Poems That Came To Me: Translated by Sonia Amin
The struggle to come up with a name for this collection of poetry was an arduous one. The volume could not be termed an ‘anthology’ for it was not representative of a genre; an age; a century; a region; or poetry of a single poet or an overlapping category of these. The collection of poems that I translated over a long period of time for the sheer joy of translation, or more rarely at a request to contribute to a special edition, remained an assorted bag of random products of an intermittent creative moment. I did not find myself in the South Asian Translation canon and yet I was drawn to it and had published on and off. So, the question of a name for a volume where all of it could be put together, became a perplexing matter. A volume containing a poem read somewhere, or remembered or thrust upon one’s mind through life’s twists and turns, seemed to defy any categorization. And yet, I felt the time and effort gone into the work and its contents deserved to be collected and preserved somewhere in a single accessible place.
One day at a serendipitous turn in a conversation with a former student who had a fine sense of literature and art, we arrived at a possible name for the book! It struck a chord immediately, for indeed these were pieces that ‘came to me as Mirza Ghalib had put it in averse, long ago:
“Atihaighaib se ye mazame khayal mein. Ghalit sarirkhwamanawa e saroshhai”. (From the ether come these gifts to my mind. Ghalib the scratching of the pen are the sound of angels.”
The title captured the essence of how I had proceeded and how this collection had grown over time. Other, more memorable poems might have come in a similar manner and just as easily but these are the ones that did. And later these are the ones that got translated.
I have tried to place each of the poets in chronological order according to their birth dates. It may be hoped this chronological sequence itself provides a pattern of sorts. All I can say is that the volume contains modern Bengali poetry (starting with Rabindranath Tagore and ending with Khondkar Ashraf Hossain) and the poems centre around the concerns inhabitants of the ancient, medieval, modern and post-modern world faced/face every day: love, loss, death, despair, futility, lack of meaning, desire, betrayal, grief, courage, wonder, the lack thereof….
There are many I wish to thank here: Sabiha Haq for agreeing to write an introduction; several of the poets for instance, the late Syed Shamsul Huq, and the late Khondkar Ashraf Hossain (who was a colleague in the department of English), the late Tarun Sanyal; who read Deep within the Heart-the translation of Syed Haq’s book of sonnets over a single night; poet Ruby Rahman who is an inspiration in grace in the aftermath of tragedy.
Thanks are due to Rezaul Karim Sumon, student and colleague who provided the title; readers who were satisfied and delighted; readers who were not; editors who asked me for translated poems specially Rifat Munim of The Dhaka Tribune; friends who were there for me at critical junctures-Aksadul Alam, Niru Shamsun Nahar, Khaleda Khatoon, Tapali Sengupta, Parveen Jolly, and others; members of my family who encouraged me just by being who they are even if they did not participate in the process: my sons Ashim and Shudipto and Hasan their father, my sister Milia and brother-in-law Owaise, niece Smeeta Kazi.
Several of the poems were translated at various times in various places, for instance, the collection of sonnets by Al Mahmud Sonali Kabin was done during my term as writer in residence at Sanskriti Pratisthan, Gurgaon, Delhi; Tagore’s ‘Sesher Kabita’; Shamsur Rahman’s ‘February Monument’, etc. were translated for a programme titled ‘Autumn Moon and Burnt Ash: A magical Journey through the Pathways of Bengali Poetry” organized for Good enough House while on a fellowship in London in 2000. However, I put everything together as a book and added many poems during the years 2020-2021-the period of the worst pandemic the world has known.
Writing in the time of Corona was a daunting task for a person inhabiting Dhaka the capital of Bangladesh, a city with one of the densest populations in the world and an inadequate health care system. Living in constant anxiety surrounding the dreaded disease, sapped one’s energy and often made every endeavour seem futile. Yet in a way it was part of what kept one sane and productive. I tried hard to partake of some of the magic contained in a poem translated here “for poets never defeated are….”
In conclusion I wish to say I hope this little volume travels far and reaches the hands of those who do not know Bengali and cannot gaze with wonder at the gems in their original form.
Dr. Sonia Amin was Professor and Chairperson at the Department of History, Dhaka University
