Abol Tabol

Abol Tabol is Sukumar Ray’s collection of nonsense poems, the book that defines Bengali children’s verse and that adults keep reading well after childhood. It is full of strange creatures, made up words, and a kind of joyful wrongness that almost no other writer has matched.

Sukumar Ray wrote it shortly before his early death in 1923. A century later, Bengali children still grow up with these poems, and they still feel as fresh as when they were new.