preface

Bengali is a language of the poor, but it is far from a poor language. In very few places in the world are words celebrated with more vigour than in Bengal. Every street corner has its literary group, which meets to publish a little magazine, and to listen to each other's writing. Clubs compete in hosting poetry recitation contests, culminating in early May every year, when Tagore's birthday is celebrated with amazing intensity. From the large urban conurbations down to the smallest hamlets in both West Bengal and Bangladesh, after months of painstaking rehearsals, ordinary people stage cultural programmes with poetry and song, in temporary stages, on house verandahs and in town halls - and even in designated compartments of suburban trains.

The joke runs that one Bengali makes a poet, two, a little magazine and three, a political party. Like all jokes, it works because there is some truth in it. The number of poetry books published each year in Bengali may exceed five thousand, with over two thousand appearing in Kolkata alone, most of them in the five hundred odd stalls of the Kolkata Book Fair. Many are lackluster, but the vibrant creative force fueling this prodigious output throws up a number of exceptional voices.

This intense Bengali cultural phenomenon is largely ignored by the world. Looking at anthologies, The Poetry of Our World : An International Anthologyof Contemporary Poetry (ed. J. Paine, 2000) features Faiz Ahmed Faiz and AK Ramanujan, but no Bengali poet, and the Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry (ed. J. McClatchy 1996) lists Faiz, Taslima Nasrin, Ramanujan, and Jayanta Mahapatra in its list of eighty non-Anglo-American poets. The only Bengali poet here is, admirably, a woman. The paucity of recognition from the world is a constant topic in Bengali literary circles. While it is not the case that translations of Bengali literature are rare, it is still utterly inadequate, and this book hopes to throw some light on poetry by women, possibly an even less accessible aspect of the Bengali literary ethos.

woman poets

The tradition of women poets in Bengal starts with Khanaa, an astrologer-poet who may have lived between the 9th and 13th centuries. Her predictions were presented in rhyme and became so popular, the story goes, that her tongue was cut off, possibly by a jealous husband. Her poetry, known as খনার বচন (Khanaar Bachan), lives on today in the folk traditions of Bengal, and many saws remain relevant even today - e.g. "always stop eating before you are full." Khanaa's story is the subject of a short poem here by Mallika Sengupta (p.30), and this book derives its title from it.

Today the number of Bengali women poets is quite staggering. In February 2002, the magazine কানাকড়ি (Kanakari) brought out an anthology of Kolkata-connected women poets from the last 100 years, with the work of 270 published women poets, of whom more than two hundred are contemporary poets. There may be at least as many more in Bangladesh. Yet anthologies of English translations, such as Modern Poems from Bengal (UBPSD 1996, ed. Surabhi Banerjee) includes no women in its list of thirteen poets.

Here we focus on poets primarily from the last four decades. Except for Kabita Sinha, who passed away five years back, the six other poets in this collection are alive and active. Kabita Sinha arrived as a literary force in the 1960s, and Vijaya Mukhopadhyay in the '70s. Debarati Mitra's agile allegory as well as Namita Chaudhuri's socially conscious voice started gathering attention in the 1980's. Taslima Nasrin and Mallika Sengupta, both rebel voices, reflect different forms of protest that came of age in the '80s. Finally, we have the versatile Mandakranta Sen, who despite her debut in 1999, is already a respected name in Bengali literature.

As in other cultures, a large fraction of women's writing in Bengali deals with being second citizens in a man's world. Thus, a sense of confinement informs Vijaya Mukhopadhyay's "not you, Puti" (remember, / you have to raise children / this wild prancing around / does this become you? shame Puti! p.12) or Taslima Nasrin's "boundary" (these walls are your horizon / this ceiling your sky. p.36). I have consciously avoided stereotyping the broad sweep in each poet's work by focusing only on "women's issues"; nevertheless, anguish over the woman's role in a patriarchal society is perhaps the most common theme (never, page 3, or don't listen, girl, 35 or Radha swings 25 or Khanaa's song 30). Other poems span a wide range of emotions: from loneliness (With me, when you are not 39, or five feet of emptiness 13), desire (body center 37, contract 42, the world's beauty, all alone 16), language (fragmented words 23, or tongue 32), to lyrical abstraction (moonstruck 27, or onomatopoeia in Tung 18, or poetry, when you come 10).

notes on translation

ownership of poetry

Is art created for an audience, or for the artist's own self?

When poetry comes in a powerful rush of feeling, the words flow unfettered and one feels no need for the creation to be reflected on other consciousnesses. At this moment of creation, the poem is intimately the poet's and the poet's alone. It reaffirms what Tagore has described as the "creative surplus" in man.

In due course of time, when the same poem finds itself between covers on a printed page, does this dilute the poet's claim on her work?

Alain de Botton, in Status Anxiety, defines life in terms of two great love stories - "the story of our quest for sexual love" and "the story of our quest for love from the world." The latter, he calls a "more secret and shameful tale." In writing a poem and releasing it to the world, the poet is a player in this second, shameful, quest for the world's admiration. Without this selfish imperative, poetry (and this translation) would not be possible.

By the mere act of placing the poem in front of the world, it becomes part of the public psyche, and from then on, a little bit of it belongs also to the reader. On a personal plane, if I think of my very innermost favourite poetry, those that have remained with me for the longest time, be it Tagore's "Shahjahan" or Neruda's "Today I can write the saddest lines," I have a fierce sense of intimacy with those words, a feeling of possession almost, of ownership. It is a relationship that I, the reader, am not willing to surrender lightly.

Therefore, by publishing a poem, a poet is relinquishing some of her rights on her creation, like a mother who must eventually surrender her children to the world.

translation as treason

Translation brings a further abnegation of the poet's claim to her work. When it was published originally, the audience shared many of the values and emotions of the author, and the words found a strong resonance in their psyche. In transposing the poem into a different culture, one must forego the colour of local experience relying instead on the universals of human experience. Most importantly, the sound of the original, the song which is the soul of poetry, has to be reconstructed or lost.

Endless ink has been spilt on this aspect. Memorably, the Ming China poet says: "Translation is always a treason, at best it is like the reverse side of a brocade - all the threads are there, but not the subtlety of colour or design." (Okakura, The Book of Tea). Yet, without this treason, this act of translation, the literature of the world would be immeasurably impoverished.

The question every translator must face is - what is his brand of treason. The French have a name for it - "La belle infidèle": translations that are beautiful are unfaithful to the original, while those which are faithful are often ugly. Is it the poet's voice that should be heard, or should the voice of the translator inject itself in the process of transforming it into a poem in the new language? Is faithfulness a literal translation of the content alone, or is it also some of the surface structure? In some of the poems here like Bengal Son (p.33) , rhyme and wordplay are important, and I feel it is the translators duty to try to re-invent structures in English that retain this playfulness, but clearly there must be some rearrangement in the thoughts in order to achieve this.

The translator, as a reader, also has his emotions invested in the poem. When one falls in love with a poem, the translation appears to flow effortlessly. When one takes it up as a task to be done, it gets choked in technicalities. Ultimately the translation is also an act of creation, and the first criteria must be that the translation stands by itself as a poem in the target language.

Jackson Matthews has commented that "a translator must make a good lover," - in a loving relationship, faithfulness is effortless. While most of these translations follow the original quite literally, some do deviate in the interest of accessibility, but hopefully remain faithful to the spirit of the original.

bilingual text and transliteration

This preface opens with a reference to Bengali being a language of the poor. Perhaps this is why so many translations provide only the English text - it is as if it would be too much to ask the reader to bother looking at the original Bengali. A recent survey of Bengali poetry in translation found only five bilingual texts out of a list of 170. Even Tagore's work was not available in bilingual versions until recently. This compilation is an anthology as well as a translation, so we felt it would be appropriate to render it in a bilingual version.

To aid the non-Bengali reading person identify the original Bengali texts by sound, a english transcription has been provided only for the titles of the poems and other Bengali text; this version uses simple rules which are today widely used by Bengali computer users - essentially the upper case english characters are recruited for the special alphabets, e.g. upper case letters represent long vowel sounds (e.g. "A" pronounced as " আ" aa), and missing consonants (e.g. t for " ত" vs T for " ট", J for " য") etc. These are meant for the lay user, and the use of a more formal pronuciation structure such as the IPA is avoided.

… debts, large and small

This anthology was born out of an interaction I had with Namita Chaudhuri during a memorable boat trip on the Ganga that was part of a conference on Logic. By the end of the week, translations of many poems emerged. On a later meeting, she suggested the idea of an anthology on women poets. One thing led to another, and today you hold this book in your hand.

Many of the English versions in this book are really joint work with Kadambari Sen, an e-mail friend in the US. A lot of the poems have benefited through detailed word by word interactions with her over months, and also from multiple translations separately done by each of us. Mrs. Sen lives an intensely private life with a college-age daughter and a parrot that can no longer fly in a town on the eastern seaboard of the US, where her husband runs a small software business. She refused to be named as the author of any of the poems, and even to this paragraph acknowledging her contribution she consented with extreme reluctance.

Of course, this book would not have been possible except for the enthusiastic encouragement of Mihir Chakrabarty, Namita Choudhuri, and the Nandimukh Samsad, all of whom chipped in to help identify the poetry, contact the poets for permissions and discuss a number of other aspects of the work.

My sister Dipika Mukherjee's experienced comments on the selection, text and layout were invaluable in deciding the overall content and presentation. In addition to suggesting the title itself, she had a number of significant improvements on several poems. My friend Anjan Ghosh helped me with many intricacies in the Bengali texts and also with the proof.

I am also very grateful to Hiran Mitra for executing such an elegant cover on such short notice.

But most of all, I am grateful to the outstanding poets in this collection, without whose original inspiration nothing would have transpired.

Amitabha Mukerjee
Kanpur January 2005

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