Few days ago when I
was in library of Department of English, I was finding a book of poems and I found
“Contemporary Bengali Poems” written by different contemporary Bengali writers and
translated in English by Tapan Kumar Maity, Supriya Chatterjee,
Ananta Das and Debashis Chattopadhyay. The book is edited by Tapan Kumar Maity and Ananta Das.
When I started reading this book, in Foreward,
the first paragraph was about ‘translation’. It’s all about hard work of a translator,
“Translation is a very difficult work in the field of
literature. Mere linguistic knowledge is not sufficient. A translator must be equally
familiar and proficient in two languages and must have linguistic control.”
A writer can write at his/her own but
when it’s about translation, the writer has to choose proper words and language
structure to express the same emotions which the original writer wanted to
express. It is all about being bilingual, first to read in a native language
and then translate it into any other language with same expression. The most
interesting thing about this book is, on the left side there a poem in Bangali
language (the original one) and on the right side there is a translation of it
in English.
Here I have took
two poems which I liked most from the book,
Dream
Sometimes you calmly stare
at me unwinkingly
As the moon peeps through
grill of the window.
In which thought are you absorbed!
Or sunk in dream!
I’ve spent the days by
dreaming since childhood.
Dream is deceit, dream is
false, dream is incense
Being a bird dream spreads
its wings of sorrow.
One who cares little of gain
or loss
He also dreams in reality
the word sleep
Is inseparably knotted with
life.
The poem is written
by Arup Panti and Translated by Ananta Das.
The poem is all about dreams and how it is
deeply related with our life. We dream from childhood and it most of the times,
they are just dreams... dreams are absurd and leads us towards absurdity, but
we still enjoys it and wants to dream every night. As poet has said that dreams
are deceit, false and incense, it leads us to our unfulfilled desires and gives
us sorrow, but the metaphor of bird and wings gives a positive feeling of
freedom and delight, dreams are also like this, it gives a satisfaction and
also provocation to our desires. They are knotted with our life, without dreams
a person can’t live, a deep psychology of dreams works for our life.
I Desire
Day by day by growing
I exceeded the height of
palm tree
Exceeding palm tree
Surpassing breeze
Dodging the aqua-cloud
I reached very near the blue
star
Spreading its blue gleam
The star speaks of the earth
Spreading blue glow the star
speaks of the home
Love and pain dropping down
from the blue portrait
Within my heart
reverberation of humming of swollen waves
I desire
I strongly desire
I desire from the core of my
heart
There will be a home of ours
in the radiated azure of you...
I am beside you
and the blue portrait by the
side of you.
The poem is written
by Chitra Lahiri and translated by Ananta Das.
Our desires are the reason of both,
our rise as well as fall. The poetess explains that the desire is growing like
palm tree, the metaphor of ‘palm tree’ is very significant because a palm tree
contains history with humans as old as the first societies and palm trees most
of time grows in a sandy and in soil salinity, a land which contains salt.
Desires are also as old as human lives. Finally the palm tree of desire reaches
to the blue star by surpassing the aqua-cloud. The blue stars are very hot,
brighter and rare stars in the universe, and after reaching there, there is a
reverberation of swollen waves, ultimately the desire of poetess is to reach near
“you” this ‘you’ can be anyone from her life, and when ‘we’ are reading, ‘you’
could be from our life, and when a person reaches to his/her desire love and
pain drops down, and what remain is I and you, souls.
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