Translator's Note

 

I started translating Rabindra Sangeet in 1996 when a friend asked me to translate “shudhu jaoa asa, shudhu srote bhasa” (floating down the stream, to and fro). Like everywhere else in the world, Bengalis in Mauritius, despite the paucity in numbers, regularly held cultural festivities. Our non-Bengali friends, the major part of our audience, were usually lost trying to understand the Tagore songs that we so enthusiastically presented. Also, as an expatriate with a mixed marriage, I felt the need to bring my cultural heritage closer to my daughters, Shinjinee and Sohinee.

 

To most Bengalis, Tagore is more than religion. He was neither a spiritual nor a political leader and yet he shaped a nation so completely that its existence even cannot be comprehended without him. Much scholastic material is readily available on Tagore and his influence on Bengal. His writings – poems, songs, plays, novels, short stories and essays, 15 volumes in all, have been his legacy. Evidently, translations of his works provide the first glimpse to the world of this monumental achievement. Translating Tagore is hence nothing new. After all, one just has to float down the stream of this creative genious.

 

In this collection I have translated only his songs, commonly known as Rabindra Sangeet. While Tagore poems have always been a translator’s feast, Tagore songs have not been widely translated despite there being over 2,500 of them. I have taken the liberty to reproduce excerpts from Songs of Rabindrananth Tagore by Arnold Blake for a general appreciation. I translated the bulk of the songs during my frequent visit to Botswana between 1998 and 2004. These were compiled in a web-version http://pages.intnet.mu/ghosh/poems. My thanks goes to Dinesh Ramchurn for helping me out to help me creating the website and to Maria Coralie for ascertaining that the translations were resonating to foreign ears. Unfortunately, due to backward incompability, the the older web-version is now being discontinued and replaced by this blog. In the new version, I have also replaced the original songs in Bengali and Roman script by the songs itself. The singers are chosen primarily for their popularity, sometimes stretching over 80 years and also for their diversities in terms of gender, style, ethnicity, nationality and even belief.

 

While the devotional songs are exquisite, the mystic sage is equally unfathomable when it comes to expressing love or describing nature. The beautiful expressions and finely chosen words are like carefully plucked flowers to thread a garland. The charm is in each word, in each expression, which never gets lost in the overall beauty of the songs. In almost all songs, the poet switches effortlessly between the complex symbolic expressions and the direct narrations, leaving a great deal to our imagination. Furthermore, the nature of Bengal is inextricably embodied in Tagore’s lyrics. The intoxicating Palash, a red flower; the tranquil Shefali, a short-living fragrant white flower with a pretty orange stem; the light spring breeze; the colourful autumn clouds; the scented wet gust of the month of Shravana during the rainy season; moonlit forest trails; even the act of tying a rakhi to the beloved’s hand, are core elements that create the so prevalent romantic ambience of Bengal.

 

Even today, over a half a century after his death, Tagore’s songs enliven the charms of Bengal. While a Bengali gets instantaneously consummated by Rabindra Sangeet, a thousand words fail to express its intricate significance to others. Translating Tagore is therefore, a challenge. I am not a student of languages, let alone a poet. I have merely tried to bring the essence of the songs by drawing a balance between the poetic content and what might seem rhetoric to foreign readers in the hope to convey the meaning as closely as possible without being tedious. Generally, names of flowers, trees, musical instruments and so on have often been left in their original Bengali version. jNui may be jasmine in English, but isn’t it a lovely word by itself!

 

Like a lot of Bengali families, I grew up amidst songs, dances, recitals and plays. My parents sang Rabindra Sangeet on all occasions – when they were happy, depressed, on holidays, when we lied down under the sky on the roof of our house on sultry summer nights. I vividly recollect my father singing pagla haoar badol dine when the monsoon cloud gathered in the sky, or sitting by my bedside singing Tagore a whole night on a very dark night of my life. When my father passed away, my mother consoled herself by singing je rate mor duar guli almost every night for several months to get her courage back to face the life after. Then there were school fests, long drives, lovers - Tagore songs are intricately woven in our daily life. I simply had to turn the pages of Gitobitan. From its pages tunes came rushing. My selection of songs couldn’t have been easier.

 

Besides my parents, the list of people who deserve my gratitude is long and I am bound to miss quite a few of them. I am greatly indebted to Kakoli Bandopadhya of Beaumont, Texas for encouraging me during the early days to translate and publishing my translations in Sonartari – a delightful website of translated work of Bengali poets. My former colleague Maria Corallie who had no inkling about Tagore or Bengal took time to review several of my early translations. The monumental editing was so arduously done by Mrs. Paula Achia.

 

The encouragements from the Bengali community in Mauritius and in the cyberspace kept me venturing into some of the more difficult songs. Despite having to relocate to the US, artist friend Soutrik Das kept his word to design the cover. The support and affection of Mrs. Shakuntala Hawaldar, the Chairperson of the President’s Fund for Creative Writing in English was the guiding hand and the calming voice in this journey.     

 

And Padma, my wife. While any remaining weakness is still mine, without your tireless revisions and suggestions, the universality of the translations would have fallen well short.

 

 

Pratik Ghosh