Samar Sen

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Samar Sen (Bangla: সমর সেন) was a Bengali poet and journalist. Born in 1916^[1], he hailed from an illustrious family, many of whose scions have enriched the intellectual world of Bengal. His grandfather, Dinesh Chandra Sen, was a well-known writer and a doyen of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad. His father, Arun Sen, an academician of repute, had allegedly remarked, "I am a mediocre son of a genius father and a mediocre father of a genius son!" Samar Sen, along with Subhash Mukhopadhyay, belonged to the second generation of modern Bengali poets, to whom the torch was passed from such stalwarts as Jibananda Das, Bishnu Dey, Sudhindranath Dutta and others. However, he gave up poetry fairly early and devoted the better part of his later life to Marxism and journalism. He was the editor of the leftist newspaper Frontier published from Kolkata, which was banned during the notorious period of Indian Emergency (1975 -1977) declared by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi. He died in 1987. ^[2]

1 Frontier
2 Poetry
3 Political life
4 See also
5 References

[edit] Frontier

[edit] Poetry

Samar Sen, like his other illustrious contemporaries, grew up under the gigantic impact of Rabindranath Tagore. Yet Samar Sen was perhaps the first to 'break' with the lyrical romanticism of Tagore and introduced "modern" (disenchantment, decadence, avant garde urban heterotopia) in Bengali verse. Influence of French and English modernism was originally translated into Bengali verse. A certain convergence of modernism and Marxism was evident in his poetic thought and style. His poetic life was somewhat over shadowed by his very original journalism as the editor of legendary Frontier in his later life. He was also chosen as the translator in the translator program for Soviet literature, he spent nearly two years in Moskow in the translators job, and in later part of his life became somewhat doubtful about bureaucratic "Communism" in general.^[3]