Carolyne Wright
Collaborative Translation from Bengali—Patterns and Challenges
Because the two
parts of greater Bengal—the Indian state of West Bengal, and the nation of
Bangladesh—have been distinct political entities since 1947, in order to
translate the work of Bengali women poets, I could not simply shuttle back and
forth between the two states’ principal cities, Kolkata and Dhaka. I needed to
live in one city at a time during two distinct fellowship periods (with thanks
for those fellowships!), and undertake two discrete periods of fieldwork. It
was fortunate that such was the case, because I was able to focus on the two
Bengals separately, and come to understand their deep underlying similarities
and shared history; as well as their individual differences of religion,
religion-based customs and traditions, regional dialects, and recent political
and social history. All of this information gave me greater insight into the
literature I collected and translated, and into the lives of the women who had
written it.
Because my knowledge of Bengali was limited at the start of my project—to
translate the best representative work by modern and contemporary West Bengali
and Bangladeshi women poets for a comprehensive anthology—my translation
efforts have been collaborative. Though my Bangla has improved—thanks in large
part to the opportunities provided by fellowships to live and speak the
language for a total of two years in Kolkata and two in Dhaka—I am acutely
aware that many nuances still elude my grasp. Working with collaborators—in
some cases the poets themselves—is painstaking and time-consuming, but it is
satisfying to produce English versions that meet with the approval of both the
original poet and non-Bengali readers: translations that sound natural in
English, and remain faithful to the Bengali as well.
In Dhaka, I worked in much the same manner with Bangladeshi women poets as
I had earlier with the women poets of West Bengal. For the poems of Shamim
Azad, Dilara Hafiz, and Ruby Rahman, I collaborated with one of my staunchest
translation collaborators, Syed Manzoorul Islam, Chair of Dhaka University’s
English Department and a renowned writer and critic in his own right. We worked
together—sometimes with one poet, other times with two, and on one occasion,
all three poets with Manzoor and me—over the course of the nearly two years of
my Fulbright fellowship period in Dhaka. We usually met in Manzoor’s large,
breezy English Department office to read through each poem word for word,
producing the first version in English that conveyed accurately the sense of
the original Bengali. For the poems of
Nasima Sultana and Taslima Nasrin, I worked with Mohammad Nurul Huda, Director
of the Bangla Academy, meeting in his office at that institution dedicated to
the study of the Bengali language and culture. All of these poets had studied
English, but like me with Bengali, they were comfortable working with a
collaborator more fully versed in both languages.
By the time I met her, on one of her visits to Dhaka during my Fulbright
stay there, Dilara Hashem had lived in the U.S. for the last few decades,
working for Voice of America – Bangla Service in Washington, DC. She was thus fluent in English and sensitive
to American colloquialisms, and she and I translated her work together, with no
intermediary, after I returned to the U.S.
With the work of all of these poets, the process was similar. Going through
each original poem word for word, the collaborator and I produced a first
version in English that conveyed accurately the sense of the original Bengali,
even if the phrasing was clumsy. I copied out the literal word order, with
subtleties such as idiomatic phrases, multiple entendres or word play, and
level of diction—the formality or familiarity of verbs, pronouns, and other
forms of address; and with nouns and adjectives—whether they were standard or
colloquial Bengali (like common English words of Anglo-Saxon origin), or of
“high” Sanskritic derivation, similar to words of Latin or Greek origin in
English. Each collaborator and poet also
supplied cultural information built into the poem’s language through proverbial
expressions, allusions to history or mythology, and references to customs and
traditions Bengali readers would be familiar with.
Then I combined elements from the word-for-word literal version and the
relevant cultural information, to create an English version as faithful as
possible to the original in meaning and tone, and also successful as a poem in
its own right. At this stage I worked alone, with a Bengali-English dictionary
for reference, but thinking and creating as a poet. My raw materials were those
of the Bengali poet as glimpsed through the sensibility of the Bengali translator.
Having immersed myself as best I could in the life of the original poem, I
tried to write the poem as it might have been had Shamim, or Ruby, or Nasima,
or Taslima, or either Dilara been writing in English in the first place! When
my tentative final version of each poem was finished, I showed it once again to
collaborator and poet. If there were any remaining inaccuracies, they were
cleared up here. At that point, the translation was essentially complete.
Besides the typical economy of phrasing in Bengali—created by compound
verbs, inflection of nouns, and the lack of predicates (a challenge in all the
work I have translated)—many of the poems are in form, and so I have tried to
reflect their rhyming, and to a lesser extent their syllabic patterns. Since
Bengali, like Italian and Spanish and other Romance languages, is rhyme-rich,
with many words ending in vowels or a few key consonants, it is easy to
rhyme—not so in rhyme-poor English. For many translations, I have had to resort
to slant rhyme to reflect, at least partially, the full rhyme of the original
poems. No wonder poetry translation takes so much time for relatively few
lines, but it is an engrossing and rewarding process, and the need to work
collaboratively brings the translator much closer to the poets and their
worlds!
American poet and translator Carolyne Wright spent four
years on Indo-U. S. Sub-commission and Fulbright Senior Research fellowships in
Kolkata, India, and Dhaka, Bangladesh, collecting and translating the work of
Bengali women poets and writers. Another published collection is The Game in
Reverse: Poems of Taslima Nasrin. Wright has published five books and four
chapbooks of poetry, a book of essays, and three bilinguals (Spanish-English).
Carolyne’s own most recent book is This Dream the World: New & Selected
Poems, which received ten Pushcart Prize nominations.
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