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Jiban Narah’s Yellow Metaphor Brings Assamese Poetry Into English
Jiban Narah is a poet from Assam whose poems have been translated into English by Anindita Kar.
The book is called The Yellow Metaphor.
Many poems use colours, smells, rivers, plants, animals and farming to talk about life.
Yellow is especially important because it can suggest memory, change, pain and hope.
The poems also remember ordinary people and communities whose stories are often overlooked.
Some poems describe sadness, violence and communal troubles without giving simple answers.
One poem imagines an Assamese mother speaking with the writer Virginia Woolf about tradition and modern life.
Another gives an ant the power to carry the world, challenging the idea that humans are always most important.
Together, the poems connect Assamese folk culture with modern poetic ideas.
Jiban Narah’s Assamese poetry collection The Yellow Metaphor has been translated into English by Anindita Kar.
The poems connect colour, ecology, memory, politics, loss and contemporary crises through vivid metaphors.
Yellow serves as a central symbol of earthly experience, uncertainty, violence and emotional memory.
Kar’s translation preserves Narah’s conversational voice, rhythms, childhood memories and Assamese ecological sensibility.
The collection’s poems engage folk traditions, modernity, communal crisis, anthropocentrism and tensions between rural and intellectual life.
- Who
- Assamese poet Jiban Narah and translator Anindita Kar.
- What
- The Yellow Metaphor, an English translation and anthology of Narah’s Assamese lyrics and extended narrative poems.
- Where
- The poems are rooted in Assam’s riverine landscapes, villages and cultural memory; the book is published by Penguin India.
- When
- The collection includes poems written over three decades, from 1990 to 2023.
- Why
- The collection uses colour, sensory imagery, folk inheritance and ecological settings to explore memory, identity, loss, politics, modernity and survival.
Tradition and Communal Life
Modernity and Individual Expression
Models of womanhood
Tradition and Communal Life
The Assamese mother’s courtyard, agricultural labour, ritual chants and communal values represent a sustaining rhythm of shared life.
Modernity and Individual Expression
Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own” represents solitude, authorship and independent intellectual expression.
Meaning of progress
Tradition and Communal Life
The poem questions whether modernity can sever people from nature, family and collective traditions.
Modernity and Individual Expression
Modern intellectual and artistic life is presented as a distinct space for individual creation, even as the poem critiques its limitations.
Human centrality
Tradition and Communal Life
Images of ants, grasshoppers, trees and rivers challenge human claims to dominate or define the world.
Modernity and Individual Expression
Human political narratives and historical records traditionally place people at the centre, a perspective Narah’s poems interrogate.
Key facts
- Book
- The Yellow Metaphor: Poems from Assam
- Poet
- Jiban Narah
- Translator
- Anindita Kar
- Language
- Translated from Assamese into English
- Writing period
- 1990–2023
- Publisher
- Penguin India
- Central symbol
- Yellow, associated with ecology, memory, loss, violence and uncertainty
Quotes
Jiban Narah
Assamese poet whose collection is discussed in the article
“The screams of women are red Those of men, blue Red and blue screams Mingle in the water”
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“You built yourself a ‘room of your own’ / and then took your own life”
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Virginia Woolf
Literary figure represented as a ghostly presence in Narah’s dramatic poem
“I died without ever understanding modernity”
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Sources
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