Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay
Translated by Robert McNamara

Poetry
5.5 x 8.5, 152 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-59766-039-6
paper: $15.95

As though a tree
they sit in my shade,
a tired woman holding the hand of a child.
At once
a shiver climbs through my body,
right away I shed my leaves.
Under a shadeless tree, the woman and child lie
on a bed of fallen leaves, fall
asleep without complaint
and never wake up.
When winter's done, I'll grow new leaves on my body,
weave a cool dense umbrella for them.
But if they touch me again—
again the pain of shedding leaves.

— from an untitled series

Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay published his first volume of poetry in 1957, when India still reeled from the turmoil of independence and partition. At the time Mukhopadhyay began writing, Rabindranath Tagore still cast a long shadow over Bengali letters, and, in an effort to break with tradition, the post-Tagore generation drew on free-verse models from America and Europe. Mukhopadhyay—who has written criticism of English-language authors such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence—would later strike out on his own, in a style strongly colloquial, coolly skeptical, and yet deeply engaged. “The poet’s job,” he insists, is only “to be honest.” The author of over a dozen collections of poetry as well as several novels, Mukhopadhyay has also translated George Orwell’s Animal Farm in Bengali, as well as the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and William Carlos Williams, among others. He lives in Calcutta with his wife, poet Vijaya Mukhopadhyay.

Praise for The Cat Under the Stairs

“This is a clearly and faithfully translated collection, which captures Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay’s quietly witty, urbane, and reflective voice in contemporary Bengali poetry—a voice that also waxes ecstatic, in scriptural tones and with sensuous resonance.”

—Carolyne Wright, author of Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire