This translator's introduction to Bengali poet Ruby Rahman, whose work appears in the Spring 2011 Iowa Review, reveals not just the process of translation of a text, but the development of personal ties that bring the translator friendship, sorrow, and a lesson in "literary citizenship."
Ruby Rahman was born in 1946 in Dhaka, then in East Bengal. She was the third daughter (of seven sisters and one brother) in a middle-class, urban, literary family. She was much influenced in childhood by her grandfather, who composed and performed songs; and by her mother, who was a devoted reader of the work of Rabindranath Tagore, and who wrote poetry and sang Rabindrasangeet (the songs of Tagore). Several of her sisters also wrote, sang and performed—two sisters are popular singers in Bangladesh; another sister is a well-known journalist. Ruby Rahman studied at Dhaka University, receiving a B.A. with Honours in English, Psychology, and Bengali; and an M.A. in English. After her marriage, she lived with her husband and their two children in Lalmatia, a middle-class neighborhood of central Dhaka, near the university. For over thirty years she taught English at the Government Commercial College in Dhaka, and she has served on the Bangladesh national review board for textbooks and educational curricula.
Like many Bangladeshi poets and writers, Ruby Rahman has been active in journalism, translating news and features from English to Bengali for the Associated Press of Bangladesh, and serving as the editor of a weekly women's page of one of the foremost newspapers. Since 2004, she has been an editor for Kāli o Kalam, a weekly literary magazine published in Dhaka. Beginning in her college days, she has participated in literary and cultural programs on Radio Bangladesh, and she has frequently hosted its Sunday literary program.
After television arrived in Bangladesh in the mid-1970s, she was a frequent guest of Bangladesh Television's literary and cultural programs; but during the next decade, which was dominated by the military dictatorship of Hussein Mohammed Ershad (1982-1990), she and many other democratically-minded writers boycotted programs sponsored by the government-controlled media. Besides trips to West Bengal for literary conferences and readings, she traveled with her husband, a politician and leader of the Bangladesh movement for workers' rights, to Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
As a board member of the country's largest literary organization, the Jātiyo Kabitā Parishad (National Poetry Society), Ruby Rahman was instrumental in organizing poetry festivals and seminars in Dhaka and elsewhere in Bangladesh, especially the Society's own National Poetry Festival held every February at Dhaka University. This is part of the nation's largest literary event, the annual Jātiyo Boimelā (National Book Fair) sponsored by the Bangla Academy and held on its grounds within the Dhaka University campus, an area traditionally honored as a free-speech zone, even during military regimes.
Considering her extensive literary, journalistic, and educational activities and service, Ruby Rahman has not been a highly prolific poet, but she is regarded as one of the finest poets of contemporary Bengali letters, renowned for her sense of literary craft, lyricism, and cultural allusiveness. Informed by European Modernism and by early 20th century Bengali poets like Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das, her work is complex and intellectually engaging, layered with echoes of and references to classical Bengali literature and the work of Tagore, Das, and others. She published her first poem in a national newspaper in 1958, but her first book of poetry, Bhālobāsār Kabitā (Love Poems), did not appear until 1983; her second book, Je Jiban Pharinger (This Cricket's Life), was published in 1991. A third volume, Kan Pete Aschi Moumachi (I’ve Come to Listen, Bee), appeared in 2006. Her poems have been featured in all the major newspapers, magazines, and literary anthologies of Bangladesh and West Bengal.
Ruby Rahman was one of the first Bangladeshi poets I met after I arrived in Dhaka in the fall of 1989, on a Fulbright Senior Research fellowship to study and translate the work of 20th century Bengali women poets and writers. (This was a continuation of the project begun on a similar fellowship from the Indo-U.S. Subcommission, in Kolkata, India, where I lived for nearly two years, collecting and translating the work of West Bengali women poets and writers.) I was introduced to Ruby by one of my staunchest translation collaborators, Syed Manzoorul Islam, Chair of Dhaka University’s English Department, and a renowned writer and critic in his own right. We worked together over the course of the next nearly two years on the poetry of Ruby Rahman and several other poets.
The three of us usually met in Manzoor’s large, breezy English Department office to read through each poem of Ruby’s word for word, producing a first version in English that conveyed accurately the sense of the original Bengali. I copied the literal word order, noting subtleties like idiomatic phrases, multiple entendres or word play, and level of diction—the formality or familiarity of verbs, pronouns, and other forms of address; and with nouns and adjectives, whether they were standard or colloquial Bengali (like common English words of Anglo-Saxon origin), or of “high” Sanskritic derivation, similar to words of Latin or Greek origin in English. Ruby and Manzoor also pointed out cultural information in the poem's proverbial expressions, allusions to history or mythology, and references to customs and traditions that Bengali readers would be familiar with. Then, having immersed myself in the life of the original poem, and working alone with a Bengali-English dictionary, I combined elements of the literal version with the relevant cultural information, to create a translation as faithful as possible to the original and also (I hoped) successful in its own right. I showed this version to Ruby and Manzoor to correct any remaining inaccuracies.
From the literary relationship born of the pleasures of translating her work, Ruby became one of my closest poet associates during my nearly two years in Bangladesh. We spoke on the phone, almost entirely in Bangla, she patiently helping me with grammar and vocabulary as I tried to keep up my end of our conversations about poetry, the arts, and the mysteries of the human psyche. I visited her home for dinners, house poetry and musical performances, birthday celebrations, and meetings prior to joining pro-democracy events in the weeks after the fall of the Ershad military regime in December 1990. I remember one morning in mid-February 1991, marching and chanting enthusiastic slogans in the hot early spring sun among a crowd of students, writers and intellectuals with Ruby and her younger sister Monica. This was during the heady days of the first National Book Fair week and nationwide celebrations just after democracy had been restored and just before the first free (and reasonably fair) election in Bangladesh, later that month.
It was at a dinner and reception that evening in their pleasant Lalmatia flat that I met Ruby’s husband, Mohammed Nurul Islam, a nationally renowned labor union leader who was running for a seat in the newly democratic Bangladesh Parliament. A lean, tall, handsome man with an engaging personal force, Nurul Islam was in fine form that evening, and his conversation with family, friends, colleagues and neighbors at this reception was full of wordplay, political humor, and speculation about the outcome of the election and its implications for the country’s future. Chatting with all her guests and attending to refreshments, Ruby beamed at him across the room. Though I could not follow all the wordplay in bangla, I could understand what a fine, intelligent, dedicated man her husband was. Nurul Islam narrowly lost that election, but continued his work on behalf of Bangladesh’s labor unions and democratic political parties. But from that time I remembered above all his and Ruby's optimism, and the hope expressed by everyone I met then, for the future of Bangladesh and its people, expressed in poetry and in public life.
After I returned to the U. S. in mid-1991, I remained in sporadic contact by postal mail with Ruby and many other poets, writers and translation collaborators I had worked with. Though my time in Bangladesh was before email and internet usage became widespread, I gradually re-established communication with poets and collaborators as they acquired email. Meanwhile, whenever poems of Ruby's appeared in a literary magazine or anthology, I endeavored to have the editors send contributors’ copies to her home address—given the irregularities of international surface mail, some of these packets reached her, some did not. This was an indirect way of letting her know that the translation project was still underway; but by the summer of 2008, we had not been in direct contact for several years.
Nonetheless, with these translations of her poems, Ruby was nominated for a 2008 fellowship to the International Writing Program at the U of Iowa; and to my surprise and delight, I received a call in August 2008 from another Bangladeshi associate, letting me know that Ruby was in Iowa City! It wasn’t possible to meet her on this visit, however: I was already committed to a month-long series of talks, readings and workshops in Chile through Partners of the Americas that exactly overlapped the main portion of Ruby’s stay in Iowa City. But during her stay, before and after my travels, we had several delightful conversations on the phone, exchanged books and magazines through the mail, and made tentative plans to translate more of her work.
After a wonderful experience with poets in Iowa City, where she was much beloved, and just before she was due to return home to Bangladesh, Ruby was in Boston to visit her daughter, who was then a Research Associate at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In early December 2008, they received the horrific news that there had been a suspicious freak fire in the family flat in Dhaka—a fire that had killed her son Tamohar and left her husband, Nurul Islam, badly burned and clinging to life. Father and son had been sleeping when the fire broke out at about 3 a.m. Tamohar died, but Nurul Islam was rescued by neighbors and firefighters and taken to Dhaka University Hospital’s burn unit. In shock, Ruby and her daughter flew back immediately to Dhaka. Nurul Islam lived until the next afternoon, long enough to be interviewed by detectives and journalists about what had happened, but he ultimately succumbed.
Family, friends, and political colleagues suspected that the fire was no accident, but arson—the work of political opponents or possibly of Islamic militants. Nurul Islam, at that point President of the nation’s leading coalition of center-left political parties, had been nominated for a seat in the upcoming national parliamentary elections, and had been receiving threatening phone calls in the days before the fire. I followed the news from Bangladesh over the internet—satellite broadcasts that showed the scorched interior of the flat, scenes of bandaged-swathed Nurul Islam struggling to speak with journalists from his hospital bed, and heart-wrenching footage from his burial service: the flower-wreathed coffin surrounded by mourners, the military salutes and eulogies by political colleagues and friends, and glimpses of Ruby and her daughter, with sorrowful downcast faces, standing among the other women mourners and family members.
In the wake of this overwhelming devastation, one of the poems presented here, “Damages,” although written years before, is deeply relevant in its contemplation of the nuances of earlier loss. “There are some sorrows, some damages, for which there is no compensation,” the speaker declares, and “you are that irreparable loss of mine.” The speaker realizes that this “inconsolable sorrow . . . tears apart this neat and tidy day-to-day existence,” compelling her to reflect on the nature of existence with all the comforts of domestic routine stripped away. This sorrow propels the speaker into an isolation rendered in maritime imagery (the “lighthouse's flickering beam of light / will tremble only on the vast deep”)—imagery reminiscent of Crane and Melville, and gesturing toward a similar confrontation with the morally neutral elements of an indifferent universe. Absent the lost one who has imparted “the courage to dream” so that it “blooms in the blood,” the speaker’s “difficult habit of staying alive” gives way; she enacts this gesture with a uniquely Bengali simile, as her will to live “crumbles like conch-shell dust.” This image of the conch shell is intimately associated with the entire spectrum of Bengali life—from celebratory sounds of conch shells blown at births and weddings, to the destruction of conch-shell bangles when a woman is widowed, and thus enacts multiple nuances.
A few days after the funeral of her son and husband, Ruby was approached by leaders of the political coalition that Nurul Islam had headed, and asked to run for the district seat he had been contesting. She did not stand for that seat, but ultimately won an at-large seat among those reserved in the Bangladesh Parliament for women. Now, as a Member of Parliament, she has little time to write poetry, but in this capacity she has followed a South Asian tradition of wives, daughters and sisters carrying on the work of political leaders who have died serving their country. In this capacity, she also brings her longstanding commitment to literary citizenship and service to the wider public life of Bangladesh, and thus “make[s] a way . . . towards beauty” for all the citizens of her country.
