Africa

Rabindranath Tagore


Translation by Bina Biswas , Secunderbad, India


In those flustered days of the primeval age
when the Maker frustrated with himself
was ravaging the new creation again and again,
In those days of His impatience, the frequent tossing of head,
The enraged arms of the ocean snatched you from
the breast of the Eastern mother-earth, Africa,
and tied you down under the thick watch of foliage
in the inner quad of stingy light.

There in the solitude of leisure
you accessed the mysterious remote
besought to learn the obscure notes of
water, land and sky.
The nature’s imperceptible wonders
aroused spells in your cataleptic mind.
You scorned the dreadful
in the appalling guise,
yearning to beat the terror,
by making yourself grotesque in stern grandeur
to the drumbeats of the divine dance.

O the shadowed one,
beneath the dark veil,
unknown was your human form
to the hatred's blurry eyes.
Came they with iron manacles
their claws sharper than your wolves,
Arrived the human-trappers
More blind with pride than your
your sunless woods.

The savage hunger of the civilized
bared its brazen inhumanity.
The forest paths moistened with
muted sighs, the dust was mucky
with your tears and blood.
Crushed under the nailed boots of the bandits,
on the ugly lumps of clay
left their stubborn scripts
in your insulted history.

Across the ocean, all the while, in their towns
bells chimed in their temples
morning and evening in the name of all merciful God.
The children played in their mothers’ arms;
the poets’ songs rang with the adulation of beauty.

Today, when on the western horizon
The evening is breathless in the windstorm,
the beasts emerge from the hollow caves
Announce the end of the day with their ugly howl,
Come , O poet of the eon,
in the approaching gloom of the dusk,
Stand at the doors of the slighted woman,
Say, ‘Forgive us’.
Amidst delirious raving,
Let these be the last hallowed words of your civilization.