Is this a first?

The above qualities are on display in Bad Shaman Blues, his latest volume of poetry (Bloodaxe: 2006), where Herbert ranges not only between his two languages, but also geographically from Sofia to Beijing, from Athens to Kolkata. As well as in his rueful goodbye to youth:

So say farewell to all pretence at manhood:

The ninety-minute legs, the tan

That once looked buff, not tangerine; be careful

Combing your decockatoodled hair.

The book also contains the poem titled 'Adda.' It is unusual for a well-known Western poet to have tackled the theme of a very Bengali conversational art form, and use the original Bengali word as its title. Westerners might not quite catch every nuance of the term, but we, don't we.

Adda

All day I've been a penguin in the library,

telling kids how those birds form a shuffling mass,

like seed-pods on the coldest sunflower:

Iceflower of the Southern floes.

I've been explaining how the circle churns

to make outsiders, how each bird spends

a moment in the white petals of that blast,

and this is how I'd like to see their city.

Instead I've been rushed from boiling shade

to shade, drunk Thums Up in the compound,

and gazed at Kolkata's grimy shimmer past the glass:

All day I've been the emperor of air-conditioning.

Later, I sit on the verandah of the Director's flat

and discuss the rain that's suddenly, deafeningly

falling on the palm-leaves and the car-tops.

It's dark now, the lightning emitted from

the underside of clouds needles at bicyclists;

the day's heat is sawn through by the teeth

of rain, the sharpness of the shower.

This is Kaalbaishakhi, the April norwester.

Sarika says there is a season pinched between

Rainy and Autumn called Sarat, bright, not hot--

better for visiting. But I love this whetted weather

as much as her re-carving of my quartered year:

It's like the way that mood-words want to be

untranslatable, a dictionary of difference:

Hiraeth, honfibu, fortwursteln, suadade--

new seasons in the mind--

and abhiman, a word she tells me means

'pride' in Hindi, but in Bangla it expands,

like a blossom in the rain, into this sulking

as at something mistakenly withheld.

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.