Sing a song of six books
The ornament in the title story, "Didima's Necklace," becomes a symbol of feminine resourcefulness as its owner keeps pawning it to tide several generations of her family through a series of crises. When the family fortune eventually finds an even keel and the necklace is redeemed for good and is seen by all--for the first time--it is discovered to be quite unimpressive in weight or design. Then it disappears and didima too dies in venerable old age, a personage of mythic proportions. There are touching emotional resonances in the story, but they seem to be muffled by a meandering quality in the prose.
A similar tendency mars some of the other stories, e.g., "Holy Thursday," while "Mariam and the Miser," which is an amusing vignette, is spoiled by unnecessary feminist philosophizing towards the end. However, one should not complain too much, for there are a number of stories that keep things nicely balanced, e.g., "An Experiment in Human Psychology," "Reality," "By the Roadside" (a veritable prose poem), "A Lucky Escape," "The Nawab Who Loved food," "Behind the Mosquito Curtain" (a gentle satire that will raise a chuckle from anyone fortunate enough not to be stricken by dengue). Interestingly, Niaz quietly peppers her prose with unglossed local words, which, after Rushdie, is, I suppose, quite apropos.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. Three Girls: A Twenty-First Century Tale tells the story of . . . well . . . three girls. And a number of other characters, of course. After their homesteads have been ravaged by the floods of 1998, Anwara and her younger cousin Khalida grow up in a slum somewhere in Bangladesh. Anwara's situation improves when their rich uncle Mahmud (a.k.a. Sam) employs her father and also provides them accommodation after her mother dies of dengue. Khalida too is kept on as a household help, and the two girls are befriended by Maya, Sam's only daughter. But the irrepressible Khalida gets on her auntie's nerves and moves to Dhaka to seek domestic employment with the help of an agent.
Anwara is married off into an orthodox family dominated by her mother-in-law and quietly adjusts to the situation. Maya is besotted with her schoolmate Noman who is, however, no more than a name. A burqa-clad woman claims to have been sent by Noman to take her to him. The gullible Maya falls for the trick and is trafficked to India after being broken in through a series of gang rapes. Khalida gets into trouble on attaining puberty; she is seduced by a driver, thrown into jail on trumped up charges, resorts to vagabondage on coming out, and dies.
The narrative breaks off with 9/11, the point of this (commendably enough) being that everyday there are many more horrible deaths worldwide than were caused by that horrendous event.
Plenty of other terribly distressing events occur in course of a terribly contrived narrative, but they have little emotional impact, chiefly because the characters are little more than cardboard cut-outs. Matters aren't helped either by the postmodernist posturings of the author, Faruk Abdullah, a.k.a. Carl Bloom (the former being the name adopted by the latter when he and his Bangladeshi wife had a Moslem wedding). Nor does the language stimulate appreciation: "entwined in some sort of wrestling act"; "she did not know, in her heart, what the condition of her father was towards her"; "write about it without incurring some kind of crime." Well, well, well...
Yantrarudha is the kind of novel that is difficult to write and even more difficult to translate, for it is about a spiritual quest undertaken within the parameters of the Hindu tradition but in an age dominated by materialist values. Happily, both author and translator have attained conspicuous success. Chandraskhar Rath has become an illustrious name in the history of Oriya literature, and Jatindra Kumar Nayak has won the Hutch Crossword Book Award for Indian Language Fiction Translation for his English version, Astride the Wheel.
A densely-textured novel of considerable psychological power, Yantrarudha has for central character a middle-aged village priest, Sanatan Dase. His relentless struggle with poverty leads him to doubt the validity of the metaphysics that he is professionally committed to uphold. But after a chance encounter with a mysterious character he embarks on a series of pilgrimages and attains varied forms of spiritual illumination.
If good poetry is rare, good translations of poetry must be rarer still. It's a pleasure to browse through Syed Sajjad Husain's translations of Abul Hussain's early work. The introduction is unexceptional, but the translations read smoothly and convey something of the distinctive flavour of one of our senior modernists. Here's the whole of a brief poem, "Mummies":
Mummies
What are we but dried mummies, buried deep
Inside the earth in tombs beyond the reach
Of light, devoid of conscience, bovinely
Content to eat and sleep? We talk of peace
While hatred rages and strife reigns and ask
Forgiveness for all while the demons who
Torment our life derisively smile. We
Are naught but skeletons preserved for show
In pyramids.
The southern wind leaves us cold,
Incapable of opening our eyes.
We are all hollow men, deaf, mute and blind.
A book of translations in the other direction (English to Bengali) that deserves notice (and praise) is William Shakespeare'r Nirbachito Sonnetguccho. The 'Nirbachito' in the title evinces what one might call 'numerical modesty' in an extreme form--for all but the last two of the Bard's 154 sonnets are here.
The translator, Salim Sarwar, many will surely recall, was one of the more promising Bengali poets to emerge in the 1970s. After many years in the intellectually arid classrooms and corridors of Saudi Arabian academe, when, but for a rare and welcome appearance in periodicals, he was lost to our literary scene, the prodigal's return to Dhaka has, within the space of two years, resulted in this impressive volume. We shall naturally look forward to more from his pen.
The translations are en regard with the originals, firmly balanced on crisp footnotes, and eminently readable. They are both attractive and faithful, with the rhythm, rhyme and structure of the sonnet form scrupulously maintained. Translation of course involves, as Umberto Eco memorably reminds us, complex and pragmatic negotiations. How should The English summer, to which Shakespeare compare his lover, be rendered in Bengali? Sarwar turns it to our "grishma," but wisely refrains from using that torrid word in the first line, and instead mentions "Baishakh," which at least carries a suggestion of freshness. Sudhindranath Dutta, to my mind, negotiated the passage between the two far-flung climes more elegantly by turning Shakespeare's summer into our "basanta" (spring). The other sonnets, happily, are more amenable to Sarwar's manoeuvres.
Admiring mention must be made of the 20-page introduction, which is scholarly, fairly comprehensive, and indeed even poetic. Sarwar generously as well as critically acknowledges earlier translators: Sudhindranath Dutta and Bishnu Dey, and on this side of the border, Zillur Rahman Siddiqui.
To end on a wholly negative note, Bangla Academy deserves to be anathematized for a very shoddy production; the cover does no credit to its designer, Qayyum Chowdhury.
Suresh Ranjan Basak, professor of English at the Metropolitan University, Sylhet, has published an interestingly wide-ranging collection of twenty-one essays in Bengali, Sahitya: Nikat Somoy Durer Desh ("Literature: Distant Lands Near in Time"). They deal with writers from four continents and many more literary traditions. Anglophone writers, British (D. J. Enright, Golding), American (Maya Angelou, Sylvia Plath), postcolonial (Naipaul, Seth) outnumber those who write in other languages, but a number of eminent Latin Americans and Europeans are also discussed (Marquez, Gide, Holub). A genuine love of literature is reflected on every page, and one hopes that this book will be read widely, for it will surely induce its readers to explore more of world literature. The essay, "Black Jesus: Blasphemy vs Artistic Freedom," stands out for its sober affirmation of creative freedom.
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