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Literary Review
Flawed effort
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Though well conceived, there is a blurring of focus and a deficiency of editorial input which reduces the value of Signposts, says SUKANTA CHAUDHURI.
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A WISE old homoeopath once told me how amateurs in his art (to be found in every Indian household) go wrong in their prescriptions. They often hit upon the right drug; where they err is in determining the strength and the dose.
Given the impressive list of editorial advisers, it would be impertinent to call Signposts an amateurish effort. But reading the book reminded me of that old doctor's observation. Signposts is a well-conceived, well-planned volume. The general level of translating skill is markedly above average, rising to the exceptionally competent. Yet there is a lacuna, a blurring of focus and deficiency of editorial input, which reduces the value of the collection and prompts some nagging questions.
Rabindranath Tagore was himself the first post-Tagorean. But it is customary to commence the story of modern Bengali poetry with the gifted generation that followed him: Jibanananda Das, Sudhindranath Datta, Amiya Chakrabarti, Bishnu Dey, Buddhadeva Bose and their compeers. Even that generation has achieved a somewhat removed, classic status. It now makes sense to do what this collection has done, which is to begin with the next generation — poets who began writing around Independence, but came into their own in the 1950s and 1960s. We find a refreshing presence of young and recent poets. There are one or two serious omissions as well. If Arun Mitra, why not Samar Sen? And surely Sukanta Bhattacharya deserves a place, if not for his ideology then for his impact. Nor is it clear why some poets should have three, others four or five pieces of roughly the same length.
The token inclusion of poets from North Bengal, Assam and Tripura is well intentioned, but has little point in view of the exclusion of Bangladeshi work, or indeed that of Bengali poets based elsewhere in India. There is a serious call for one or more anthologies bringing together all Bengali poetry across the world: as Sunil Gangopadhyay reminds us in his Foreword, Bengali is the world's fifth most-widely spoken language. But such a collection is not to be lightly attempted. It involves an exceptional challenge in co-ordinating two distinct bodies of work, besides a number of ancillary foci.
To return to the present volume, the editor must be complimented for having drawn on a large pool of translators. (One wishes they were better introduced: there are notes on the poets and illustrators, but not the translators.) Not one translation in the book is downright bad. That may seem faint praise; but anyone with experience in the field knows how hard it is to achieve even this modest end, and what demands it makes on translator and editor alike.
Many renderings, in fact, are particularly fine: not only by old hands like Samik Bandyopadhyay, Kalyani Ghose or Madhuchhanda Karlekar, but by relatively new or infrequent practitioners like Sriparna Basu, Malabika Sarkar or Sudeshna Banerjee. (This is not meant as a complete list of Alpha scores.) Other successful pieces are scattered through the book: Vijaya Mukhopadhyay's "All This Play-Acting" as rendered by Sutapa Neogi, Amitava Gupta's "Arjun: to Karna" by Sunandini Banerjee, or Bhaskar Chakrabrty's "Death" by Bidisha Basu, for instance. Generally speaking, all the translators are sensitive to the original text, and recognise the need to preserve its values in English instead of churning out a quickie approximation.
What then goes wrong? Nothing at all, some of the time; but all too often, a lack of fine-tuning, maladjustments of idiom or register, or — to out with the sad truth — simple lapses of grammar. The creative translator may deliberately seek freedom in these respects, especially to reflect a freedom taken by the source-poet; but the instances I am talking of match neither the one case nor the other. They serve no conceivable aesthetic point, but are solely due to slipshod revision and editing.
Hence even serious and sensitive translations threaten to go off the rails, or at least lose much of their potential impact. This applies to pieces by such major poets as Sankha Ghosh, Arun Kumar Sarkar, Benoy Majumdar, Sunil Gangopadhyay and Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay. The simpler poems by these poets retain their impact: Sunil's "For Che Guevera" or Benoy's "Last Evening". But in more complex pieces, the tangles are never quite sorted out, but rather compounded through syntactical slips. The reader may work out the sense and even deduce something of the original form, but he is left dissatisfied by the total impact of the translation.
This can be said of Santa Bhattacharya's not insensitive version of Manibhusan Bhattacharya's powerful poem, "The Story of the (sic) Martyr's Day". Elsewhere, the very meaning might be lost. "Dr." Partha Ghose (why the academic title in such a context?) ends a piece from Subhas Mukhopadhyay thus: "Pass me the fire." Ghose may have had some Promethean nuance in mind, but he has obscured the basic sense, "Give me a light". The erstwhile Marxist poet wishes to share a smoke with a tractor-driver. And of course Sankha Ghosh did not write about "cornfields" and "twelfth night" (used here to mean the twelfth phase of the moon) in a tribal and rural setting.
The embarrassing truth is that the book needed much more editorial care and honest-to-God desk editing. It is impossible to rule out error in a collection of this sort, but Signposts doesn't really try. Sunil Gangopadhyay's Foreword focuses too little on Bengali poetry, too much on his current concern with the politics of language. But what really jolts the reader is the unacceptable quality of the language (presumably Englished by someone else from the writer's original Bengali), commencing with two grammatically grotesque sentences. The editor's own Prologue is perfunctory in content and equally slipshod in style.
The notes are unsatisfactory in more than phrasing. The Baul is described as a "Hindu stoical devotee," "Espahan Bukhara" (sic) as "two pre-historic places in Iran", and atar (sic) as "Indian perfume generated from the state Uttarpradesh" (sic). Lalgola becomes "a remote place in Murshidabad". (Remote from where? Kolkata?) Dhubulia in West Bengal's Nadia District, the site of a notorious camp for East Bengal refugees, is said to be a health resort in Bihar, Amritabazar (sic) is described as a Bengali newspaper. (It was indeed once, but so long ago that only its English reincarnation matters here.) Sari is explained but not "25th Baisakh" (Rabindranath's birthday). The bidi becomes "a local cigarette", and a noolia, incredibly, "Natives who help the uninitiated to take a bath in the sea."
The book is beautifully designed and produced, with a set of striking illustrations (but not individually ascribed to the distinguished artists, who are merely gathered in a list at the end). This makes it all the sadder that the text should be so badly proofread: whole lines and stanzas are made mystifying by typos. There is no policy of transliteration: the same Bengali word is spelt differently in the text and the notes. To talk about lapses in punctuation may seem niggling, but they are endemic. It becomes hard to disentangle some pieces as a result. One is left guessing whether essential marks have been omitted simply through carelessness, or designedly for a mock-modern effect. In either case, their absence can seriously impede one's understanding of a poem.
It is depressing to note these pervasive shortcomings in a rich and serious collection. Even as it stands, it will provide readers outside Bengal with a rewarding overview of Bengali poetry since Independence. The pity is that a task so worthwhile should not have been better accomplished, avoiding the numerous and entirely avoidable defects. The publishers should think of a radically revised second edition.
Signposts: Bengali Poetry since Independence, edited by Prabal Kumar Basu, Rupa and Co., 2002, p.275, Rs. 395.
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