Translator's Note

I got to know about this obscure Bengali poet in 2011, when a Bengali newspaper announced in its “Kolkata Chronicles” section that a poet had won a literary award. “At 80, the first since his schooldays,” the news item said. It also added that he “publishes little” and his only published work, his Best Poems (1985), was long out of print.

I managed to get an unsold copy from the publisher and discovered a voice which resembled nothing I had read in Bengali until then. Isolation and obscurity had helped preserve it.

Chattopadhyay’s poetry hinges on irony which is uncommon in Bengali poetry. An overarching philosophical sense (rather than wordplay) and an impersonal tone set in strict poetic meter sets him apart. Unlike most Bengali poets, Chattopadhyay’s poems are rarely political or social.

As the “universal” nature of his poems yield easily to translations, I (and a friend of mine) met the poet and got his permission to translate and publish his works.

Though Bengali and English are both Indo-European languages, they are structurally different. English poetry is “verb heavy.” The Bengali language is not rich in verbs. Rather, Bengali has more nouns. For example, an English speaker would find it difficult to find a synonym for “sun.” However, an ordinary Bengali speaker could easily rattle off 3 words for “sun.” Poetry written in Bengali carries this character of the language. This difference in the structure of English and Bengali (and the difference in their poetic dictions) adds to the difficulty of translation.

Sambhunath Chattopadhyay uses a lot of local imagery in his poems. Quite a bit of his vocabulary comes from the flora and fauna of Bengal which do not have exact English synonyms. Sometimes these local terms are onomatopoeic, adding to the difficulty. For example, in one of the poems I originally selected for translation there was a word, “Jhumko Joba,” which is a special type of hibiscus flower with a pendant-like pistil. The words “Jhumko” and “Joba,” in addition to carrying alliterations, carry an image and an onomatopoeia to the Bengali ear: “Jhumko” being the name of an earring with little metallic pendants attached and also the ringing metallic sound that the pendants produce. While selecting the poems for translation I had to weigh such challenges before embarking on the translation.

As stated, Bengali poetry is not big on irony but Sambhunath Chattopadhyay’s poems are. However, often the irony in his poems is spread across the body of the poem rather than being concentrated in a few lines. A major challenge in translation was to spot the irony and highlight it while maintaining the sense of the original.

Kingshuk Sarkar

In the Classroom