Eighty Steps in Darkness — Selected Poems of Kalikrishna Guha Translated

Translated by Dilip Kumar Chakravorty

Genre: Fiction / Novel
ISBN: 978-93-92281-58-7
Published: 5 May 2024
Pages: 90
Binding: Hardbound
Published by: Virasat Trade

Kalikrishna Guha’s poetry makes us remember Santayana: “…behind the discovered there is the discoverable.” But of course he is no deist. For him, Nature is the last word for man. But for that matter he never debunks the kind of man’s theatricality which is the root of the Rousseauistic concept of evil in Man and society. He is neither concerned very deeply with the evil of any sort, however, ‘famine’ or ‘starvation’ are often used in his poetry. And there is no ‘eternity’ for him, nor even future. His poetry ascertains, Men fulfill themselves in the present alone.

Kalikrishna Guha is no traditionalist, yet he is in no confrontation with it as Browning and Whitman were constantly at war with tradition and Christianity. Much close to the existentialist mode of search for identity, his poetry is essentially an outcome of “nothingness” mould.

About the Translator

Dilip Kumar Chakravorty was born in 1949, in Kolkata. He is an MA and Ph.D in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, and has authored several volumes in English and Bengali, his major fields of work being poetry, translation, and literary criticism. He has also translated ‘Selected Poems of Sankha Ghosh’. And he has written extensively for literary magazines, periodicals and newspapers. He taught Comparative Literature at West Bengal State University, W.B.