Bengali is the richest of the 18 officially recognised Indian languages but if you had any doubts, Kalpana Bardhan’s two-volume The (Oxford India) Anthology of Bengali Literature, I861-1941and 1941-1991 (Rs 695 each) should close the debate about how it compares with the rest, including Malayalam and Hindi, its two closest competitors. All literary anthologies are, by definition, exercises in unravelling the basic landmarks of a literary culture by providing a “historical depth” in categories of poetry, fiction and non-fiction that would attract the intelligent common reader. No matter how large the canvas, the distinguishing marks of an anthology, whether in original or translation, are intimacy and informality, or in the words of Hazlitt, “What do I know?” or “What am I supposed to know?”
It, thus, follows that an anthology cannot be hampered by preconceived notions of order and regularity; if it has to seduce the common reader it must include all the names one would expect in a representative anthology but to make it readable it must also be “a loose sally of the mind”. This is what this definitive anthology, which covers more than 100 years of Bengali writing in its English translation, does but it targets non-Bengali readers, who have hitherto been served with uneven translations of even the best-known Bengali writers, including Tagore.
Before getting into the formatting of the two volumes and a representative selection of the three genres – poetry, fiction and scholarly essays – a word about translation. The success or failure of this anthology would depend upon how we understand a translation should be done. First, to cite Ralph Manheim, who translated the German classics, translators should be like actors who speak the lines as the author would if she could speak English. Translation, according to Manheim, must be a kind of interpretive performance that bears the same relationship to the original text as the actor’s work does to the script.
But the translation process must be auditory so that it is immediately available to other people, as opposed to a silent, solitary process. The author’s voice and the sound of the text must be clearly “heard”. This is especially true for poetry, though it also holds for other pieces, because all literature is emotional, not intellectual.
The first volume begins with the work of Michael Madhusudan Dutta (1824-73) who had described himself (in English) as “a tremendous literary rebel” and the poetry section includes Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Sukumar Ray (1887-1923), Jibanananda Das (1899-1954), Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), Bishnu Dey (1909-1982) and Samar Sen (1916-1987). (Strangely, Sukanta Chaudhuri’s brilliant translation, Select Nonsense of Sukumar Ray, which would have served as a fine example of how attractive translations can be if the translator had a little courage to depart just a little from the original, has not been included here.)
The second volume has been formatted in the same manner into poetry, short fiction and non-fiction. It has a heavy preponderance of writers from Bangladesh, which closes with the journalism of Taslima Nasrin, who has been incarcerated in her country.
No anthology can ever be fully representative but the essential question is whether the selections here will tempt readers to dip into the two volumes and perhaps persuade them to buy the set. The straight answer is yes because some of the translations have broken from the straitjacket of the original text flow as spontaneously as the original verse. This is the acid test for all translations of any literary form, and nothing else. Purists who are sticklers for the meaning of the original will no doubt find this objectionable, but no successful translation has ever worked unless its “voice” has been interpreted in the right spirit.
Many writers have wondered why the renaissance of Indian writing first took root in Bengal and then spread to other vernaculars. There is no simple answer to the question because all regions came under the same constraints imposed by a colonial rule. But a possible answer has been provided by Partha Chatterjee in Our Modernity. Chatterjee says our modernity is “deeply ambiguous” in the sense there is a close proximity between “modern knowledge and modern regimes of power”, that is, “it has borrowed heavily from the west, yet retained its own national characteristics”. This reflected both “courage and inventiveness”. “Courage” because we did not shy away from western regimes of power which required us to study the English language. And “inventiveness” made us adapt these concepts to our own condition. Looking back, there is no doubt that one of the factors that led to the Bengal renaissance was the eagerness with which it embraced the study of the English language, which it adapted for its own purposes.
Like all anthologies, this two-volume set has one great advantage: its variety with the promise of containing something for every reader. You won’t be disappointed.
