Poetry at the Heart of the Nation, the journal of the Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library (IPPL), in its previous avatar was published in pdf form and uploaded to the IPPL website. While throughout the pandemic we, at IPPL, have been using poetry to stay connected, work on the Journal had been held up for various reasons. We lost Dr Sutapa Chaudhuri to Covid 19 last year. Sutapa Chaudhuri helmed the journal and she had been the associate editor of the previous two issues of the journal. She was a member of the Executive Council of IPPL and worked relentlessly for the cause of poetry. We also lost eminent poet Shri Sankha Ghosh last year, to Covid 19. Shri Ghosh was the President of the Advisory Board of IPPL.
All these losses have affected us badly. Like everyone else, living through the pandemic, we have been trying to find ways and means to hold on. There has been a new editorial team now, with all the executive body members of IPPL being part of it. Professor Sanjukta Dasgupta is at the helm of it all, as she had been before, as our Chief Editor. We now have two Associate editors, both of whom had been members of the Journal committee earlier too.
The journal takes its name from what our founder, Professor Bashabi Fraser CBE, had noted about what the purpose of IPPL ought to be. IPPL strives to take “Poetry to the heart of the nation.” We had been toying with the idea of having an online journal with a dedicated url for quite some time and in 2022 we were finally able to work on it. The journal is now online and the two earlier issues that were available on the IPPL website (www.ipplkolkatawordpress.com) are now available on the journal website (in slightly modified form). The Journal was meant to be open to contributions to members alone, with contributions from our Advisory Board members as well. A look at the last two issues will bear out to this. The current issue of the journal is a deviation from this practice.
In February 2020, before the pandemic took over our lives and made things so difficult and different, Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library (IPPL) had organized a One Day Translation Workshop at the ICCR Library in Kolkata. This was the first time that IPPL organized such an event, a day long one (IPPL events are usually held in the evenings at the ICCR Kolkata Library). The workshop was held in collaboration with Kolkata Translator’s Forum (KTF) with three coordinators, Nishi Pulugurtha, Nabanita Sengupta and Tanmay Bir. A large number of translators and people interested in translation responded to the call for participation. The workshop had participants not just from Kolkata and its vicinity, but from various parts of West Bengal and also from other states.
At the end of the workshop we had decided that translations that emanated from this workshop would eventually become part of an IPPL Journal issue. With that in mind, mentors of each language group got in touch, sometime last year, with the translators and several of them responded. This issue of the IPPL journal consists of the several translations from Bengali, Hindi, Spanish, into English, from Spanish to Bengali, from English and Maithili to Bengali and from Punjabi to Hindi as well.
Translation has emerged as an important literary and cultural practice in the current scenario. There has been a growing desire and need to understand various languages and cultures. In the post-globalised world, and with growing internationalism, translation has come to occupy the position of a prominent literary activity. This was one of the key thoughts behind organizing the translation workshop in 2020. The idea of the workshop was to showcase the richness and diversity of the languages while at the same time to promote a dialogue between them. The workshop was addressed by eminent scholars and translators like Ramkumar Mukhopadhyay, Joya Mitra, Siddhartha Maity, and Anjum Katyal where each of them deliberated upon the importance of translation in contemporary society and the significance of holding such translation workshops. At the end of the workshop, we had some very fine translated poems with us and most of them find a place in this issue of the journal.
This issue of the journal is a multilingual one as already mentioned. The contributors in this issue are some of the participants of the translation workshop held in 2020, the various language mentors and the coordinators of the workshop. Though as editors and as coordinators of the workshop we had tried to reach out to each and every participant, the two difficult years in between has proved to be a deterrent. This issue publishes the work of all those who kept in touch or responded to our call.
The journal comprises poems ranging across time and space, encompassing a diverse literary tradition. While Averi Saha translates some portions from the songs of Lalan Fakir, the nineteenth century Bengali mystic poet, Saptaparna Roy and Jemima Nasrin bring us the translation of an important nineteenth century poet, Swarnakumari Debi and Kamini Roy respectively. Contemporary Bengali poets like Subodh Sarkar, Ranojit Das, Krishna Basu, Mandakranta Sen and Sudhangshu Ranjan Saha have been translated into English by Sukanya Paul, Ishani Paul Chowdhury, Kausambi Patra and Nishi Pulugurtha. Trishna Basak’s Bengali translation from Maithili and Rawel Pushp’s Punjabi to Hindi translation adds to the linguistic variety of the journal. Jaya Choudhury adds an international dimension by translating a poem by a Chilean poet from Spanish to Bengali and translating her own Bengali poem into Spanish. Tanmay Bir’s Bengali poem finds a place in the journal in Hindi translation. Rabindranath Tagore, the poet who still remains at the heart of our poetic consciousness is represented in the journal through Issani Paul Chowdhury’s translation of his poem, ‘Bahoo’. Iconic English poets like William Shakespeare, Robert Frost, and Edward Thomas have been translated into Bengali by Gazi Nishad, Suptashree Shome and Suparna Mondal respectively. Several Hindi poets have been translated into English too. Basudhara Roy’s translation of two poems by Leeladhar Mandloi, Sumit Ray’s translation of poems by Yatish, Sudeshna Chakraborty’s translation of Anamika’s poems, Nikita Parik’s translations of Suryakant Tripathi Nirala and Madhu Sriwastav’s translation of Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena bring a variegated collection of Hindi poems for English readers. IPPL pays tribute to the first president of its advisory board committee and eminent poet Sankha Ghosh through Anita Agnihotri’s poem on the late poet’s birthday, translated by Nabanita Sengupta. The multiplicity of language in this issue reminds us of the rich linguistic tradition and the need for interconnectedness. We hope that such diverse linguistic presentations will find readers across languages and contribute to a meaningful cultural exchange. We are thankful to all the participants, the mentors — Late Sutapa Chaudhuri, Tania Chakravertty, Madhu Sriwastav, Trishna Basak, Jaya Chaudhury, Rawel Pushp, and co-coordinator of the workshop Tanmay Bir. Saptaparna Roy deserves a special mention for stepping into the role of a mentor at a very short notice, a space left empty with the untimely passing away of Sutapa Chaudhuri. We are also grateful to our advisory committee members and the Executive Council of the Intercultural Poetry and Performance library for their constant support. Special gratitude to Sanjukta Dasgupta, President IPPL, and Jaydeep Sarangi, Vice President, IPPL for their encouragement and guidance. We hope these poems would find readers crossing beyond the barriers of languages and take poetry to the heart of not just nation, but the world.
- Nishi Pulugurtha
- Nabanita Sengupta