Abstract
In this essay, named, after Roland Barthes, “The Rustle of Language,” the author explores the manner in which Rabindranath crafted his poetic voice in the poem “Nirjharer Swapnabhanga” [The Waterfall Awakens from a Dream], published when he was twenty-one, out of the vicissitudes of his early experimentation with meter and form in the shadow of other voices, other rhythms. The author demonstrates how in this poem the poet constructed, out of materials he had already played with before, his particular poetic voice. This discussion attempts thereby to understand why the English translation of Rabindranath's Bengali poetry inevitably fails at many levels, most of all failing to capture the repetion and rhythm of the Bengali words and lines as they rustle and murmur on the page or in the ear with a life of their own.
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