Sabyasachi Sanyal
Summer 2025 | Poetry
37
From the Land of Gramscia: Tadogen Girte’s poems
Countess Vera Markova,
In her Bulgar tent,
Her silver spoon in the sugar bowl,
She speaks to me of memories,
Of the heart’s secrets, squeezing a lemon
Into the tea.
I see the muscles of her wrist and her blue veins.
Memories have trembled all night on our fingertips,
Now memory is severed from our past—
That dusty chair—
On which no one will ever sit again.
Countess Vera Markova, squeezing lemon in the tea’s liquor,
Her glassy muscles, glassy veins,
Tremble and ring
Sabyasachi Sanyal is a molecular biologist based in Lucknow, India, who writes primarily in Bengali. He has lived in various parts of India, South Korea, and Sweden, experiences that inform the diasporic and translingual dimensions of his work. His poetry has appeared extensively in “Kaurab” (https://kaurab.com), an international poetry journal where he served as an associate editor for nearly two decades. He was a key figure in developing circumcontentive poetry, a formally innovative movement that emerged from “Kaurab” and was featured in “Jacket2”. His work has also been published in “Aufgabe” and numerous Bengali literary platforms. Sanyal’s writing explores philosophical, mythic, and diasporic themes through experimental and multilingual forms, often engaging with displacement, gender, and the politics of language.
This poem is part of a larger, formally experimental project, From the Land of Gramscia, written under the heteronym Tadogen Girte. This invented persona, inspired by the vastness of the Mongolian steppe and the minimalism of Inuit poetry, was an act of linguistic and artistic liberation. The poems were originally written in Bengali and underwent a deliberate process of being translated into broken English before being re-translated back into Bengali—a method designed to create a rupture with traditional literary norms.
Email: sabysanyal@gmail.com