English Poems of Khandakar Ashraf Hossain
Khandakar Ashraf Hossain is a professor of English at Dhaka University, and a well-known Bengali poet. He has published seven volumes of poetry, as well as translated into Bengali texts such as Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction. He is the editor of the long-running little magazine Ekobingsho for which he was awarded the West Bengal Little Magazine Award in 1998.
Khandakar Ashraf has now published a volume of English poems, On Behula's Raft: Selected Poems (Dhaka: writers.ink, January 2008). In the introduction he writes that his "fond wish is that the reader...take these poems as 'English versions' rather than as translations of their originals in Bangla." This is because "writers who 'translate' their own works...do not so much translate from one language to another as express the same ideas through two mediums."
As the poet himself points out, aside from the themes of love, "considerations of womanhood" and a tormented vision of Bangladesh, these poems collectively spanning a period of thirty years are discontinuous in mood and content. The poems tend to be self-consciously 'literary' when they echo and refer to canonical Bengali and English poets (even Khandakar's assertion of "same ideas in two mediums," for example, takes on Rabindranath's hue who wrote that his English Gitanjali was the result of his "urge to recapture through the medium of another language the feelings and sentiments..."). Khandakar's poems are freer when they employ the common rhythms of everyday life: "Do the bed, straighten the sky on the window/Spread last night's clothes on the hangers..."
The brooding sensibility present in the poems is certainly Bengali and Bangladeshi--as evidenced in the title poem where the mythological Behula's husband protests against being awakened to a present-day Bangladesh with its particular horrors:
A shameless villain of the town lured you to a deserted alley
and stuffed handkerchief under your blouse;
You made a diaphanous headscarf with my shroud-cloth;
laying me out naked on the sunlit pavement
begged for coppers and dimes from foreign traders.
The poems, however, are marred by Indian English-isms, with atonal registers and both British- and American-speak present ("guys" with "chums", for example, and in the above quote perhaps 'pennies and pice' might have been a tad more musical), awkward phrasing ("I must be avenged for thousand deaths and denigrations"), outdated poeticisms ("O reverend trees"), and redundancies ("bolster pillows").
Had the poet (and his troika of advisors) been more careful perhaps these infelicities could have been avoided.
The Stranger
A stranger is waiting at the door.
I haven't allowed him in. I said,
"Stand there, wait just a while;
I am so messy at the moment; can't open
The door for a guest so early; let me
Do the bed, straighten the sky on the window;
Spread last night's clothes on the hangers;
Let me change the oil-smeared pillow covers
And put the ones with the floral design—
Also I'd like to rinse this body of mine
And hang the heart on the line to dry.
Then you'll come, you and your dog
On a long leash. If you please, you can loll
Against the bolster pillows, or, if you prefer,
Sit on a lone chair, dangling your feet.
It can happen on the pink mattress of the floor—
Or on the wide verandah, near the kitchen sink.
You might go at it straight without foreplay:
After all, rape and death, if they can't be helped,
Should be enjoyed, philosophers say.
Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.
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