‘The Yellow Metaphor’: Jiban Narah’s poetry signifies luminous precarity through the yellow colour
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Jiban Narah’s collection of Assamese lyrics, The Yellow Metaphor, has been translated into English by Anindita Kar. His decades-long practice has given him consummate mastery and imaginative control over the lyric form.
The metaphors and symbols in his poetic representation serve as powerful devices to unearth hidden emotional and intellectual connections. Together, they expand across memories, ecology and contemporary politics. His lyrics emerge from a chemistry of folk inheritance, intuitive perception of the elemental forces, and a sharp insight into their workings. We see his intuitive power at its best to evoke sensual nuances out of the classic elements of the earth – river, rain, flora and fauna, paddy fields, sunshine, moonlight.
A distinct articulation
Kar’s translation penetrates deeply into Narah’s poetic voice, capturing its conversational idiom, childhood memories, private emotions, musical flow of diction and rhythms shaped by the cross-cultural milieu of Assam. Her translation does not merely find verbal equivalents or transfer the content into the target language. Instead, it preserves subtle nuances of tone, reinforcing the ecological ethos. What, thus, emerges in English is not an approximation but an afterlife – a focused exploration of themes rooted in the riparian landscape and collective memory.
The poetics of colour and sensuous apprehension, deeply anchored in the riverine ecology and...