When Poetry Comes (A Selection Of Poems By Contemporary Bengali Women Poets

$17
Item Code: NAD928
Publisher: SAHITYA AKADEMI, DELHI
Author: Marian Maddern
Language: In English Translation)
Edition: 2007
ISBN: 9788126025176
Pages: 154
Cover: Paperback
Other Details 8.5 inch X 5.5 inch
Weight 260 gm
Fully insured
Fully insured
Shipped to 153 countries
Shipped to 153 countries
More than 1M+ customers worldwide
More than 1M+ customers worldwide
100% Made in India
100% Made in India
23 years in business
23 years in business
Book Description
About The Book

Twenty different contemporary Bengali women’s voices speak in the one hundred and ninety-seven translated poems in this book. They use a range styles and forms. Some poems are in traditional forms, some are in free verse, and some are prose poems. And of course they speak of different matters. Some of poems are lyrical or descriptive, offering pictures of tress, flowers, landscapes or city scapes.Some express personal feelings or experiences of pleasure or loss,or pain. Some comfort issues of humanity or of social juistics.Others speak specifically of the lives of girls and women, and of these cry out against injustices to women, both now and in the past. And some speak of the power and fascination of words, or of the nature poetry itself, or of what it is like to be poet and of the experience of joy, such as the coming of rain after the dry seasons, “when poetry comes”. This book should interest students of women’s writing as well as lovers of poetry in general.

 

About The Author

Marian Maddern (born 1942) studied Bengali at the University of Melbourne. Her M.A thesis (published as Bengali Poetry into English: An impossible Dream?) was on translating, and her Ph.D.thesis involved a comparison between Bengali and English. Her other publications included. I have Seen Bengal’ Face (with S.N.Ray), Sociological Essays of Bankimachandra Chatterjee(with S.N.Mukherjee), and The Poison tree: Three Novellas of Bankimchandra Chatterjee (also with S.N Mukherjee). She lectured on literature and creative writing for some years at a tertiary teachers’ training college. She also teachers music, and writes poetry herself.

 

Introduction

Several years ago, while I was working on this book, I was in Calcutta briefly, firstly to visit Professor Sibnarayan Ray, whom it is my great good fortune to have had as a. teacher and also as a friend, and secondly to meet some of the poets who had sent me some of their poems. In connection with the second, I found myself giving a talk on what I was doing. I spoke of the poets whose work I was translating, and of what particularly struck me about their work, and before long, as I paused, a gentleman who had come in a little late and missed the introduction to the talk said something like this: ‘All these poets you are talking about are poetesses— why are you only talking about women poets?’ This question made me aware all over again of why I was working on this book— and also why it took me so long to start on it. It is in its way a common enough story, and the factors involved have been described and analysed now by many women, but perhaps my own individual experience may still be of interest.

As I look back on my encounters and my engagements with poetry— and indeed with literature and with my other cultural contexts— I can see, now, a number of things which I was not at all aware of at the time. Poetry was something I was aware of early in my life, and I can still remember some of my attempts, as a small child, at writing it. My grandmother and my parents (especially my mother, to whom my debt is incalculable) read and sang to me; and once I was at school there were the graded primary school readers, all containing poetry as well as prose. It is interesting to look at these readers and at the poets who appear in them. In the early ones there are quite a number, proportionally, of women poets— mostly represented by rather emotional, sweet or pretty poems. (Their influence can be seen in some of my early efforts, many— not all-of which tended to be concerned with fairies and bluebirds and so on.) But as the level rises, the men poets predominate more and more. Later, in secondary school, there were set anthologies, in which the ratio of women to men poets pretty much followed the one-in-twelve pattern which has been shown by recent writers to be so characteristic of anthologies of English poetry, and in which, again typically, those women poets included tended to be represented by the softer and more emotional examples of their work. (1 am not intending to imply that women— or men!— should not write simple or sweet or emotional poems, or that such poems should not be appreciated : it is the imbalance and exclusion which I regret— I value, for example, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s love sonnets, but I would like also to have been told about her political poem and about her impressive novel-length poem Aurora Leigh: what would be thought of an English literature course which in discussion Robert Browning mentioned only his love poems?) And there were period study collections, containing selected poems, by selected individual poets, in which there were no women poets at all. I cannot remember studying a single individual women poet (nor, interestingly, a single individual Australian poet). This pattern continued more or less unchanged into my study of literature at university: a heavy preponderance of men in anthologies and collections, in-depth study of a number of individual men writers, and period studies (for example of Restoration drama) which ignored even major women writers altogether. The poem by Rajlukshmee Debee from which the, title of this anthology is taken asks ‘When poetry comes, by whom can its passage be barred?’ and talks of the internal barriers experienced by the poet, but (and some of the poems in this book deal with this subject too) cultures can also impose their own barriers, can silence or restrict the voices of certain of their own members.

What kind of a difference did this skewed selection make? Do women writers write differently from men writers? If so, is this a matter of style or content or perspective? Is it an innate or a culturally produced difference? These and other such questions have been and continue to be debated with thought-provoking results. What I can say of my own experience is that yes, I do (now) feel the presence of a difference in sensibility and emphasis in women writers in general. (I had an interesting confirmation of this, in fact, during my work on this book: at one stage I found in my files a batch of poems whose author I did not know but which I assumed had been sent to me for the book; as I began to read and translate some of them, however, I found myself thinking more and more strongly that these did not feel like the work of a woman poet— and indeed I found out later that they were not.) I can also say that my formal study of English literature inculcated in me a certain particular, also skewed, style of evaluation while nevertheless presenting this as universal and objective: it did not equip me, as I found when I came to develop course content for my own teaching, to appreciate or even to understand at any depth even those women poets who had been allowed across the selection barrier. I would add to this that it is generally acknowledged that experience can be expected to influence writers and that different groups of people may have different kinds of experience. For example, to be marginalised is an experience which, by and large, women in patriarchal cultures will have more often than their men will. But such experiences are not always recognised as such. At the time, I simply did not realize, or did not notice, the kinds of proportions and selection and bias in what I was taught.

By this time I was also learning Bengali, and beginning to read Bengali poetry. Gradually, with the help and encouragement of my teachers, especially Sibnarayan Ray, 1 began seriously to translate into English some of the poetry we were studying. Eventually a number of my translations, together with others done by and with Professor Sibnarayan Ray and some done by Bengali poets themselves, appeared in the anthology called I Have Seen Bengal Face (1974). And yet, over all the time I was working on and reading these translations, it never once occurred to me that none of these poems were by women.

After the anthology was completed I set translating aside for some years. I had begun teaching literature in a pre-school teacher training college and was putting a lot of time into developing and thinking about the subjects I was teaching— to a predominantly female student body. As I did this, and also began to read some of the important feminist writers of the 1970’s and earlier, and discussed what I was doing and thinking with my (mostly female) colleagues and friends, I began at last to see something of the bias in what I had been taught. And I began to work at redressing this both in my own thinking and in my teaching. Even then, however, I somehow did not connect any of this with the composition of I Have Seen Bengal Face. It was not until, nine years ago now, I was asked to speak about my translation at a well-known Melbourne women’s club, and started to put together some examples, that I first looked at this with new eyes. I found myself thinking that my audience might well be interested in one or two poems by Bengali women poets— that in fact there might be something rather odd about a woman professional addressing a group of other literary minded women on the subject of translating Bengali poetry with not a single woman poet being mentioned. But, as I realized at this point, every single poem I had translated from Bengali so far had been by a man poet. If I wanted to present an example by a woman poet, I would have to set to and translate one. So I did— I looked at several recent issues of Sibnarayan Ray’s periodical Jijnasa, and chose a poem by one of the several women poets represented there, and translated it. I thought it might be interesting to keep this translation until the end of my talk— and, significantly enough, as I presented, in the body of my talk, example after example of poems by men poets, not a single person in the audience commented on this or asked me, ‘Why are you only talking about men poets?’ Nevertheless, when I read them the single translation I had so far done, so recently, from a woman poet, and told them something of my thoughts about this situation, they seemed to take my point very well.

But I could not quite leave it there. Something more, I felt, should be done. As a start, I wrote to Sibnarayan Ray asking about Bengali woman poets in general. And here is an interesting temporal coincidence. I am not now sure in which order things happened, but Professor Ray himself, at about this time, was asked by one of the women poets he knew, ‘Why are there no women poets in I Have Seen Bengal’s Face?’ and was similarly confronting some of the implications of this absence. So with Professor Ray’s invaluable and continuing help and encouragement I undertook what in some sense I feel to be a task of redress : to put together an anthology of translations of Bengali poems all be women poets to compensate a little for the earlier one of poems all by men poets (though the earlier one does not, of course, say that this is what it is— it just talks of poets). And this of course, is the answer to the question asked at my talk in Calcutta, with which I began this introduction.

 

Contents

 

Introduction I
Ahana Biswas 1
The moon's light in my dilapidated room 1
Doe 2
Game of exile 2
When you return, go and look 3
Marriage 4
Verses about error 4
Come, let us be blood-smeared 5
Stone-chip 5
Seven measures 5
A deformed woman speaks  
Anjali Das  
This life 8
The djinn's daughters 8
Earth 9
Marriage mantras 10
The ship of the dead 10
The story of two lives 11
Hunger 12
News of water 12
Flood 13
Season's end 13
Anuradha Mahapatra  
Midnight 15
The season's nature 15
Household goddess 15
The year 1984 16
You 16
River landing 16
He 17
Sleep 18
Crow 18
Cow and grandmother 19
Archana Acharyachaudhuri  
One-horned horse 20
Chimera 20
Womb 21
Narcissus and lion 21
An iguana on the path is bad luck 22
Male 22
Rhyme 1 23
Rhyme 2 23
I in the year 1956 24
Winged dragon and I 24
Chaitali Chattopadhyay  
Poem written on behalf of the goddess 26
Anger 27
Room 27
Water 28
All this ding-dong, all these flying letters 28
Prayer 29
You 29
Poison 29
Kashi Mitra Ghat 30
White page, to you 30
Debanjali Mukhopadhyay  
Forest woman 32
The bamboo flower and all this solitude 32
Birds of the ocean of beauty 33
A story of a mythical goddess 33
Dyke 34
My Calcutta 34
Women ofleaves 35
In the year 1402, a new token of identity 35
The bird of blue fire 36
Rain 37
Debarati Mitra  
Young woman in a cable-car 38
Waterfalls, thousand-streamed cascades 39
The father too is an inevitable lover 40
Warm honey 40
Sun idolater 41
The world of numbers 42
Food 43
Alphabets 46
Gita Chattopadhyay  
Poetry 47
'Woman' said Manu 47
Cops and Robbers 48
Genius 48
This life 48
The god and the matchgirl 49
No more Calcutta 50
World penance 50
Woman, hell's gatekeeper 52
The ant and the grasshopper 52
Jyotsna Karmakar  
My mother's face 52
To Grandmother, long after 2
Daughter 52
Plain cloth 53
Words have substitutes 53
Relationship 53
Calcutta 54
A dream for former class-mate Lili 55
Grasshopper 56
Muniya alarm 56
Mallika Sengupta  
Tree worship 57
Sin 57
Deven Thakur's son 58
Moth 58
With birds 58
Counsel 59
Pandu's desire for sons 60
Woman's voice 60
Peaks 61
In the fathers' world 61
Mandira Roy  
Song of departure 63
Or else in rhymes 63
After one life 64
When someone is killed 64
Waybread 64
A prohibited day 65
Death's countless hands 65
Weeping 66
The stone's mark 67
Love-creeper  
Rajlukshmee Debee 68
When poetry comes 68
Riddles 69
Dreams have no reins 69
The top 70
Tree 171
Wooden doll 71
Once-boiled love 72
Blue jewel of sorrow 72
Word-hostility 73
Beloved Calcutta  
RamaGhosh 75
Earthenware pitcher 75
Listen, young woman 76
Thirst for beauty 77
At the day's fag-end 77
Darkness 77
Concubine 78
Nature 78
Peaceful 79
Farewell 79
I am not the goddess of poetry  
Rupa Das Gupta 81
To you / 30 October '88 82
Raga Bageshri 8
Raga Malkosh 83
The wheat mill 84
To you 84
Pall-bearer 85
Wedding 85
Railway line 85
To Mother / 25th Baishakh 1401 86
Thirtieth wedding anniversary 86
   
Sanjukta Bandyopadhyay 87
A witch's fairytale 87
Awakening 88
Wife 88
Scar 89
Being a woman this time 89
Obsession 90
Medusa's head: one 90
Medusa's head: two 91
Medusa's head: three 92
Magic slate 92
Susmita Bhattacharya  
Mother to daughter 93
Daughter to mother 93
Khana 94
Mask 94
Bonsai 95
That blameless word 95
Sky, ocean, promises, lies 95
Krishnachura 96
Fairytale 96
Creation means 97
Sutapa Bhattacharya  
Fear 98
Santiniketan 98
Sita.c, to Earth 99
Not poetry 99
Adulteress 100
Bairagitala 100
Mother 101
Behula 101
Draupadi 102
In this alien land 102
Sutapa Sengupta  
Field flower 103
Grass widow 103
About the Babus 103
Devadasi 104
Death 105
Desire 105
Position 105
Negotiation 105
Buddha 105
Urmila Chakraborty  
Un-immersed 106
Load-shedding 106
Poetry 107
Seeing off 107
Three sisters 108
Strayed 110
Calcutta, Calcutta 110
Even so, moonlight 111
In Johannesburg, that morning 111
In a strange new Ramarajya 113
Vijaya Mukhopadhyay  
Forest Officer's diary 114
Poet-Priest 115
Looking at the leaves 115
Of God 115
Banyan and pipul 116
Crow 116
Subjugation 116
Bad dream 117
After a long time, in Calcutta 117
What makes poetry 118
Notes on the poets and on their poems 119

Sample Pages



Frequently Asked Questions
  • Q. What locations do you deliver to ?
    A. Exotic India delivers orders to all countries having diplomatic relations with India.
  • Q. Do you offer free shipping ?
    A. Exotic India offers free shipping on all orders of value of $30 USD or more.
  • Q. Can I return the book?
    A. All returns must be postmarked within seven (7) days of the delivery date. All returned items must be in new and unused condition, with all original tags and labels attached. To know more please view our return policy
  • Q. Do you offer express shipping ?
    A. Yes, we do have a chargeable express shipping facility available. You can select express shipping while checking out on the website.
  • Q. I accidentally entered wrong delivery address, can I change the address ?
    A. Delivery addresses can only be changed only incase the order has not been shipped yet. Incase of an address change, you can reach us at help@exoticindia.com
  • Q. How do I track my order ?
    A. You can track your orders simply entering your order number through here or through your past orders if you are signed in on the website.
  • Q. How can I cancel an order ?
    A. An order can only be cancelled if it has not been shipped. To cancel an order, kindly reach out to us through help@exoticindia.com.
Add a review
Have A Question

For privacy concerns, please view our Privacy Policy