{"id":10214,"date":"2016-03-01T09:00:53","date_gmt":"2016-03-01T09:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=10214"},"modified":"2020-12-09T14:30:17","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T14:30:17","slug":"rumpa-das-reviews-poem-continuous-by-bibhas-roy-choudhury-tr-kiriti-sengupa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/rumpa-das-reviews-poem-continuous-by-bibhas-roy-choudhury-tr-kiriti-sengupa\/","title":{"rendered":"Rumpa Das reviews ‘Poem Continuous’ by Bibhas Roy Chowdhury (tr. Kiriti Sengupta)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Reading Kiriti Sengupta\u2019s translations of Bibhas Roy Chowdhury\u2019s poems is an exercise in self-introspection. It\u2019s a journey that allows one to have experiences of translation, trans-literation and finally, trans-creation. For all functions of attempted translations are, in effect, a concatenation of all of these three modes. It is a kind of self-introspection because one discovers layers of embedded meanings of the poet\u2019s self (here, selves) as well as relate them to one\u2019s personal experiences. Reading Roy Chowdhury\u2019s poems that smell of his thought-ridden soul \u2013 his anguished response to the holocaust of the Partition (in Bhatiyali), his painful awareness of a poet\u2019s predicament in today\u2019s society and refusal to conform to pre-conditioned roles (in Bibhas) or his interpretation of relationships as an intimate experience such as those of water-droplets\u00a0 caressing the body while bathing (as in Ashram) \u2013 all these arouse us, his readers, as it possibly did Kiriti, to the intense thrill of a life beyond \u2026 of a life where every moment encompasses a myriad lives, some colored as dark as pain, and some as mysterious as evening rain. Sengupta\u2019s bold attempts have not only succeeded in unraveling some layers of meaning Roy Chowdhury\u2019s poems contain in themselves, but also compressed some meanings of his own in the process of reading, re-interpreting, translating and trans-creating some poems.<\/p>\n

Why does one write poems? What dis-ease prompts him or her to trans-literate his or her thoughts? While penning down the thoughts, does a poet think about his intended readers? Is his or her act of writing a conscious artistry or is it something more organic? As a trans-literator of thoughts, as a person with poetic inclinations myself, I feel that just as no symphony is designed for the listener or no painting for the viewer, no poem is also written keeping in mind who would read them, and as such the poet is under no compulsion to cater to his or her readers, or explain him or her to them. A translator who attempts to translate a poem from one language to another, however, treads a more risky slippery terrain. Why does he translate \u2013 not a story or an essay but a poem or poetry? He is not imparting information encoded in the poems in another tongue, or merely trying to make available the essence of the poetry in another language, possibly for a broader audience.\u00a0 Most importantly, if the translator is not a poet himself or herself, the translated work merely becomes an inaccurate testament of an inessential content. The translatability of a work connects the original with the translated text, which obviously comes later than the original.\u00a0 In many ways, the translator\u2019s work is problematized because the vitality of a work in its original can never be reproduced in the translated work, ostensibly because the original and the translated work are two individual entities. However, the translated work has a life of its own, a vitality and life of its own, and in a way, also enriches the after-life of the original. Walter Benjamin in an introduction to a Baudelaire translation in 1923 spoke of an investigation to grasp the genuine relationship between an original and a translation; it was his view that \u2018no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original.\u2019 He believed \u2013 as most translators would, that words with fixed meaning can undergo a maturing process, and that in the renewal of life a poem undergoes in its translation, the original too undergoes a change.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I must admit that I am not very sure about either Roy Chowdhury or Sengupta\u2019s personal connect with the humungous tragedy that the Partition of India unfolded, and my own responses are mediated through my grandmother\u2019s narratives of her painful brush with history. Almost seventy years after the event, we still experience the intensity of the horror in every cricket match or diplomatic tightrope-walk with our neighboring country. In a book I recently edited on the Partition of India (Rethinking the Partition of India: Historical & Literary Perspectives, Avenel Publishers), I noticed how people\u2019s responses to the Partition still perceive it as living, throbbing with pain and oozing tears that taste of blood. Roy Chowdhury\u2019s Bhatiyali is a poignant response not just of a soul scarred by history, but also of an ardent wordsmith, a lover of dreams whose dreams know they are breaking apart. To translate these emotions to a language intricately associated with those who engineered this butchery of men and dreams needs a lot of conviction and courage. Sengupta wrote:<\/p>\n

An eye in my heart \u2026 in the eyes of courageous Bengalis<\/em>
\n Countless patriot camps along the alphabet list<\/em>
\n So many broken banks \u2026 several lightning \u2026 much cyclone<\/em>
\n Dream filled hearts and melodious Bengali tone.<\/em><\/p>\n

Somewhere, the Bengali lust for the language in Roy Chowdhury\u2019s lines has been transformed to the Bengali lust for courage in Sengupta\u2019s lines, which I feel is also correct and possibly a post-modern evaluation of the quintessential Bengali lust for both language and courage, as we are the only people in the world who bled and died for our maatri-bhasha (mother tongue)!<\/p>\n

Sengupta\u2019s rendering of Bibhas as Illumined Expression is very close to my heart.\u00a0 The stark refusal of the poetic self to register pain or insult or suffering on the canvas of poetry, and even more aggressive denial of any attempt to trade one\u2019s poetic expressions in a few re-gurgitated praises or accolades (\u2018Aami toh noi mugddhotaay kena\u2019) is as much Roy Chowdhury\u2019s as Sengupta\u2019s own.\u00a0 The translated line \u201cI have been the future-poem\/ of much insult, and devastation\u2026\u201d rings of a rebellious voice, which keeps resonating in the mind long after the actual reading experience. In a way, this constitutes the after-life of a translation perhaps.<\/p>\n

The English poet, John Keats, had talked about the concept of \u2018negative capability\u2019 in relation to the poetic self\u2019s capability of \u2018becoming\u2019 what it perceived in Nature, negating the subjectivity of the self that perceived. In conversation with Sengupta, I discovered how close to Keatsian Romanticism was Roy Chowdhury\u2019s \u201cJakhon ekla laagey, \/Shunyo pokar kaachey jaai\/boli, Utthey esho\u2026aamar pata ti khao\u201d became \u201cCome here, eat my leaves,\u201d and the fervent plea \u201cWhy couldn\u2019t I become much lonelier?\u201d The human desperation to be one with Nature is so touching, so personal that it almost resonates with the universal cry for oneness.<\/p>\n

The anchor to our being in the social matrix is our family.\u00a0 The loving yet inquisitive probe into familial affections as evinced in the original poems is maintained in the translated works as well, as is evident in poems such as Birth Of A Legend, Ma And Her Eldest Son, or my favorite True And False For My Father.\u00a0 The mother as rain and the father remaining engrossed in monsoon is the tribute both poets pay to the almost elemental connection we have with the pillars of our lives.\u00a0 The words from languages of the original and the translated tongue are not interchangeable, but the foreignness of English is hardly noticed when one reads \u201cMysterious rain arrived after a few days, but Ma never returned\u201d bringing out the pathos Roy Chowdhury\u2019s lines also reverberate with.<\/p>\n

Bibhas Roy Chowdhury, whom I do not know personally, has been ascribed to be a private person who shies away from publicity, by the translator himself. Sengupta, on the other hand, is a media-savvy person. Possibly, somewhere in the translations, therefore, the intensely private emotions recorded in Roy Chowdhury\u2019s poems get transmitted in the glaring glamourous arena of public attention that comes naturally for English poems. The acceptance of a poem like Lunatic in the United States as Sengupta informed me possibly is an index to this fact \u2013 its distinctly Eliotian preoccupation with metaphysical imagery and a ruthless honesty of expression must have enamored a readership who enjoyed an aftertaste in a Bengali poem that came filtered through an English idiom, much after Eliot. The modernist trend that he (Eliot) pioneered has left an indelible print on our collective unconscious, and may have touched sensitive personalities like Bibhas Roy Chowdhury and Kiriti Sengupta alike. As a reader, I do not presume to evaluate either the original or the translation \u2013 the fidelity to the original and freedom to be original both have, I believe trans-created the original poems. So, it\u2019s actually, reading the translation that leads to a revelation of the original. It speaks volumes about the creative fecundity of both \u2013 the original poet and the translator or trans-creator of his works.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dr. Rumpa Das<\/strong> is the Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English in Maheshtala College, Calcutta. With her research interests in Women\u2019s, Post-colonial and Media Studies, she has bundles of publications to her credit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Kiriti Sengupta\u2019s translations of Bibhas Roy Chowdhury\u2019s poems is an exercise in self-introspection. It\u2019s a journey that allows one to have experiences of translation, trans-literation and finally, trans-creation. For all functions of attempted translations are, in effect, a concatenation of all of these three modes. It is a kind of self-introspection because one discovers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10214"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10332,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10214\/revisions\/10332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}