Any errors are unintentional....

Poems of John Reed

I excerpt below two poems of John Reed. John Reed could be compared to Sukanta Bhattacharya and Kazi Nazrul Islam. However the short-life of Reed is more reminiscent of Sukanta. Sukanta could be credited with being among the first serious Bengali writers (poets) who could change the 'content' of a poem in Bengali literature; poems no longer remained vehicles of love/romance (remember Tagore's dramas are vehicles of ideas!) with the philosophical richness of the Raabindrik-school; thanks to Sukanta poems became collection of words that related to the lives of commoners. Nazrul also rebelled, introduced many Urdu words, became popular and prolific -- but wrote many songs on love, devotion and other tender aspects of life. The rebel in Nazrul (Aami bidrohi rana-klaanta...) had a different flavour than the commoner in Sukanta; you could foresee the coming of Premendra Mitra with 'Aami kabi jato kamarer aar kumorer...'!   I myself could not claim to write poems, but I express complex ideas into a syntax that would not follow Nesfield -- so it must be a poem if it were to be English!

John Reed was born on Oct 22, 1887 in Portland Oregon (USA), graduated from Harvard in 1910, and died of typhus in Moscow on Oct 17, 1920. Though a poet, he is famous for his contemporaneous novel.  I had excerpted  from "The Complete Poetry of John Reed, Jack Alan Robbins(ed.), Univ. Press America 1983" . Any errors are unitentional and regretted. 

I.  A Winter Run:

Out of the warmth and the light,
Into the frosty weather,
Into the teeth of a winter's night,
Running, we sprang together........
..............................................
..........
A flashing glimpse, a scarce-seen face,
A figure clear, then gone,
Once more the dark, the swinging pace,
And on again, and on......
..................
......
Across the river dim and still
The headless sleepers lie,
And, finger-like, the towered hill
stand up against the sky.

Into the warmth and the light,
Out of the frosty weather,
Out of the chill of a winter's night,
Glowing, we sprang together........

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II. Fog

Death comes like this, I know ---
Snow-soft and gently cold;
Impalable battalians of thin mist,
Light-quenching and sound-smothering and slow....
.................................................
.................
I drift or seem to drift
In a vague vapour-world that clings and veils
great trees arow like kneeling elephants.......
...............
...........
Now love and all the warm
Pageant of livingness
trouble my quiet like forgotten dreams,
Of ancient thunder on the hill of storm.

Aforetime I have kissed
The feet of many gods:
But in this empty space, there is no god
Save only I, a naked egoist.

How loud, how terribly
aflame are lights and sounds!
and yet I know beyond the fog is naught
But lonely bells across gray wastes of sea.


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I wanted to compile an anthology of 100 Indian poems --- I still have a long way to go! Of late I found some very interesting Telugu poems translated into English.  You are welcome to translate John Reed poems into vernacular (at times literal translation is not possible). You can collect a copy of the book I mentioned (available in libraries). If you are adventurous, you could translate Sukanta into English -- his anthology is very easy to get from any store in Kolkata.

SG,
Bangalore,
April 30, 2006.