Re-Reading Two Poems by Bishnu Dey in a Time of Exponentially Growing Crises

ABSTRACT

I argue in this essay that in some circumstances lyric poems written from the colony or the postcolony move in the direction of expressive totality by engaging with multiple worlds of reference at once. György Lukács suggested that the totality that we find in epic poetry and, to a lesser extent, in the novel, is absent from lyric poetry. In a re-reading, inflected by the Covid-19 pandemic, of two mid-twentieth-century Bengali poems written by Bishnu Dey (1909–1982), of which I provide the English translations, I illustrate how lyric poems about disaster, enacting a disorientation of the senses and a dissolution of the fixity of reference, creates transpositions across multiple worlds. In the case of these particular poems, the worlds are those of Greek myth and Indian myth, parallels among which weave intertextually together in an expressive totality. It follows that, alongside other genres, poetry too continues to be a resource with which to think our contemporary moment. © 2023 South Asian Literary Association.