THE MARKIN-BANGALI: AN INTERVIEW WITH CAROLYNE WRIGHT, Part 1
- by By Kajal Mukhopadhyay and Mousumi Duttaray
 |
How
do Bengali women love in times of social transition and political
upheaval? How do Bengali women tell their truths of the heart
and mind
through the prism of their struggles for equality, opportunity, and
recognition
in a changing society? Award-winning
poet, translator, and scholar Carolyne Wright recently spoke to Urhalpool
about these questions, her travels in India and
Bangladesh, the challenges of writing and translating poetry, and her
time with
some of the Bengali language’s great female poets.
|
Urhalpool:
We are talking
about the
name, so let’s start with the name.
We read
the first three lines of the very last poem that you have here, “The
Majestic
Night.”
Carolyne
Wright:
“The Majestic Night,” right.
Urhalpool:
The
majestic
night, the dark of night,
The
thirst-allaying moonlight.
In
the forest of long grass, white flowers
bloom…
Now,
you chose the title of this book from this last poem.
What was the significance of the title?
I mean the use of both the word majestic and
the word night? To
underscore the
underlying love in the poems?
Carolyne
Wright:
Right. I
chose that name, and I
took it from Dilara Hafiz's poem because it seemed to me that this
would embody
in English… the sense, of course, of
love as being regarded as a nighttime—the lovers will meet
at night,
certainly in Bengali culture and Bengali society, especially even more
in
traditional society. I
remembered that
married people, especially newly married people, would not really spend
any
time together except at night. And
during the day, they almost—at least in the most genteel families—they
would
almost not speak or not have much interaction with each other because
it was
regarded as rather—it would be immodest to show affection out in
public, even
in front of other family members.
So, as
they say in the blues, nighttime is the right time to be with the one
you love—I’m
quoting some blues singer here--that would be the rural Southern
equivalent of
the Bengali sense of modesty: that
nighttime is when lovers are together and the fact that it is the
majestic
night, it’s a beautiful night, this is a night of triumph. And in the story of
Radha-Krishna, this is
the night in which they are reunited, in which they come back together
and have
resolved their conflicts with each other, at least for this particular
cycle. And since
the story is immortal and the god,
Lord Krishna, is immortal, I believe the story is cyclical: it occurs again and again
and again. So at
this point, when they are reunited, it
is of course when those time-bound
and
sequential literary forms, such as novels and movies and any kind work
of
literature, end on that climactic moment of resolution.
So that’s where I wanted to conclude the
book.
Urhalpool:
The next question is, as we move from epic time to the preface
of
the title, you mentioned “in a time of transition.”
What was this transitional element you were
referring to?
Carolyne
Wright:
Well, I was thinking of the society, of the cultural
transition that had
been going on in Bengali culture throughout the subcontinent, really
throughout
the world, but in the period of time in which the poets translated here
have
lived. The
eldest in this book are
poets like, you know, Radharani
Devi, who was
born in 1904, and Begum Sufia Kamal, born in 1911.
So, starting really at the end of the 19th
century and going up until basically pretty much the end of
the—Radharani was
born in 1904, and a few of the other writers I translated who are not
in this
book because they are prose writers were born at the end of the 19th
century. But
there’s been so much
change, technological change, social change in the Bengal Renaissance
of the 19th
century; women began moving out of purdah, they
began acquiring
education, they began working outside the home, holding jobs, and
moving from
arranged marriages to something more approaching making one's own
choice of a
marriage partner. I
remember reading
about how, in the Bengal Renaissance time, young men began to want
educated
women, educated wives. They
began to announce,
“I don't need a dowry.” So,
there has been a great deal of
movement and so that’s the sort of transition that I was thinking of. I was interested
in how these poems looked
back to the traditional cultural values, the traditional social norms for women, and
also, the more traditional
Bengali literature where those sorts of norms and values were part of
the
content of the writing and forward to now.
There has been a great deal of change, and the women are
now freer in
certain ways, so that was my thought in this particular collection. And I also tried to talk
about that in the
introduction.
Urhalpool:
I was going
through some of
the other volumes, and they are a very interesting collection of
compilations. What
inspired you to take
this journey, bring these collections of fine love poems from another
part of
the world?
Carolyne
Wright:
Oh yes, well, there are several ways to answer that
question. On the
practical level, the reason this
particular volume was published by White Pine Press in this series was
that I
had known Dennis Maloney--the editor of White Pine Press—I had known
him for
several years. I
had been in
correspondence with him, sent him other work of mine that had not been
accepted
for publication, but he and I had been seeing each other at various
writers'
conferences and the American Literary Translators Association
conference, and
at one point, he invited me to submit a small collection of my Bengali
translations for this series of pocket-sized books called “Companions
for the
Journey.” He said
it would be very
interesting to have this collection of love poems.
And so, he invited me and… I went through the
hundreds of translated poems that I had, from all the poets I had
translated
from both West Bengal and Bangladesh and thought, “What I’m going to do
is find
all of the poems that have to do with love and then organize them
following a
sort of narrative arc” that the volume traces.
This is a sort of trajectory
through the stages of love, first love, then marriage, separation,
aging,
death, and finally, the so supreme universal love… The romantic love
reflects
imperfectly what you could call divine love or universal love, and that
was
what I thought I would do. And
since I
had a limited number of poems that I could include, I wanted to make
the volume
as comprehensive as I could and I was careful to choose—and fortunately
it
worked out that of all the material that I had, of all the poems
translated, a
fair number of them are about love, and I was able to find enough that
sort of
traced this trajectory
from first
sight, first love, all the way through to the final poem, “The Majestic
Night,”
and also pretty much divided evenly between poets from West Bengal and
poets
from Bangladesh, so—
Urhalpool:
So, it was really
a huge
job, you brought a large number of poets, translators, and it was an
enormous
task, how did you manage it?
Carolyne
Wright:
Oh well, this is only part of it, you know, there’s the
big anthology…
my original project. When
I first went
to Kolkata more than twenty years ago to do this, I had proposed to the
Indo-US
Subcommission that gave me the fellowship that I wanted to do
collaborative
translations of the work of Bengali women poets and writers. So, because my grasp of
Bangla was still
pretty rudimentary, still pretty basic… I wanted to work
collaboratively with
Bengali literary people, native speakers of the language, and other
writers and
also to be able to meet all of the writers and poets whom I translated. So, when I went to Kolkata
for that purpose,
I had a one-year
fellowship, and I stayed on it
for two years, but it was a very generous amount of money for the time,
I was
amazed at the amount. It
was all paid in
rupees, and I lived very modestly; I stayed in the Ramakrishna Mission
Institute of Culture—
Urhalpool:
Golpark—
Carolyne
Wright:
In Golpark, right, and I did not stay on the expensive
air-conditioned
side. I stayed on
the Gariahat Road
side, so I had only
ceiling fans and, you know; I
could hear traffic noises and buses outside, and bus conductors
pounding on the
side of the buses, yelling “Gariahat, Gariahat, Rashbehari, Rashbehari,
Park
Street, Park Street” and I’d hear all the noise of the street life
outside. And
of course that was much more interesting.
I didn’t want to be insulated
from the real life of the country, and so I just worked for two years
on
translating every day, working with poets and writers and my
collaborators to
choose this material and then render it into English.
So I was working, din raat k’ore, day
and night; and then when I returned to this country—in fact, even while
I was
still there--people were saying to me, well you know, what about our
Bangladeshi poets? You
know … you need
to translate them too. And
I went, “Oh,
that’s another whole fellowship. That’s
another whole visa, another whole time.”
Because you can’t just, you know, if you are not from the
subcontinent,
if you are not a citizen of India or Bangladesh, you cannot move freely
back
and forth.
Urhalpool:
Yes, yes.
Carolyne
Wright:
It’s complicated because
you have to fly,
you can’t take a bus. So,
when I
returned to the US, I applied for a Fulbright Senior Research
Fellowship, and I
received it and I went to Dhaka and did the same thing.
Urhalpool:
Oh.
Actually now
things are a little bit
easier. Now we can
take a bus.
Carolyne
Wright:
Right, if the rivers are not flooded ! :)
Urhalpool:
So, you stayed in
Dhaka
also?
Carolyne
Wright:
Yes, I did the same thing.
I got
a year-long fellowship this time from the Fulbright Commission. It was a Fulbright Senior
Research
Fellowship, and again I stayed two years.
Urhalpool:
Talking in this
line, when
you were selecting or looking into these poems or working with
collaborators or
translators, did you have any criteria for selecting the poems in this
collection?
Carolyne
Wright:
Well, for this particular collection, yes.
Of all of the work, for example, that poem we
were just looking at by Dilara Hafiz’s, “The Majestic Night,” that’s a
love
poem. She has other
poems that have
other subject matters. About
exploited
women and her own girlhood, etc. So…
for
this collection, I chose the poems that had to do with love. And when I had
the whole manuscript put
together, I submitted that, I mean work by Nabaneeta Deb Sen, I chose
poems; she
has a lot of love poems because that is more of her main subject. Interestingly enough that
is also that is
also one of the subjects for Tasleema Nasrin, the
very controversial Taslima Nasrin.
I
was able to choose quite a lot of poems from them, and then once I
submitted a
manuscript to Dennis Maloney, the editor, he suggested… that I remove a
couple
of poems that he didn’t particularly care for as much, or a couple of
that he thought were
perhaps too obscure for non-Bengali readers. So I removed
a
few poems, substituted a few others that I also had, and I tried to
make sure
that almost every poet I translated was represented in this collection
by at
least one poem. The
only person whose
work I did not translate--you know, I did not work with that poet
herself and with
my translator collaborators--was Ketaki Kushari Dyson, who lives in
England and
really does her own translation. I
mean,
what does one call a poem if you are the poet and you have written it
in one
language, and then you write it again in a second language, in another
language? Is that a
translation or is
that something else? I
started jokingly
to call it translanguafication because it’s not
exactly
translation: the
poet writing her poem
again in another language can
make it a new
poem, she can give it the same title and make it somewhat different in
the
other language if she wishes. A
translator does not have that permission, the translator has to be as
responsible to the original language as possible.
Urhalpool:
Yes, like the
literal
translation, but when the poet writes her own translation, it’s kind of
a new
poem coming out of it.
Carolyne
Wright:
Right, right, Ketakidi can do that, and so her poem “When
There Was
Land”--that was her own translation.
I
guess we just called a translation--she called it translated by
herself. She’d sent
me a number of her poems, which I
had had for some time, and this was the one chosen for this particular
anthology. But these fifty poems here,
represent… maybe about
one-tenth of the work that I have
translated from Bangla…
Urhalpool:
So can we see
many more
volumes to come?
Carolyne
Wright: I
hope so! And you
know there have been two other volumes already, two individual
collections. The
first one to come out—and that was
because of her celebrity or notoriety at that time—was the volume of
poems by
Taslima Nasrin, which was called The Game in Reverse.
Urhalpool:
Okay, yes, yes,
yes, yes.
Carolyne
Wright:
That came out from
George Braziller in
1995. It’s now out
of print and Dennis
Maloney of White Pine is very keen on… doing a new edition from White
Pine and
maybe including some of Taslima's—those Nirbachito
(Selected) Columns that
won her the Ananda Puraskar and more or less
launched her on her literary career.
And
so, that’s something that may come out at some point.
With this current economic situation, it’s
kind of, what should I say? It’s
a bit
difficult to know. I
think a lot of
these presses are cutting back on their numbers of titles per year, so
Dennis
said to me, the last time I saw him a few weeks ago in Chicago, “Well,
you
know, don’t rush to contact Braziller about making certain that I have
the
rights to do a whole new edition with a new publisher.” I
do
not think Braziller is going to reissue that particular collection. But that collection of
Taslima's poems, The
Game in Reverse, that was the first work of hers that was
available in
English worldwide. At
that time, 1994
and early 1995, I was getting a lot of calls from journalists and
interviewers,
asking about Taslima, asking for samples of the writing that had gained
her
such notoriety, so Braziller
put
that collection out pretty quickly.
In
fact, I had to translate more of them--I had had about twenty of her
poems
translated when I left Bangladesh, and then when this major case, human
rights
case happened for her, I had to translate several more, so there are
about
forty some in that book. And
then
following year, in 1996, a volume came out from Calyx Publishers, Calyx
Books,
of the poetry of Anuradha Mahapatra, called Another Spring,
Darkness.
Urhalpool:
So, those were
not like the
theme of love per se?
Carolyne
Wright:
No, no, those were individual collections of poems by
those two
poets. So, kind of
like a volume; for
example, William Radice did that volume of selected longer poems of
Rabindranath—
Urhalpool:
Rabindranath
Tagore—
Carolyne
Wright:
Right, and so the poems covered many different subjects. And so I have other
individual collections by
other poets like Nabaneeta and Bijaya Mukhopadhyay, as well as other Bangladeshi poets. I’d like to do a whole book
of the poems of
Ruby Rahman, but I’m
not sure at this
point… rather than doing individual collections, maybe to do
collections of,
let’s say, three poets together… I
was
thinking of doing Bijaya, Nabaneeta and Kabita Singha.
Urhalpool:
Yes, because
they’re
contemporary also.
Carolyne
Wright:
Yeah, and I would be interested in doing another one with
Sanjukta Bandyopadhyay,
Mallika Sengupta, and somebody else.
Urhalpool:
And I think
Mandakranta
would be a good choice. Mandakranta
is a
little younger; she kind of followed Mallika Sengupta, and you could
choose
Dabarati and Mallika Sengupta along with her.
Carolyne
Wright:
Right, right, right.
I’ll get
Debarati, Debarati Mitra? She’s
more of
the generation of Kabitadi and Nabaneeta and Bijaya.
Urhalpool:
Yeah, yeah, a
little
younger, but almost the same.
Carolyne
Wright:
Yeah, a little younger, yeah,
She
was born in 1946, and I’m thinking about the generational concerns and
the use
of language and everything--these do change, and of course that’s another aspect of the
business of
translation, that the younger poets have grown up in a different era—
Urhalpool:
Yeah and
experiences also—
Carolyne
Wright:
Right, right. So
I think that’s
kind of fun… Now,
is Mandakranta in New
York?
Urhalpool:
No, she is from
Calcutta.
Carolyne
Wright:
Oh! She’s living in Calcutta?
Urhalpool:
Yes, she’s living
in
Calcutta.
Carolyne
Wright:
Okay, okay, because my challenge at the moment is getting
there. You
know, I had those fellowships etc., but
now I’m married, and I don’t go away for a year or two years.
Urhalpool:
No, but this, the
internet
or video conferencing or audio conferencing, has become much cheaper
and easier
also.
Carolyne
Wright:
Right, that would be a possibility.
Or even just working through email.
So you know, I have this feeling… life is long, I hope,
that I’ll be
able to all of this work.
The final,
the big volume of course would be the big authoritative anthology that
would
include a generous selection of all of the poets I’ve translated, you
know, the
eldest being Radharanidi and the youngest being maybe Mandakranta...
Urhalpool:
Yes.
Carolyne
Wright:
And there are other poets, Apabrita Lahiri, I didn’t
translate because
she was just starting to come along and publish in the, I think, early
1990s. And I know
Anuradha had talked
about her, recommended that she be someone I should translate, but I
think that
came right toward the end of my time in Kolkata, and then I was in
Dhaka, focusing
on the Bangladeshi women. And
I’m just,
as I would say, I’m just one person trying to encompass this whole huge
literary movement. Yet
it’s only one
language, and all
those languages of the
subcontinent and of the world. Yet
I
focus only on writing by women,
and I know the
men have very felt short-changed.
Urhalpool:
Definitely.
Carolyne
Wright:
Several men have said, “Oh! You know, you really should be
translating
us.” And I said,
“You know, we need a
male Carolyne.” We
need someone who will
be interested in focusing
on the wide
range of male poets as well, but my reason of course for choosing the
women
poets is that I am a woman. And
I was so
interested in women's experiences as expressed and described and as
they can be
perceived in the writing by women.
So,
that’s why. And it
was also easier to
approach women.
Urhalpool:
I think
women also have seen the most dramatic change in this century or even
quarter
of a century.
Carolyne
Wright:
Right, right, and I think embodied in the life of
Radharani Devi or
somebody like Sufia Kamal… You
know, Sufia-amma
was born in purdah, her first husband was a cousin, and she was married to
him at age eleven. That
enabled her to get out of the house, out
of her parents’ house—well, her mother’s house because
her father had wandered
off or gone off on a
pilgrimage and never returned when she was quite small.
But she married her first husband, by the
name of Hossain.
They went to Kolkata, and she began—he was
very encouraging and
very supportive of her—going out and doing volunteer work and social
work with
women. She met
Gandhi, and had to dress
as a Hindu wife in order to meet him
at that
point, she had to put
on the sindoor and
the pala, sankha, and tie the sari the correct way
for a married Hindu
woman. And of
course she went up to
Gandhi, and it did not matter to him--he said to
her whatever he said to her, sister or daughter whatever, and what is
your
name? And
she told him her real Muslim
name and he said, “A-ha! I
understand,” but he gave her his blessing. She
was a real
social reformer and very much working with women, especially
the welfare of women.
Urhalpool:
For women's
education—
Carolyne
Wright:
Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely, and these are wonderful,
wonderful
examples of how much transformation took place in the lives of women at
that
time.
Urhalpool:
We actually
are excited
because, in a way, you have answered so many questions that we wanted
to ask
you. At
this point I wanted to
tell you we have a few more questions that go beyond the book, general
questions—I hope you have time.
Carolyne
Wright:
Oh! Yes,
I have, I have time.
Urhalpool:
Did you meet
Sufia Kamal?
Carolyne
Wright:
Yes, I did meet Sufia Kamal. I used to see
her quite frequently in
Dhaka, and of course I also know her son, I mean both sons—Bhaiya, her
elder
son, I don’t recall his actual name—he
still
lives in the family house there; and her elder daughter,
who has a tea plantation in northwest Bengal, northern Bangladesh, and
then her
younger daughter, Saeeda, the
painter. She
came to the US once and had a
fellowship, a residency fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center--I met
her
there.
Urhalpool:
Wow!
Carolyne
Wright:
It was amazing. It
was same month[s]
that I was there. So,
we had a wonderful
time together, you know, taking walks some afternoons and speaking in
Bengali
about life back in Dhaka, about Amma and the family. Amma’s
son Sajed also drove up
to visit—in fact he drove his sister to and from the VSC—he’s the one I had seen most
frequently because when I
came back from Bangladesh, I had applied for a fellowship at the
Bunting
Institute at Radcliffe College, so I was there in the Boston area the
year
after my two years in Bangladesh, and there I met Sufia’s son Sajed and
his
wife Rosie who is American and their son.
So, I was there in the Boston area for five years and
spent quite a bit
of time with Sajed and his family. We
worked together on the translations of his mother’s poetry. And occasionally, when I
was over there, they
would call Sufia Amma and we would talk briefly on
the phone—that was
totally lovely to be able to talk with her.
Urhalpool:
The Sakhawat
Memorial
School in Kolkata is one of the first schools for Muslim women; that
was, I
think, because of Sufia Kamal, Begum Sufia Kamal.
Carolyne
Wright:
Right, right, and she was also inspired by Begum Rokeya.
Urhalpool:
Yeah.
Carolyne
Wright:
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain.
Urhalpool:
Yeah, yeah.
Carolyne
Wright:
So, there was a great deal of influence there, you know,
because Sufia
met Begum Rokeya as a girl.
Urhalpool:
Before
we move to some general questions, just one last thing about Majestic
Nights.
Carolyne
Wright:
Yes?
Urhalpool:
Whom do you wish
you had
included in your book, but for some reason ended up leaving out on the
cutting
table?
Carolyne
Wright:
Ah! Oh! You mean which poems or which poets?
Urhalpool:
Both. We
would like to know the
poets who were not
included, but who, in your thoughts, might have been interesting
additions to
this book?
Carolyne
Wright:
Well, if there’s another edition, I would probably want to
include some
work by Qazi Rosie. I
tried to
include—there were a few other Bangladeshi poets,
another one I
translated named Jahanara Arzoo, an older poet who had some interesting
poems,
but that was one poem that Dennis Maloney suggested not to include. And probably some of the
younger people whom
I didn’t really get to translate because they had come along after
that, five
years after the time when I was doing most of the initial collection of
material and then most of the initial translations between1986 and
1991, and of
course, some more of Taslima's poetry after that.
In terms of this particular collection, I’m
pretty satisfied with it, in terms of its length and scope. But of course, I’m
thinking ahead now to the
big anthology, the really big one; and the working title of that is A
Bouquet of Roses on the Burning Ground.
Urhalpool:
Wow!
Yes, you mentioned that somewhere in the back
of the book.
Carolyne
Wright:
Yeah, yeah, and that anthology, it’s going to be a couple
of years more
for several logistical reasons--one of which is time, and the other is
that Majestic
Nights is just out and I would not want another book to
compete with
it. But I also have
to just assemble
it--I mean, I’ve got all this work assembled, but need to decide on the
final
selection of poems for each poet, and then write the introduction, etc. I actually have done most
of that, I could
put it together pretty quickly, but I think I am just going to wait a
little
while. Oh, and I
did find the Majestic
Night poem by Dilara Hafiz--it’s called “Jomokalo Raat.”
Urhalpool:
“Jomkalo Raat.”
That’s really nice.
Carolyne
Wright:
Yeah. So
that’s “Jomokalo
raat, raater kalo,” I can read this here, “Trishahoron,
chander aalo,
kashbone phul sada,” then “birohalaye achen radha,”
right? Yeah,
I have to practice this a bit. But
what I have is this--a rather dark
photocopy of the poem from when it appeared in a magazine. I do not have it in one of
her books. In fact,
I even have a question here written
in my Bangla handwriting, “Kon patrikai ei kobita chapa
hoyechilo?” What
magazine was this poem published
in? And what do I
have written here, dainik…
oh! Dainik
Desh. It
was originally published by Dainik Desh
in Bangladesh.
Urhalpool:
Bangladesh, Dhaka.
Carolyne
Wright:
Somebody has handwritten and then crossed it out, “The
night is pitch
black and the—” and that’s the end of it.
And then I started to write, “Radha is pining alone in
wait,” etc. And
so, that’s where there’s the birohalaya
aachen Radha, the wonderful word biroho—we
do not have a word like
that in English.
Urhalpool:
English, yes,
like there
are some words which are somewhat difficult, like abhiman,
that’s
another word.
Carolyne
Wright: Abhiman,
there is no word for abhiman, although that state
of emotion exists in
English. I could
tell you, I could name
people with whom I am in a state of abhiman !! But you know, I think what
has to happen is
Bengali-Americans--you know, Bengalis living in this country--need to
introduce
the concepts embodied in these terms.
I
include myself because I have been called an
“American Bengali” by one of my wonderful poets who passed away (I was
so sorry
about this)--Nasima Sultana who was a journalist and a poet and married
to
another journalist. They
were a modern
couple, she was even two years older than he was—or is.
But then she—after I departed Bangladesh, I
was in touch with them, not via e-mail, they didn’t really have e-mail
until
later—but she got cancer and died in 1997.
And I was so sorry about that because they were sweet
couple, they
worked together, and they were happy together.
I used to go over to their house and sit and talk, and
other poets would
come over, and we had a wonderful time.
But she had called me, she had interviewed me just before
I was
departing Bangladesh and the title of the article about it was “Bidai,
Markin
Bangali Carolyne.” Oh!
I cried when I
saw that… Bidai… you know—
Urhalpool:
Farewell—
Carolyne
Wright:
Yes, it was farewell.
It was very
sad, you know, I didn’t realize it would be a bidai from
her, that I
wouldn’t see her anymore. So,
that was
very sad. And of
course Sufia Kamal has
passed away and a few of the other poets… I was surprised in a few
cases, they
did not seem—Kabita Sinha passed away in Boston when she was visiting
her
daughter. I used to
see her a lot in
Boston. In fact, we
worked together on
more translations of her work and on some of the Taslima columns that I
needed
to finish. And then
Farida Sarkar passed
away. In fact, it
was Farida who had
first urged me to translate Taslima Nasrin and sort of arranged for
Taslima to
come and meet me. So,
it was all very
interesting how all of that happened.
And
I did meet Radharani Devi also. I
met
her in Nabaneeta's house—
Urhalpool:
Bhalobasha.
Carolyne
Wright:
Yes, Bhalobasha. What
a great house!
Urhalpool:
A great
house, yeah.
Carolyne
Wright:
Great, tall house. In
fact,
Nabaneeta, if you ring the doorbell—I don’t know if you’ve been
there—she pulls
on this cord, this sort of a wire, and it pulls the door open and it’s
almost
like a, you know, one of those scary movies where the door opens: rrrrreeee…
Urhalpool:
Screeching sounds.
Carolyne
Wright:
And nobody’s there and you hear Nabaneeta's voice from the
top of the
stairs— “Opore ashun, upore ashun,” you know: Come on up!--that was the Urhalpool
of
the day, you know!
Urhalpool:
Regarding Kabita
Sinha, I
referred to her, I think, as the most wonderful poet that inspired me. Like “Iswarke Eve,” that Aami
Prathama,
“I was the first.”
Carolyne
Wright:
Oh! Yeah, yeah, “Iswarke Eve,” yeah, yeah, that’s a very
bold poem.
Urhalpool:
Bold poem, yes.
Carolyne
Wright: I
really loved it, and it was fun to read that at the reading at the
Bowery.
Urhalpool:
The Bowery Poetry
Club,
yes.
Carolyne
Wright:
Right. Because
I preferred to
read it in Bangla, and I wanted to read it with some of the same
emphasis that
she had, so I think I sort of did.
I’m
not as tall as she was and not as forthright, but I just tried to read
it with
her tone of boldness.
Urhalpool:
Do you find there’s any
connection between
the US poets as well as poets from West Bengal or Bangladesh, a kind of
connection during this time?
Carolyne
Wright:
In what sense of connection?
That people were in communication with each other? Or the poetry?
Urhalpool:
The poetry.
Because I think that
Nabaneetadi, Kabitadi,
and all of these, Debarati Mitra, they were also from the 60s and when
the
movement, feminist movement of the 60s took place—
Carolyne
Wright:
Right, absolutely. Oh! Yeah.
I think there are a lot of common themes in the poetry of
women from…
Bengal and from the West. I
think that
the feminist movement actually moved around the world quite quickly,
and this
was before—things were not globalized as they are now, but
nevertheless, there
were enough, enough news media outlets and literature being published
and
people becoming aware, and you know, a lot of travel back and forth,
people coming
from the West to India and Bangladesh and people from India and
Bangladesh
going to the West. And
you know, there
was a lot of immigration at that point also from there to the West, and
so a
lot of communication back and forth.
I
think that that had influence on, certainly on the subject matter of a
lot of
writing as people's, as the circumstances of lives changed, the subject
matter
of what writers write about also will transform.
And I think that that started earlier with
Radharani and with Sufia Kamal--less so with Sufia Kamal--but you know,
writing
in this, these words of urban colloquial Bangla still in rhyming
couplets, of
Radharani’s “Aparajita” persona, I think that’s just amazing. And Sufia Kamal, of
course, writing about
Bangladesh's struggles for freedom, and all of the work that she did
outside of
the house and then working with people, resisting the soldiers from
Pakistan,
etc. And it was
amazing how that kind of
experience transformed their subject matter, but what was interesting
with Sufia
Kamal is that many of her poems are still written in rather traditional
form,
actually rather Persian form, and of course her first language actually
was
Urdu, although she wrote in Bangla…
Of
course the younger poets are much more influenced by this sort of
global youth
culture. I
think that there is a lot
more Western influence or access to the West now, and there is access
to the
rest of the world for poets of the so-called West.
Urhalpool:
Some of the
Western women
poets of the era that you have covered—from Radharani to, I think, who
was the
last, Taslima—
Carolyne
Wright:
The youngest was Taslima—
Urhalpool:
So, could you
name some of
the poets from the West who wrote about women's feelings, about love,
even here
also, the women came out and started to have their own identities in
the later
part of this century?
Carolyne
Wright:
Oh yes… I think there are a great number of common
semantic threads
through poetry written by women here, let’s say in the US or other
English-speaking countries and the poetry coming out of West Bengal and
Bangladesh. And I
think also that there
has been a lot of formal exploration moving from free verse to poetry
in
form… Much of this
poetry in Majestic
Nights is in fairly free verse.
I
think there are some poems that pay attention to syllable
counts and things that are
much more prevalent as formal devices in Bangla than in English—I know
Anuradha
does that at times—but I think a lot of the work is free verse. Some of it is formal--one
poet I think of is
Mallika Sengupta. Mallika
has written
quite a lot of poetry in form, which is interesting because at that
time there
was not so much poetry being written in form, and she was making use of
Western
forms like the sonnet, which is really interesting; it’s very
interesting to
try to translate a sonnet from Bangla to English.
Urhalpool:
Yes, it’s very
difficult.
Carolyne
Wright:
And it’s so much easier to rhyme in Bangla. And I think this “Jomkalo Raat” by Dilara
Hafiz--this poem is
in form, I just looked at it, it’s all rhyming.
I haven’t really studied to see if it has a syllable
count, but it
probably does. This
“raat kalo, alo
sadha, radha, chiranjani” and then “prem kahini,
kobi, chobi”
etc. She’s got
rhyming couplets--it’s
easier to do that in Bengali. It
may not
sound distinctive to rhyme in Bengali just because it’s easier to do
than… in
English. I can’t
say because I can only
read these poems from my own experience and not if I could magically
turn
myself into a Bangali kobi.
And
then read these poems with that whole set of memories and experiences
and
education, learning everything, reading Sahoj Path as a three-year-old,
etc. Going through
the whole educational
system and then reading these poems and how would they seem to me? “Oh, this is amazing, a
poem written in
form!” Or would it
be just be, “Oh, yes,
yes, this is a good way to do this.”?
Anyway, so those are my thoughts about the fact that it’s easier to
rhyme in Bangla than
it is in English. So
I think there’s
been—back to the original question—I think that there seems to be this
sort of zeitgeist
(a German word for Spirit of the Times) that runs through
literary culture
as well as all other aspects of the culture and the sorts of concerns
that
people have. In
this case the concerns
that women have in one part of the world, concerns that women are
facing
everywhere--I think that certainly is the case between the women who
write in
Bangla and the women who are writing in English.
Part
2 of our interview with Carolyne Wright will appear in the next issue
of Urhalpool.
