By IANS
Kolkata : "Pagli Tomar Sange" (Crazy woman with you), a collection of poems that fetched celebrated Bengali poet Joy Goswami the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2001, is set to reach global readers thanks to its English translation.
Translation has often been criticised as tarnishing the original value of literary works but "Part Autobiography", a collection of 25 translated works of Joy Goswami, may change people's opinions.
Academician Swapan Chakraborty recently launched "Part Autobiography", published by New Delhi-based Worldview Books, at the Oxford Bookstore here.
Chakraborty said the process of translation made "the strange familiar, and the familiar strange".
The book launch was followed by a reading of the poems, first in Bengali by Joy Goswami himself and then in English by the translators themselves.
Chitralekha Bose, Probir Ghosh, Indrani Ghosh, Carolyn Brown, Skye Levin and Prasenjit Gupta have translated the poems.
"This is the very first work published in translation spanning my writing over 24 years between 1983 and 2007. The translators selected some of the poems while I selected others.
"I believe the translators have stayed loyal to the original work but at the same time put their own emotions into it. They have created poems that can be viewed as independent creations," Goswami told IANS.
Goswami wrote his first poem at the age of 13. It was about an old ceiling fan at his home in Ranaghat near Kolkata. At 19, his first few poems were published simultaneously in three local magazines. Today, he is one of Bengal's most well known poets.
Although his mother was the headmistress of a school, Goswami is a school dropout. But then he has never walked the trodden path or stuck to the rulebook. He enjoys a cult following owing to his sensitive response to contemporary times.
Noted Bengali recitation artist and actress Bijoylakshmi Burman adapted his long prose poem, Jara Brishtitey Bhijechhilo (Those who got wet in the rain) into an extremely successful solo play. Well-known director Anjan Das has now made it into a film.