A Twining of Tongues

Translator: Prayag Shukla (Tr)

Publisher: Vani Prakash

Price: Rs. 200

Pages: 169

Returning to India after four years,a grandiose Taslima Nasrin declares,“Love is my country”. From an author exiled from Bangladesh and then forced to leave India by a jittery government,this sounds slightly accusing. And now Nasrin,a pillar of injured femininity,offers us a collection of her poems translated into Hindi,titled,Mujhe dena hai aur prem. She is aggrieved,but she still loves you.

Most of the poems in the collection are written as an aggrieved address to someone or to a forsaken homeland. In poems like ‘Abhishaap’,‘Sunte ho’ and ‘Jaana’,she is in the grip of a tempestuous passion for a no-good man. In others,she addresses women who have been oppressed. Many of these,directly or indirectly,address a woefully callous reader. Women from all ages and places are bound by a common plight,her poems suggest. ‘Noor Jahan’,in which the blows rained down on the persecuted queen are felt by the poet herself,is powerful,gathering urgency through repetitions. But what does the woman who walks up to her at a event in Switzerland want to “weep” about? In ‘Switzerland ki ladki’,the two strangers look at each other with the grief of — being women,presumably.

Others are poems of exile,where she rues a native country that has forgotten her and even Kolkata,her adopted home,which eventually rejected her. ‘Bhoomadhya saagar ka seagull’ and ‘Is ghar se us ghar mein’ evoke the sap and green of rural Bengal and Bangladesh. Nasrin has often been compared to the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das for her depictions of the landscape. But Das’s poems linger in the shadows and contours of the countryside,Nasrin’s poems rarely venture beyond the Brahmaputra. The collection takes Hindi readers beyond the political Nasrin,perhaps for the first time. Her controversial memoirs and Lajja,the novel that led to her exile from Bangladesh,have been translated into Hindi before,but not her poems. As translator Prayag Shukla observes,there is a large market for Nasrin’s work among Hindi readers. In India,she has been known mostly as a figure of political dissent; this collection lends depth to her image as a writer,introducing another side of her to a new group of readers. It is perhaps the translation that is the triumph of this collection,marking an important exchange between two regional languages.

It is,to borrow a phrase from Gayatri Spivak a “most intimate act of reading”,one in which the translator has “surrendered” himself to the original text. Shukla trains his ear to the cadences of Nasrin’s poetry,taking pains to preserve the “musicality” of the original,frequently choosing a word that is melodious over a more exact translation. On one occasion,he even keeps the Bengali word so as not to disturb the rhyme scheme within a line of poetry. For this loving act of surrender also means allowing the “rhetorical interferences” of the original language to disrupt the translated text. Often this involves acknowledging the limits of translation. Shukla keeps Bengali words like “pattari” — a kind of scroll used by students to write on,and “dolon champa” — the name of a flower,explaining them in footnotes. Some words,after all,cannot be translated out of their cultural contexts.

Today,the more prominent translations are from Indian languages into English,which has its own set of anxieties. Among them is the fear that the beloved eccentricities of the regional tongue will be smoothed over in the hegemonic language. Hindi,as a state language,holds a similar position of power over other regional languages,and has often been resisted by the latter. But the Hindi of this collection,a malleable,egalitarian Hindi reflects a moment of intimacy between the two languages. This translation gives Indian readers better access to the breadth of Nasrin’s oeuvre. In a way,it gives her a home in India.

ipsita.chakravarty@expressindia.com