By: Dr Ratan Bhattacharjee

Ken Liu said about translation of poetry, “Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.” This miracle happened in ‘Weep Not My Love’, in which Dr Ranjana Bhattacharyya carved out her niche as a wonderful translator of Assamese poems to make it reach the wider poetic platform of India and the world. Earlier, she had translated one of Pranab Kumar Barman’s novel Charitrahina into English and this time, she took up a more tough job to translate the evocative and poignant Assamese poems of Pranab Kumar Barman in English. Barman is a renowned poet, faithful in his natural surroundings, his soil and culture as his themes focus on his being the son of the soil. He shows his sensibility towards socio-political reality with ridicule and sometimes as an intrinsic anger though he is more interested in focusing on love and lost love.

Weep Not My love contains one hundred poems of love, war and social reality. Dr Ranjana Bhattacharjee has used local and regionalized words in the translated version and successfully overcomes the peculiarities of the poetic phrasing by grasping the right mood and tenor of the original poems. The poems selected have an undercurrent of romantic mode as in the titular poem –

“Weep not, my love, weep not

Even if the olive leaves turn red

The sun will rise tomorrow”.

But the predominant tone is the social content as in the poem ‘Where is My Home-II’ –

“Tell me who will give my time back

The sky is so small for us”.

The selection of romantic poems is a priority but we get some poems giving reflection of social reality as in the poem ‘Confession of a Raped Girl’ which ends with a desperate cry of the victim –

“Your honour my lord

These are my words

Now I wish, three of them

Should get cut their penis

And ever be invirile males”.

The forceful translation of the realistic lines from a romantic poet makes this book so valued and relevant today when a dalit girl is raped openly by members of upper class people with the sponsorship of the administration. Other realistic poems have a vigorous tone and tenor unimpaired in a series of poems entitled ‘When War Breaks’, ’When War Increases’, ‘Let’s Rename the Wars’, ‘War Can’t Be a Spring’ reminding us of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Spring Offensive’.

Pranab Kumar Barman has to his credit forty-four books and twenty-nine of them are anthology of poems while fifteen are fiction. So selection of poems from this prolific poet is a challenging task and Dr Ranjana did that with profound care and academic acumen. She mingled the romantic with the realistic. A full book of his poems in English translation will enable the renowned poet to reach a wider pan-India platform and Dr Ranjana has successfully done the job. She herself being an Associate Professor of English at Nalbari College and having experience of editing books including Comparative Literature, Language and Linguistics, Oral Narratives, Culture and Translation Studies, it was expected that she would render it in the best way possible and has even done a great work by doing so.

‘Weep Not My Love’ as a title apparently seems to not reflect the exact spirit of the poems in the book but if broadly seen, it is a perfect title as the poems reveal a sadness caused by either lost love, rape, war, unemployment or any other unfulfilled desires and cravings in the human heart. The last few lines of the last poem ‘Sagorika’ will resonate forever in the heart of the readers –

“Bless me with the ink of blood

To fill my pen up

Words of gunpowder

I must write.”

Gunter Grass once said, “Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.” After reading the translated poems of Pranab Kumar Barman in the recently published book by Dr Ranajana Bhattacharyya, one may have the same feeling. The cover design by Manjit Rajkhowa is undoubtedly exquisite and the layout by Ramen Rajbongshi adds to the excellence of presentation. Published by Seuji –Seuji (Pulak Barman) the book is priced at Rs 250. (The writer is an Associate Professor of English and Head – Dum Dum Motijheel College, Kolkata cum Trilingual Columnist and Poet. He can be reached at [email protected] )