Weblog of A Designer

Wild Pepper Forest (2006) - The work is inspired by a line from a Bengali poem by one of my favorite Bengali poets, Kamal Chakraborty (’80 – ‘90). The sentence goes like this, “… tomake dekhate partum buno maricher jongole thyangare ghumiye porechhe …” .

A rough translation of the line would go like this, “… I wish I could show you how the brigand has fallen asleep in the wild pepper forest …”.

The image was  used as the cover for 14th issue of Kaurab Online, the on-line edition of Kaurab, a Bengali Literature magazine founded by Kamal Chakraborty, which he also edited for 30 years.

I have written a prose piece in Bengali, along with this image, as a part of my response to this line. Rather, my work is a textual and visual tribute to the poet, Kamal Chakraborty, who has inspired me to experiment with the form and content of Bengali prose in my writings.

• Read this Bengali prose piece, “Tomake Dekhate Partum (I wish I could show you)” in Bangla UNICODE font
• Read this Bangla Prose Piece, as GIF

French and English transposition of the first paragraph of the Bengali piece has been done by Rouflaquettes.

French transposition:

Je pourrais te montrer
et je veux tellement te faire montrerles
les grattes ciels depuis les frontières de la cité… …
bric à bric
sable, bois
pierre à pierre
sur plafonds blanchis
vignes coulantes formidables de piments sauvages … …
dont l’ombre endorme le brigand faire à mesure
tel que le soleil de thésaures de notre parole
dictionnaires
examens et leurs cahiers verts
ainsi que le stylo à balle en rouges …

English transposition:

I could have shown you
and I would have wanted so much to show you
the skyscrapers beyond the city’s frontiers,
brick after brick
sand, wood
on lime-washed ceilings
flowing vines of elegant wild pepper
whose shadow shelters the sleeping brigand
like the sun of the thesaurus
and dictionaries of our speech,
exams and their green notebooks,
marked in red ball-point ink …

Later, in 2007, I reworked the image to create a cover for the printed edition of Kaurab.

The reworked image can be viewed here »