Monday, December 18, 2017

Hookah-faced Crave-all

As I have written before on this blog, Sukumar Ray was a multi-faceted genius who is primarily remembered for his Bengali nonsense poems for children. I cannot emphasize this multi-faceted aspect enough - much of what I know today about science, technology, engineering, mythology, geography, and the natural world, had its roots in Sukumar Ray's writings. All these years later, when I see a beaver building a dam in a documentary, or I see compressed air being used to transport messages through tubes, or I read an article about some underground fire burning for decades, or I see Thor and Loki fighting on the silver screen, my mind travels back to that large red book of my childhood, with the smirking green cat on the cover.



When it comes to translating something out of that book, however, I always choose one of the nonsense poems. I find translating nonsense particularly interesting, especially since I try to preserve the rhyme of the original poem. I try to do the same with Tagore's verse, but in case of Ray, since the tone is decidedly more frivolous and common Bengali words and their sounds play a very important role in conveying the mood, translating is somewhat more challenging. I'm not the first person to translate Ray's nonsense though. Acclaimed scholar Sukanta Chaudhuri translated many of these poems about twenty years ago and he did a fantastic job. But I still go ahead and translate some of these poems from time to time, just for the fun of it, and I make sure I don't look at Sukanta Chaudhuri's translation before I do. So here's one of my favorite poems, with the illustration by Sukumar Ray himself. [Coming to think of it, this is how I would expect one of my image classification algorithms to behave when a query image is equidistant from two reference images.]

Hookah-faced Crave-all

~Sukumar Ray

Hookah-faced Crave-all,                              lives in Bengal
His face holds no smile, have you seen?

No smile, why so?                            Anyone in the know?
To stay with him, have you ever been?
Shyamadas, uncle of his                     is the opium police,
He has no other relation---
Is that why alone,                          his face devoid of tone,
He sits with a sad expression?
Thumping his feet,                      he danced to every beat
His voice always full of glee,
All day he would sing                   Do-re-mi-Fa-Ting-ting,
An image of happiness was he.
Today during lunch,                      sitting on that branch,
He was eating smashed plantain.
Then what transpired?                   Did his uncle expire?
Or did his leg suffer a sprain?
Hookah-face yells back      "You're on the wrong track!"
"Don't you see the fix I'm in?"
"The way to swat flies                         the more I theorize,
My whole day passes worrying.
If it sits on the right,                    in my rule-book I write
This tail I use for the kill.
If the left it would choose,                  I'm not one to lose,
This other tail then fits the bill.
But if some naughty fly                 the centre-line does try
I can't imagine what I would do ---
How hard it is to choose              which tail should I use,
I don't have tails but these two."
(Translation by Sugata Banerji)

4 comments:

  1. আবোল তাবোল কবিতা অনুবাদে হাত দেওয়ার দুঃসাহস সকলকে সাজে না। তুমি সহজেই সে কাজে উত্তীর্ণ হতে পেরেছো। খুব উপভোগ করলাম।

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    Replies
    1. ধন্যবাদ কাকু, আমার প্রণাম নেবেন।

      Delete
  2. Exceptional translation!!!!! Ami just bhabte parchi na... in fact bangla kobitar sange chhando tao puro milche!!! Tumi oboshyoi egulo compile kore chhapte dao!

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