Weblog of A Designer

Comics
View larger image »

Since my childhood, I have always been mesmerized by the magical world of images and text of comic books and the bikini-clad girlfriends of the super heroes with their funny speech baloons, crossing the boundaries of those small boxy frames and rigid panels. I have always wanted to create a comic strip, but it did not get done. The only thing that I could do is to bring together one of my unfinished poems about a weekend trip with a rejected photograph from the same trip, and make a conscious effort to simulate the eerie ambience of the first cell of a dark, action comics strip - still without a story, waiting for a hostile moment to begin its journey through the pages of our childhood fears.

The text on the image can be roughly translated as,

There are trucks and trucks and trucks, and more trucks, more and more trucks, truck after truck, standing still beside the yellow seat, before us, and the dark sleeves of their t-shirts wipe off from the dark, gloomy, night, the vaporized sodium of Highway no. 7!

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 »

Two of my most recent writings are published on Natunkabita.com - an online Bengali Literature magazine, which is also the online presence of ‘Natun Kabita’ (New Poetry) - one of the most promising Bengali Literature and Poetry Magazines of the time.

I am a regular reader of their printed issues and now I am really excited to see one of my favourite magazines, easily accessible on internet. ‘Natun Kabita’ (New Poetry) is probably one of the very few literary groups in India that consciously tries to question the conventional mode of writing, denies the supremacy of main stream literature, supports non-conformist literary initiatives and regularly publishes strange text pieces; labelled as ‘New Poetry’, like mine! Jokes apart, ‘Natun Kabita’ has been publishing my experimental writings in Bengali, regularly, since 2004 and allowing me to play with language as well as the form, denying all lingustic and literary conventions of mainstream Bengali Literature.

I was reading their ideas about this so called Bengali Natun Kabita or New Poetry and how it was evolved in the last decades of 20th century and thaught it would be helpful for the inquisitive readers if I post few excerpts from their manifesto here,

“In every language and time a conventional main stream of poetry is cultured, it is observed, with nurturing supports from institutions and establishments. … During late eighties through early nineties of last century, young poets from Bengal, … wound up their own magazines under banner of Kobita Campus and initiated the quest for New Poetry. … It was decided to identify the signs of mainstream poetry, then called old poetry, and discard use of those (signs) … Thus came generation of alternative poetry by creation of new space and style, language, centripetal observation from resource point by zeroing subject. They called this NEW POETRY … “

By Barin Ghosal (On behalf of Natun Kabita Online)

The original article “In Search Of Alternative Poetry” can be viewed here »

Another interesting feature on this website is the Video section where they feature video recordings of poetry reading sessions by prominent contemporary Bengali Writers. This issue features, veteran Bengali poet and one of the main conceptualizers of this Bengali “New Poetry” idea - Barin Ghosal.

For inquisitive readers:

• Pronoydhwonir Software - Poetry E-book by Barin Ghosal
• Ku Jhik Jhik - Recent writing of Barin Ghosal »
• Proteekbaad (Symbolism) by Barin Ghosal »
• Amar Somoyer Kabita (Poems of My Time) by Barin Ghosal »