A fresh translation

Shomosto deen'er shayshay shishirer shobdayr moto Shondha ashay;

And whose effect is to mimic the imagined sound of falling dew (shishirer shobdo) in two ways, or rather, through the use of two devices: one, by soft, very soft, 'sh' sounds, which sounds like dew falling, and second, by slowing down the speed of the line since we can't read a line with a succession of 'sh' sounds too fast. These effects didn't simply happen, with Jibanananda sitting down to write and the lines pouring effusively out of him. These are all conscious poetic devices, and the more a translation can mimic the original's effects the richer it is. And so both the sound and the speed reflect the line's content, falling dew, which in turn reflects death, the closing of life, the onset of the evening of one's life, the fading of the earth's colours. Aside from the sound, Sudeep's succession of 's's' also has the effect of slowing down the line, though the half-line 'evening closes the day's end' is awkward construction. As is the 'by day and night' in the second line of the first stanza. (Please, I didn't say it was the perfect translation, only that it was very much worth a look. You can't get everything, we all know that.)

Yet another point is that Sudeep has not kept to the strict form of the original, which was three stanzas of six lines each, but within which the sounds and words--Bengali being a much 'softer' sounding language than English-- convey a sense of drift, of the mystery of historical time, of distance and space. English translations could hardly ever convey this sense, mainly because by sticking to the original form, English sounds, quite hard to the Bengali ear, became that much flintier. And so the pliable matter, the yielding grief, of Banalata Sen tended in English translations to become wood and stone, somethingwhich tended not to 'give'. Sudeep, by indenting lines and adding many more dashes, by way of parentheses and hyphens, by a general slant in the look of the poem on the page, has loosened the form, which to an extent conveys the original's inherent sense of drift, of chancing upon a cinnamon isle, of man wandering in history's outer edges.

There are other things too ('Natore'r Banalata...' for instance), and not always successful, but those I leave for the readers to have fun finding out.

Banalata Sen

(translated by Sudeep Sen)

For thousand years I have walked this earth's passage
by day and night 3/4 from Lanka's shores to Malay's vast seas.
I've travelled much 3/4 been a guest at Bimbhishar and at Ashok's courts,
stayed in the distant nights, in the town of Bidharba.
I'm long worn-out; around me waters of the sea and life have endlessly swirled.
My only peace 3/4 a fleeting moment snatched with her 3/4
Natore'r Banalata Sen.

Like the dense ink-night of Bidhisha, her hair 3/4 black, deep black;
her face 3/4 like the delicate-wave of Shrabasti's filigree-frieze.
Just as a lost boatman, rudderless, tossing in the far seas
chances upon a lush-green Isle of Spice,
I too caught a sight 3/4 saw her, a mere glimpse in the dark. Gently, raising
her eyes, she whispered: "Where were you, all this while?"
[And there she stands at my dream's end 3/4 my own Banalata Sen].

With soft-settling hiss of dew, evening closes the day's end;
kites erase from their wings, sun-stained smell of flight.
When colours of the earth gently fade, fireflies light up their palette,
and old songs find new lyric, old stories new score.
Birds return home, so do the rivers; as life's trade 3/4 its give-and-take 3/4 cease.
Only the dark stays. And just as it remains, so does sitting by my side,
face to face, my own Banalata Sen.