Goutam Jena’s “Nirāsakta Samaya Pāin Eka Śōkagīta” (“A Lament for the Detached Time”) is a philosophically charged poem of temporal alienation, existential estrangement, psychic dispersal, bodily displacement, and the difficult recovery of the self. Although the poem initially appears to be a lament addressed to an apparently hostile or indifferent time, its deeper architecture gradually reveals that “time” is not merely a chronological category but a semantic and existential field in which the subject experiences separation from the body, the mind, intimate relationships, memory, and finally the self. The poem, therefore, transforms temporal consciousness into a poetics of ontological dislocation. Its recurrent images of incomprehension, hostility, restless moments, approaching moments, emptiness, tears, sweat, bodily helplessness, surrender, and self-questioning establish a dynamic structure in which meaning does not remain stable but is continuously attracted, dispersed, displaced, and reconstituted.

 

This essay reads Jena’s poem comparatively alongside the modernist and existential traditions represented by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, E. E. Cummings, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Frost, William Blake, Pablo Neruda, and Allen Ginsberg, while also drawing upon Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Bakhtin for conceptual clarification. The principal theoretical contribution of the essay, however, lies in the application of Dr. Santosh Kumar Nayak’s Semantic Gravity Theory (SGT) and Interpretive Torsion Theory (ITT). SGT demonstrates how semantic forces in the poem generate attraction and repulsion around such gravitational centres as “time,” “emptiness,” “body,” “mind,” and “self,” producing trajectories of concentration and dispersion. ITT, in turn, explains how these meanings are twisted by conflicting temporal, psychological, existential, relational, cultural, and intertextual pressures. The poem’s decisive movement is consequently not from sorrow to consolation in any conventional sense, but from temporal estrangement toward a radical imperative of self-disclosure: “to know yourself, / open yourself completely.”

 

The poem finally becomes a poetics of inward reconfiguration in which alienation itself becomes the pressure through which the self is compelled to seek itself “in every birth.” The study argues that Jena’s poem constitutes a significant contemporary Odia meditation on the fractured experience of modern temporality and demonstrates the capacity of Odia poetry to participate in global conversations concerning alienation, identity, embodiment, existential anxiety, and the unstable afterlife of meaning.

 

Keywords: Temporal Alienation; Existentialism; Modernism; Semantic Gravity Theory; Interpretive Torsion Theory; Selfhood; Emptiness; Translation; Semantic Pressure; Textuality