The Ruined Nest and Other Stories

TRANSLATION is a risky job, but somebody has to do it. After all, a translator runs the risk of being lost in the act of crossing the language or cultural barrier. It is never easy to grasp the subtlety of the source language and render it in a readable target language. The linguistic competency is just one of the many qualities that a translator requires to avoid communication collapses. The translator must be both sincere and sensitive not only to the original text but also to its context. The risk gets even bigger when one attempts to translate an author who himself has ardently tried and arguably failed to translate his own work in his second language.

I write the last sentence, and brace myself for the criticism that it must entail. Tagore, after all, got the Nobel Prize for his translation of Gitanjali. But the translated abstract philosophy of Tagore, as critics have argued, turned out to be mawkish verses. Philip Larkin, for one, ill-famously used the F-word to show his disgust for Tagore in translation. Amit Chaudhuri, writing for The Guardian, quotes Karl Miller who once told him that Tagore was "shoved down our [British] throats." A dose of the colonial quinine I suppose. Chaudhuri also cites James Campbell who under the pen-name of JC in his TLS column "notebook" questioned the fuss over Tagore's 150th anniversary. Chaudhuri summarizes: "Any man dressed in a loose robe-like garment, and whose poetry, at least in English translation, comprises lines such as the one Jack quotes ('Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark'), is up, in Britain, for a laugh."

Tagore was no stranger to criticism when he was alive. Throughout his career, he had to negotiate with harsh criticism. Centuries down the road, it is up to a new breed of translators who can really show the world what the fuss over Tagore was, and is, all about. This is precisely the reason why the dirty job of translation has to be undertaken. Without good translation Tagore's essential genius will fail to cross the cultural threshold. The need of good translation has been recognised and addressed by Ketaki Dyson, William Radice, Radha Chakravarty, Fakrul Alam among others. I pick up the collection of short stories by Rabindranath Tagore, The Ruined Nest and Other Stories, translated by Mohammad A Quayum, with certain apprehensiveness. Can Quayum do justice to Tagore and add his name to the list of translators mentioned here? At least he has picked up a relatively easier job of translating Tagore's prose, and not poetry.

Settled in Malaysia, Quayum is a university professor who specializes in South Asian literature. His academic orientation is evident in the introduction on Tagore. He begins by providing a brief account of Tagore's life before going on to discuss the central ideas behind the stories. The good thing about this collection is that it approaches a readership that probably has no prior knowledge of Tagore. He tries to explain and add footnotes to every possible cultural reference. These footnotes do not necessarily block the flow of a very readable prose. At times, it seems the translator is overdoing it. Then again, it could be just me (or anyone who is familiar with Bangla for that matter).

You cannot think of a Bengali middle class household without a copy of Golpaguchha and Shonchoyeeta. And as you read the translation, you feel something is amiss. Tagore, by his own admission,  "had to create" a poetic prose to short stories as he had no literary ancestor such as Maupassant when he started writing his stories (Galpagucuchha). The lyricism of Tagore's prose and the economy of language are really hard to get across in a different language.

Quayum has tried his best to be honest to the text. He was making sure that his overseas readers understand what the stories were all about. Some of the themes  like Suttee or child marriage may appear as lore from bygone days.  To make Tagore contemporary to a modern audience, Quayum focused mostly on the tapestry of human relationships available in Tagore. Love, jealousy, caste consciousness, liberal humanism seem to loom large in the selection of translated stories.

There are 20 stories in total--the longest one is the title story 'Nasto Nirh', translated as 'The Ruined Nest'. The collection aims at translating one-fifth of Galpaguchha, while remaining quite representative of Kabiguru. Quayum has tried to capture various stages of Tagore's literary career--an idea that has been depicted in the cover illustration of the book.

The praise for the book on the jacket will confirm how successful the translator has been in making his work accessible to a great majority. But anyone familiar with the Bangla may find some of the interpretive translation a bit limiting. For example,  in Tagore's "Suha" where a relationship dies because a deaf girl fails to express herself in human language. She has no problem in communicating with a calf in the stable. But her husband is simply eager to get rid of her and marry for the second time when he realized that he had married someone without language. "The second time around, her husband, making use of sense organs of both sight and hearing married a girl who could speak" (98). The original story, however, mentions someone with "language." By making it an issue of speech, Quayum is blocking other possibilities associated with communication collapses.

Overall this is a great production that will make contemporary readers aware of the brilliance of one of the greatest storytellers of the world.

Reviewed By Shamsad Mortuza, 
Professor of English, University of Dhaka.