984, is a gentle yet prominent voice among Bangladesh’s poets of the 2000s generation. He offers his readers tales of those employed to plant moss, of a moonlit pond, and of the scent of sunrise fading before a horde of salt. Just like a true successor of Jibanananda Das, he narrates the anecdote of someone who dies silently and does not wish to be present at any moonlit conference. On the other hand, Pias tells about terrible jealousy of the ropes of living.

New Normal and Other Poems is a collection of poems by Pias Majid, translated into English by Alamgir Mohammad. Alamgir Mohammad, Assistant Professor of Bangladesh Army International University of Science and Technology of Cumilla, endeavoured to decipher the imageries and symbolisms of Majid’s poems and retain all those that remain after a language gets ‘lost in translation’. Professor Emeritus Serajul Islam Choudhury has penned a worthy preface of the book.

Personally I began reading Majid’s poems from 2006 when he was just a university student. 20 years passed by and he is still steady in his offerings to the Muse—the muse of poetry. Who is this muse, his “lady love”, who he can never reach as the path to her is a “shaky bridge” of the poet’s language?

New Normal and Other Poems mostly connotes a number of small but profound poems which seem like the faint songs of rustling leaves from a distant forest. For example, in “An Afternoon in the Naval”, the poet takes us away to the coastline of the azure seas:

From the blue strings of the sea,you saw the sea birds flying.You are tied up fastto some held-up fog.Suppose, in your chestyou carry the lives of many ships—Their speed and destination have crossed away.

While browsing through this aptly translated collection of poems, any reader may feel a pang in their heart after reading metaphors that sway like grass. Like the whirling dance of the Sufis, the cycle of seasons shroud the woman’s words which she probably wished to tell him (from “Your Words”).

I, however, won’t deny the gradual changes Majid seems to undergo in his decades-long relationship with poetry. Poems in his earlier Bangla collections, like Nach Protimar Laash (Banglayan Books, 2009) or Marble Fol er Mousum (Oitijjhya, 2022), read like an impressionist painting with vibrant colours. On the other hand, his contemporary poems exhibit an association with today’s gadget driven world. The lines “In future we even wish to/ live-stream our deaths” from the poem “New Normal” may seem too simple but are striking . Sometimes his poems reminded me of paintings by Marc Chagal where “Our ancient love metamorphosed into ghosts-wearing the clothes of green” (“On a Late-Autumn Morning”). For that, kudos to the competence of Alamgir Mohammad as a translator.

Pias Majid uses a milieu of metaphors from Bangla folktales like “Chander Maa Buri”. “The Flickering Flame” reminded me of the late poet Shamsur Rehman’s autobiographical recollection of a childhood in old Dhaka. It is in this poem that the lines “The boats from the underworld/ that lost their sails in the sky” may make you recollect the much sung lines of Tagore song: “Dariye achho tumi amar/ gaaner opare/ batash bohe mori mori/ ar bendhe rekho na tori!” I wondered if these boats from the underworld depicted the river of the underworld in Greek mythology which Orpheus had to cross to get back his Euridyce.

Throughout the collection, the poet sometimes behaves sarcastically out of sheer jealousy towards his beloved when the woman leaves him for the land of yellow clothes and returns in the guise of a crocodile’s daughter (“Poem on Love”). Again the poet comes into very casual, everyday metaphors like storing “every bit of the evening’s sweetness” in the “pen drive” (“Aesthetics”). He seems also to get a bit philosophical as he stands in the race of life “as both a winner and a loser” (“Parlor”).

This is an excerpt. Read the full review in The Daily Star and Star Books and Literature websites.

Audity Falguni is a writer, translator, poet and essayist. A law graduate from Dhaka University, Audity has served in a number of national and international NGOs, the UN, publishing houses and several newspapers.