Modern Poems from Bengal.

Perry, John Oliver

Looking respectfully and hopefully for good English translations of modern regional-language poetry, one might be misled by the physical appearance of Modern Poems from Bengal: some inkling of the much-vaunted achievements in post-Tagorean Bengali poetry may at last be revealed to non-Bengali readers. To heighten the happy anticipation, the general editor as well as translator of five of the poets from the thirteen selected "moderns" is the Leeds-degreed head of the Calcutta University English Department. Disappointment becomes anger as carelessness in proofreading renders line after line in poem after poem meaningful only by guesswork - "If language lits up / radiance in its own blood, violet love" - and linguistic flubs (grammatical and idiomatic as well as lexical) and literary incompetencies (poeticizing archaisms, awkward-sounding repetitions, and clumsy cliches) are revealed not only in the translated poems themselves but also in the brief preface and biographical notes.

Not merely Western academic cultural biases make it difficult to accept soppy writing like "Browsing through the dusty musty books piled in the peeling shops was my favourite. Buying the yellowed, termite-worn classics, especially rare anthologies was . . . real dreamy" (ellipsis not added). Seven or eight pages of jumbled generalities substitute for a much-desired brief outline of twentieth-century Bengali poetry and for the distinctions needed among many modernisms, early and late, Western European, Anglo-American, Indian: "As in word literature, the onset of modernity in Bengali literature coincides with the ubiquitous turmoil that unsettled the grounds of civilization in the early thirties. . . . The unique fusion of the European modern tradition with the indigenous myths, history and allegory was a singular characteristic of modern Bengali poetry in its first phase. . . . The new poets [post-1953] indulged in neology, in allusions and myths but in a less obscure and more intelligible manner." A close reading of the translated poems fails to support these statements as well as the claim (soon contradicted) that the poets included here refused "to emulate the Tagorean tradition" - i.e., of romantic "whims and fancies," though "At its best, modern Bengali poetry is a celebration of fancy." Since six of the thirteen poets, all males, were born before 1910, then one for each of the next two decades and the 1950s, with the four remaining born between 1931 and 1934, one must doubt how widely representative the selection is. Seven of the eight men still alive in 1995 were over sixty years old; all were in Calcutta.

Clinton B. Seely, a professor of Bengali at the University of Chicago, translates most of the poems selected from the editor's teenage and conspicuous "favourite" (and his own biographical subject), Jibanananda Das (1899-1954), with adequate but uninspired ramblings: "All these desires / I knew once - unchecked - unbounded. / Then I left them all behind. / I have looked upon woman with love. / I have looked upon woman with apathy. / I have looked upon woman with hate. / She has loved me, / And come near, / She has paid no heed to me, / She had despised me and gone away when I called her time and again / Loving her, / Yet it was actually practised one day - this love." Apparently the great frequency of such flat generalities about "loving her" earn for modern Bengali poetry the phrases "predominantly confessional" and "objective impersonality of imagination," which "weeded out," the editor believes, "exaggerated romantic subjectivity." But exaggeration here must have been measured by what will seem to non-Bengalis a standard already emotionally supercharged.

When the translations of an accomplished poet in English appear toward the end - those of Jayanta Mahapatra rewriting Shakti Chattopadhyay (1934-95) - it becomes obvious that a major problem with the other poems has been overly constrained literalism. Compare, for example, the editor's "The rotten odour of life, everyone / declines to sit on my next chair / out of sheer repulsion," from "Too Much" by "the most popular author of Bengal (West and East combined)," Sunil Gangopadhyay (b. 1934), with Mahapatra's "Lightness," here cited in its entirety: "A light breeze blows / Leaves fall from the trees / A covered clay saucer holds / A little food for small hunger. / The eternal beggar of few words / Keeps on gathering honeybees, / If I cannot write anymore / Make a beggar of me." Feeling generally negative about a much-needed anthology is disheartening, yet some ideas about this poetry and some moments of poetic achievement can occur during an otherwise frustrating experience.

John Oliver Perry Seattle