Time Stars Women is an anthology of 107 poems of Jibanananda Das rendered into English by different hands. The first of them was ‘Banalata Sen’, done by Martin Kirkman as back as 1942. The latest is ‘Fields of an Eager World’ rendered by Asif Chowdhury in January 2024. Some poems translated by the poet himself have also been included.
Jibanananda Das left a huge corpus of poetry of which only a small fraction was published by him during his lifetime. The readers continue to focus on these poems. However, this volume contains a number of poems which were written during 1940s when his poetic worldview and diction underwent a radical change. The poet termed them as ‘later poems.’
Translation is a work of both interpretation and reconstruction. Different translators approach their tasks from different perspectives. To illustrate the point, fourteen translations of ‘Banalata Sen’ have been collected in this volume, including one done by Jibanananda Das himself.