Publication information
First Edition
Magh 1399 February 1993
First SAAP eBook Edition
September 2024
Cover
Magh 1399 February 1993
First SAAP eBook Edition
September 2024
Cover
About Writer
Abul Hossain Miah was a prominent poet from Gopalganj, Bangladesh. He was known for his contributions to Bengali literature, particularly in the field of poetry. His works often reflected the cultural heritage, social issues, and natural beauty of the region. Abul Hossain Miah remains celebrated for his lyrical and evocative poetry, which continues to inspire readers and enthusiasts of Bengali literature.
Abul was born at Barnigram in Tungipara, Gopalganj Mahakuma, Faridpur District, on 4 August 1947. He was admitted to the University of Dhaka to study English with honours, but could not complete his studies. Instead, he joined the news section of the Ittefaq in 1969. Subsequently, he became assistant editor of the Ganabangla (1972–1973) and Dainik Janapad (1973–1974).
He died on 26 November 1975 at PG Hospital (now Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University) due to long-standing heart problems.
Abul, who came first in the Asian Poetry Competition held in 1970, occupies an important place in modern Bengali poetry, though he wrote for only a decade. His poems reflect feelings of grief, self-abnegation, and loneliness. They are preoccupied with visions of death and ideas of separation. Among his volumes of poems is Raja Jaay Raja Ase (1972), Je Tumi Horon Koro (1974) and Prithok Palongko (1975). The poetic play Ora Kayekjan (1988) and Abul Hasaner Galpa Sanggraha (1990) were published after his death. He received the Bangla Academy Literary Award (1975) for poetry and the Ekushey Padak (1982) posthumously.*
A PREFATORY NOTE
Abul Hasan died young. He published four books of poems before his death. The poems he published are pervaded by a keen sense of beauty that hangs over his words like a strange aroma. In his intuitive perception of nature, of women and of his native land, there is an unmistakable pathos that gives his poems an obsession with death. In Hasan’s poetry there is a happy encounter with death, which endows on an otherwise gloomy theme an uncanny beauty. Abul Hasan’s death cut short a creative spirit, but he left us a corpus of writing which is astonishingly mature. Like Keats he died early, but the comparison does not exhaust itself there, for like Keats, he left behind some of the loveliest lyrics in our tongue.
I am pleased to see that two of our young translators have taken the trouble of transcreating Hasan for the English speaking world. It is not easy to translate something which has its roots in the culture of the land. And since ours is not a part of the European culture, it makes communication on intuitive level even more difficult. Masud and Tapan, both my former colleagues at the Chittagong University, have given an excellent account of themselves in this task. I believe Hasan in English would go down well with those for who the book is meant.
M. Harunur Rashid
Director General
Bangla Academy
Dhaka.
About The Book
Abul Hasan is one of our major poets of the sixties, although he began to be published in book form in the seventies, only a few years before his death in 1975. His actively creative period spans the time between the mid-sixties and the mid-seventies, the one end of which shot the political fireworks of hope into the national firmanent and the other received its ashes of despair. The late sixties were a time of political high-tides whipped up by the nationalistic fervour to overthrow a despotic rule and to put an end to an alien cultural sway over the native one, which culminatd in the War of Independence in 1971. But what followed the Independence was the opposite of the pre-Independence revolutionary optimisim : economic dolour, widespread famine, moral disintegration and certain totalitarian trends. Hence in spirit the decade from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies was divided in twain, as it were. The late half was as listless, bored and shiftless as the early half had been vigorous, explosive and dynamic. In spirit Abul Hasan’s verse might be seen to be rather closer to the second half of the decade under review than to the first.
His is the lyric poetry of unoccupied, lacerated, homeless youth blown about like autumn leaves shed by time. While reading his poetry one becomes aware of the absence of a regulating centre: the centre is home, whose absence is felt like an all-pervasive desolation in his world. It is not that the poet has done away with the need which might have lessened the intense pathos of his poetry which, as it is, is there (it might be suspected) because of his strong feeling for a peaceful affectionate endearing home. There is rather a persistent nostalgia for it. In the form of childhood memories of village home it intensifies the lingering melancholy in his verse. These memories pass before his mind’s eye like shades in the moonlight. This is one rich source of the elegiac and nostalgic in Hasan: elegiac because he laments the loss of good old days in terms of a glorious tradition, and nostalgic inasmuch as he casts a wistful backward look at those times—
O Poetry, haven’t you seen handlooms in our houses?
people travelling on bikes?
The deep thrill of green pools? yellow tuber bushes?
sarees drying in the sun?
Haven’t you seen our golden times worth self-sacrifice?
(“Land of the Rising Sorrow”)
Like a typical romantic he looks back. His poetry is replete with the imagery of a prosperous past now in ruins.
Many of this problems can be identified as those of an unattended youth who thinks himself to be abandoned by the world at large and who then attempts to draw attention to himself by staging self-pity. The image of something of a neglected child, dislodged, spoiled and self-pitying, recurs in Hasan’s verse because it serves well to pose him as a pariah, who has played truant from gentle society and strayed from the common beat. There is also a paradox in him of publicity and withdrawal, of forcing entry by exit. His posed withdrawal is marked by his desire of living in the corner of society in perpetual sorrow and in fugitive resentment, as it were:
(“Voice of That Woman”)
His plaintive voice sounds as if he must accommodate himself within his sorrow as he sees no other external panacea coming his way (“Endless Is My Suffering”). He demonstrates the classic desire of resisting— even resenting— oblivion. He draws attention by sitting apart. It is attention anyway that he craves. The least in his poetry is the desire of obliteration by neglect or forgetfulness; rather he longs to live on as memorabilia of classical history:
The dearest leaves will fall off hardly to be remembered
Who was I, what was I, Sanghamitra or
The queen of some far-off transitional epoch...
(“Voice of That Woman”)
He forces his existence on the attention of others by putting himself into personae and striking attitudes like Byron, Laforgue, Corbiere and Shakti Chatterjee.
Hasan’s poetry reflects the ethos of his time. The dissipation and ineffectual suffering of youth, typical of his time, finds telling expression in his verse. Nowhere are the signs of transition and change more strongly manifest than in the young blood. The expressive and creative portion of it spilled at that time into the Dhaka University campus which gradually turned into a historic rendezvous privileging the rising and aspiring poets and writers from all parts of the country. The campus throbbed with their enthusiasm. From morning till far into night they could be seen in Sharif Meah’s canteen, on the library verandahs or lazing about in the lawns chatting, shouting, chain-drinkinking cups of tea or consuming psychedelic stuff and discussing Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Poe, Dylan Thomas, Kafka, Camus, Hesse, Kahlil Gibran and also the glorified literary Cinderellas, and whosoever spoke comfort to their distraught souls or whatever corresponded with their temperament. Writers of all brands, genuine and fake, foregathered there and burned with a passion. Nobody knew whence they came, whither they went or whether they left the campus at all. They generated a bohemian spirit, which affected the place and filled its ambience like a contagion. They did not stop at living their nomadism; they also tended to perform it in public places. It gave rise to a kind of literary populism which cut the most dazzling figure on the pulpit of poetry. Hasan was an exquisite product of this flamboyant bohemianism and amongst those few who had popularized contemporary Bangla poetry in post-Independence Bangladesh. Poetry ceased to be a highbrow act. It came out into the street. Declamatory poetry recitals were held in jubilation on mobile stages, on street islands,in college premises and over all sorts of places.Poetry became an open-air affair with a keen desire to be communicated with the masses.It became a great source of excitement for the public who learned to listen to poetry in a little more than an amateurish mood. It was not an uncommon sight at that time to come across the roads blocked and the halls jammed with youthful crowds.
A similar ebullience and enthusiasm is the hallmark of Hasan’s poetic spirit. It is impressed even upon his response to the morbid human condition that followed the post-Independence days. His poetic sense grew out of a vigorous youth hungry for beauty. But he implicitly recognizes the ephemerality of beauty and joy in a rather Keatsean sense, which is the paradox of joy and beauty as they turn into their opposites upon consummation. The difference also warrants some qualification. Keats needs joy in order to sharpen his sense of beauty and pain. On the contrary, Hasan turns away from joy in anticipation of despair following from satiety, for he knows that ‘.... joy knows more sorrow than sorrow itself’ (“I Can’t Do Now”). Keats is not averse to this pleasure-pain. What, on occasion, however, relieves Hasan of his moments of anguish and depression is his outbursts of youthful drives and creative acts:
No more shall I leave a single inch of my inner
land of sorrow unploughed and barren...
(“Song of the Black Peasant”)
His overwhelming sense of beauty always touches a romantic chord, even in the projection of disenchantment. The process is similar to Hamlet’s imaginative displacement of rotten Denmark into a fascinating world of verbal wonders. Usually his romantic moods issue from the sickness that indulges beauty and self. His lyricism largely derives from the absorption of experience into this indulged self which is intent on death. And the experiences distilled through this self acquire a consequent morbidity. It is instrumental in romanticizing sickness in Hasan. Presumably he is here under the influence of Baudelaire.**
** From Book.
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