In Conversation
'I like the challenge of translation. . .'
Dr. Fakrul Alam is among the most popular and influential academics of the Department of English, University of Dhaka (he also teaches part-time at East West University). One of the leading literary critics of the country, the range of his scholarly writings on literature and literary theory is wide. For almost two decades, he has been working on translating modern Bangla poetry into English. An outcome of his efforts was the critically acclaimed Jibananda Das: Selected Poems (1999). Recently, Harvard University Press has published The Essential Tagore, a work he has co-edited with Radha Chakravarty, Associate Professor of English at Gargi College, University of Delhi. In conversation with Akram Hosen Mamun of The Daily Star, he talks about his recent works and his views on translation. What follows are excerpts from the conversation. Akram Hosen Mamun: You have been translating the poems of Rabindranath, and have just finished working on The Essential Tagore. Please comment on the nature of your recent work. Fakrul Alam: The Essential Tagore is essentially a big book--more than 800 pages! Harvard University Press has the publication and marketing rights for its edition in all parts of the world, excluding South Asia, where it will be published by Visva-Bharati in late April to coincide with the shardho shotobarshiki celebrations. The text will be the same but the getup will be different from the Harvard edition. The book consists of mostly new Tagore translations but there are some old translations as well. It's divided into ten genres: poetry, songs, autobiographical works, letters, travel writings, prose, novels, short stories, humorous pieces, and plays. It features two plays, Raktakarabi and Tasher Desh, ten short stories, extracts from four novels, around fifty poems, fifty songs, a lot of letters, and substantial extracts from the autobiographical and travel writing. And there is a "Humor" section too! We include a few of Tagore's own translations and original English prose and three unpublished English Gitanjali poems. We have translations by established writers like Amitav Ghosh, Amit Chowdhury, and Sunetra, Kaiser Haq and Syed Manzoorul Islam. In all we have around 30 people translating, including Radha and myself. I am sure it's the kind of anthology of translations that Tagore has not had till now. Akram Hosen Mamun: How did you choose the texts that have been translated? Fakrul Alam: At first, we made a list of Tagore texts that could be translated and a list of possible translators as well. Then we circulated the list of texts among translators. And after that we left it to them to choose the text that they wanted to translate. When the translators submitted their works we edited them and made our selection on the basis of what we got. Radha and I divided the work: I looked at five genres and she looked at five and then together we looked at all ten genres. Our translators are all from India and Bangladesh. So in a way it's a co-production: an Indo-Bangladeshi work! Amit Chowdhury wrote a long preface and Radha and I a long Introduction as well as a glossary, genre-wise introductions, a chronology and a full reading list. Akram Hosen Mamun: Besides literary theory, you teach modern and postmodern literature and culture. Your previous work of translation was that of Jibananda Das, another great modern Bengali poet. How did you become interested in Rabindranath Tagore? Fakrul Alam: Well, I did my doctoral dissertation on Defoe, the 18th century novelist. Before that I did a MA dissertation on Melville. In my literary/academic life I've moved on. Thus in the 90s, for a period I worked on south Asian writing in English and postcolonial writing. But in the mid-90s, you could say, I came home. I started looking at Jibananandaa poet I had first read in those dark days in1971 and who was since then lodged inside me. Now I began to reread his poems obsessively. And then I felt the urge to translate him. And it's not really that strange that I should have moved from Jibananda Das to Rabindranath. In fact, it was almost inevitable that I would turn to Rabindranaththe fountainhead of all modern Bengali writing! At the moment I'm working on a translation of the Gitanjali poems and ultimately I'll be working on more poems by Rabindranath. Akram Hosen Mamun: Theories and methods of translating literary texts constitute a large part of the discipline; Translation Studies is also a course that you have been teaching at East West University for many years. Will you tell us the methods you have followed in your own translations? Fakrul Alam: When I translated Jibananda Das I knew nothing about translation studies or translation theory. And it's only after I translated Jibananda Das that East West University, where I teach as adjunct faculty, requested me to teach a course on translation studies. So I picked up translation studies after I had actually done a lot of translation. The practice came first and the theory came later! And the one thing that I understand about translating is that no one strategy fits a writer like Rabindranath. You can say that no one translating strategy can do justice to his works, or even Jibananda Das' works. What I think qualifies me for translation is that I love poetry and I love reading poetry and I think I'm a good and educated reader of literature. That's important; also a translator must be one who uses the target language easily, and also has a reasonably good command over the source language. And I think it is relevant to say that I have spent most of my life in English literature and speak and write the language fluently and Bengali is my mother tongue. In other words, my training in literature and my ability to use Bengali and the English language qualify me for translation. While translating, I try to capture the source text. That's basically the strategy I follow. I think to the translator, at the moment of translating, the theory is almost irrelevant. Akram Hosen Mamun: That is probably the reason why Gregory Rabassa [translator of Latin American literature into English] said that he follows his instincts while he translates. Fakrul Alam: A translator follows his instincts but it is true to say that a translator gets better and better. And also, a translator learns through his/her mistakes. Also a translator cannot always succeed. To me, it seems, for every poem that you translate successfully there are two or three failures. And then, a translator has to keep working at a translation! A poem is a tremendously mysterious thing. So understanding the poem and its secrets and appreciating its beauty and recapturing its essence are very difficult asks and you can't always succeed. I translate because: a) I love literature, I love poetry, I love reading Jibananda Das, I love Rabindranath's songs and b) I like the challenge of translation. Also, I must confess that I feel very creative when I do so. I'm not a very creative person at all, in the sense that I don't write short stories or poems or novels. But when I am translating, I feel creative! So, I think that Gregory Rabassa is definitely right: you must have the instinct and you must follow your instinct. You must not have preconceived notions. Sometimes when I translate a poem I don't even know the poem. I just read the first line and I think, why not translate this? So I take the challenge and keep discovering the poem. It is the discovery that I like. And this joy of knowing the text is what inspires me. It's amazing how the poem opens up and reveals itself to you and how you can discover the total poem. You can translate line by line by line, (thanks to the computer, thanks to the fact that we can rewrite, redo, restructure). By the time you finish, you discover something that you did not know before. The joy of translating is at the end, when you put everything together. Akram Hosen Mamun: what will be your next work of translation? Fakrul Alam: I'm hoping to publish a book of my own translations of the Geetanjali poems next year and a full translation of Tagore's poems in two or three years' time. I have decided that I'm going to translate a lot of poems but I'm going to publish only the ones that I think I have succeeded in translating.
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