Translated from Bengali by the author, a selection from Ekti Mithye Matra (A False Dimension), published in 2025. Cover image: “Hierophant” 2024, painting by Eva Bovenzi,
[Introduction]
Come! See, this painting, lying on the table – completely black – acrylic –
This will be up on the southern wall – title – Self Portrait
What do you make of it?
Someone too tired to have any cravings at all is looking the other way
that is the artist –
Harsh light on the surface shows how darkness is reflected.
One visitor, meanwhile, has mistaken the painting for a window –
But he claims a chilly breeze from that side shook him to the core.
A window, for sure, he insists, you see the night – pitch black, endless night.
A stroke of darkness on the canvas –
Fire broke out in Jagannath ghat. Flowers getting burnt in each moment. A smell like that of pure envy engulfed the bridge. The world seemed very old; the breath of a giant was blowing across it. Oxygen hasn’t been able to quench my thirst for a long time. Moreover, acute loneliness has eroded my feet and palms. I remember, the only thing that was left on the seething bed after an intense session of lovemaking was the word ‘lobe’. Hunger, extreme hunger. Right now, a dot of a plane entered my mouth mistaking it for a hole in the sky. I gobbled up everything. I am famished, so I wolfed at the simplicity of life which was as gentle as the row of palm trees along the runnel, I devoured the wonderful tears of men that were more silent than flowers picked in the morning.
It was in the dead of night then, the loud sound of masticating everywhere, a dash of guilt applied on the canvas –
The emergent color of the night –
Hunger
Self Portrait
Acrylic on paper
444 x 209 cm
clean scenery, only
a house stuck to the land all around
the entire season has fallen overnight for the gravity
that attracts like her eyes
hello! yellow – I saw it advance wading through the faraway days
the path laid doesn’t end
is that the house of yellow?
like a countenance, a rugged cartography of sadness
this is the town
yellow lives in this house
Landscape
Oil on canvas
93 x 120 cm
cat.
the very cats, because, inside the milk-forlorn white solitude
approaching itself a cat
always
attending the lines clashing with one another. understands
how fast railway tracks merge, again separated
once a city is entered, metals clanking happily –
there, there from the pit of the train speed overflows
and
the scene
jeopardized
again and again –
again and again millions of cats shouting –
this beauty this accident
the two ends of a sudden impact any two people
frozen in a still shriek
Cubs of the moon
Charcoal on canvas
77 x 86 cm
the complexity of renovation –
no.
to be accurate – physical labor has a
simplicity. salty.
the scaffolds, half-whitewashed
anemic memory
he, who lies here was being born, a body
paused midway
Fossil
Lithograph
30 x 22 cm
one outside
of the house
has unfurled
many outsides
in a storm
Orgasm
Pencil sketch
15 x 22 cm
(spreading out in a drop.
spreading out like grief.
like grief like joy.)
color.
Background
Water color
10 x 10 cm
Note:
The texts, excerpts from the book published originally in Bengali – Ekti Mithye Matra (2025), follow the custom of the catalogues of art exhibitions where the title, the media and dimensions of the paintings are mentioned. In place of the photographs of the paintings, come the descriptions from an onlooker’s point of view. The only difference is that the exhibition never took place, and the paintings do not exist.
Aritra Sanyal (b.1983), a poet, translator, researcher, amateur photographer, and ex-sports journalist (The Statesman) works as a teacher. He is the author of eight books of poetry in Bengali; the latest, Ekti Mithye Matra (A False Dimension), came out in 2025. The recipient of the Sunil Gangopadhyay Award (2018) conferred by Kabita Academy, West Bengal, Aritra Sanyal has translated and collaborated with poets from different parts of the world. He co-edited Bridgeable Lines (2019), a book of Bengali translation of 12 contemporary American poets. In 2021, he co-edited and published the Bengali translation of Salome by Adeena Karasick.
