Biryani with cream sauce: Review of ‘Bangladesh’ by Rifat Munim

The book is a praiseworthy effort in itself but is impaired by awkward translations and clumsy typesetting.

This heartwarming volume introduces you to a diverse group of authors whose writing went into the making of a resilient people who survived Partition, wars, and extremes of poverty. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock

Bangladesh is a work of love. It is a heartwarming volume that introduces you to a diverse group of authors whose lives and writing went into the making of a resilient people who survived Partition, genocide and war, military dictatorships, religious fundamentalism, and extremes of poverty. And yet, as most of these stories testify, they found faith in the power of words to describe and interpret reality—for some, the point was to change it, as good ol’ Marx had prophesied; for others, an opportunity to marvel at the tenacity of ordinary people to face up to life, no matter what came next.

Bangladesh: A Literary Journey Through 50 Short Stories

Edited by Rifat Munim

Bee Books

Pages: 608

Price: Rs.850

The book compiles the English-language translations of 50 short stories by authors ranging from older literary giants like Syed Waliullah, Syed Mujtaba Ali, Shawkat Ali, and Kayes Ahmed to contemporary writers like Shahaduz Zaman, Imtiar Shamim, Harishankar Jaladas, and Prashanta Mridha, who have their individual cult followings beyond the border. Particular attention is devoted to the representation of women writers: Shaheen Akhtar, Purabi Basu, Audity Falguni, Nasreen Jahan, Dilara Hashem, Selina Hossain, and Taslima Nasreen. It ends with short biographical notes introducing every author and translator. At 608 pages, it is a hefty royal-sized tome, and definitely not recommended for casual reading on public transport.

Cover of Bangladesh: A Literary Journey Through 50 Short Stories | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

Transnational project

What also makes this book unique is the transnational nature of the translation project. As a continuation of the excellent translation work once spearheaded by the Dhaka literary magazine Bengal Lights, Munim has drawn together a team of 28 translators from across India and Bangladesh to put in inconceivable effort to bring these translations to print. The stories by Shawkat Ali, Imtiar Shamim, Afsana Begum, and Dipen Bhattacharya have been translated into fluid prose by the editor Rifat Munim himself; those by Shawkat Osman, Mamun Hussain, Kayes Ahmed, and Shushanto Majumdar have been translated by Parveen K. Elias, who has preserved their distinctive voices through a clear translation style which makes them more engaging.

Kaiser Haq’s rendition of Akhtaruzzaman Elias’ story “The Warmth of Hell” is brave. Among the famous names in Indian translation, Arunava Sinha has translated Alauddin Al Azad and Selina Hossain in smart prose (as in most Arunava Sinha translations, you invariably get a strange feeling that he is the man who is actually writing, irrespective of the author); V. Ramaswamy and Shrishti Dutta Chowdhury’s rendering of Shahidul Zahir’s difficult prose is as close to the original as it gets.

Gormless renditions

Not all the translations are equally good; in particular, gormless renditions in urban English, like turnip and cream sauce on mutton biryani, ruined the stories of Abu Ishaque and Harishankar Jaladas for me. Another translation piqued my interest and got me looking into the translator’s bio at the end. It said, he is “Bangladesh’s biggest English-language poet”. Assuming this was written by the translator and not the editor (as all translator bios appeared to be), this is self-publicity at its worst, even by the standards of today’s Instagram poets, not to mention the strangeness of the diction.

Add to that the compositor’s strong ideological commitment to end the tyranny of italics in the body text—especially with reference to names of books—and a general inattention to page and line set-up, and you have a good book spoiled by clumsy typesetting.

Closing fissures

But once you have finished reading, the book gets you thinking. The name Bangladesh appears on the spine of the book, without reference to its full title. Is the idea of a political nation state interchangeable with the stories the people living within its geographical boundaries chose to tell? Or, does it inadvertently close the fissures while aiming for singular representation under the rubric of a nation?

It prompts a long, hard think about what constitutes literary “culture” in the first place. In this volume, Akhtaruzzaman Elias, who consciously distanced himself from the literary mainstream, sits comfortably with Humayun Ahmed and Imdadul Haq Milan, who chiefly wrote popular fiction, as representatives of the same literary and cultural geography, if not defined, then taken for granted mostly in statist terms. An impossibility, one might daresay.

“Culture is a broken bridge.” Akhtaruzzaman Elias used this expression in Bangla as the title for one of his essays to communicate the problem with the idea of a singularly defined “culture”. It indeed does not get everyone across.

Deeptanil Ray is an amateur reader and bibliotaph. He teaches English at Sree Chaitanya College, Habra, West Bengal.