Eastern Voices in a Norton Anthology of poetry

This is a fat book. 734 pages.
The new Norton anthology of poems, titled Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond published in April of this year casts a wide net. It consists of over 400 poets from 61 countries and/or territories ranging from Afghanistan to Oman, from Sudan to Korea, as well as in the diaspora in Australia, Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
It has been edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, all of them fairly well-known poets themselves. Tina Chang and Ravi Shankar, as is common among American poets, are also academics, while Nathalie Handal is active in the theatre. In the Preface the editors say that this anthology was born out of despair. In the wake of 9/11, Tina Chang and Ravi Shankar were confronted anew with their hyphenated identities in America, "How could we respond to the destruction and unjust loss of human lives while protesting the one-sided and flattened view of the East being showcased in the media? What was the vantage point we could arrive at in order to respond on a human level, to generate articulate dialogue, conversations that did not fall into the rhetorical fallacies of us vs. them?" An answer was to join forces with Nathalie Handal, who had just then published "the groundbreaking anthology The Poetry of Arab Women and was herself of Arab descent" and bring out an anthology of poetry that would reflect "an alternate vision of the new century" consisting of "voices converg(ing) in the dream of shared utterance."
There is a practical side to this collection, too, as explained by Carolyn Forche, another well-known American poet, in her elegantly written Preface. Even through the 1980s, she says, "there were very few anthologies of international poetry available in the United States", and that this new Norton anthology therefore is one that very much will fill the gap. She praises it as "imaginatively constructed and…sweeping…wherein we read through poetry unknown to us one poem at a time, through nine realms of human experience: childhood, selfhood, experimentation, oppression, mystery, war, homeland and exile, spiritual life, love and sexuality."
What she is referring to is the anthology's structure, with the poems organized not in the conventional anthology manner of alphabetical listing, or by country and region, but grouped into nine sections according to certain common themes or threads running through them, allowing them "to speak to each other." The title of each of these sections (Slips and Atmospherics, or Buffaloes Under Dark Water, etc.) is a line from a poem within that section. Each of these nine sections also is headed with a personal essay by one of the three editors. The latter is a device that may work for some, while others may find it a little too intrusive, the editorial presence a little too heavy.
It is natural that most of the poems are translations, though it does contain, especially in the case of the Indian poets and those living in the diaspora, original English language poems. Bangladesh is represented by ten poets through translations, among them Kazi Nazrul Islam, Rafiq Azad, Syed Shamsul Haq, Al Mahmud, Shamsur Rahman, Taslima Nasrine and Mohammed Rafiq. It is doubtful whether the editors were aware of, or made aware of, the fact that poems are written in the original English by Bangladeshis, which is a major oversight. The translations, excepting the ones of Mohammed Rafique (reproduced here), Taslima Nasrine, and Syed Shamsul Haq, are not particularly satisfying. In Al Mahmud's poem 'Deathsleep', the lines -
My wife though, didn't want
To reach any decisions about me
The reliance that grows out of living together fifty years
She does not have it.
- which, even allowing for the fact that, in Carolyn Forche's words, when considering "poetry in translation, we consider the transmission of sensibility and the expressivity of content rather than the music, cadence, sound and wordplay"-- read like just plain bad prose. If I was Al Mahmud, I would wince and never open this anthology again.
Another example is Rafiq Azad's famous poem 'Bhaat day, Haramjada'. Here the title is 'Give me Bhaat, Bastard', which in the Norton anthology looks ludicrous. One knows that the term 'bhaat' has no equivalent in English, and that the translated 'cooked rice' is too cumbersome for poetry, and that just plain 'rice' does not quite convey the full Bengali meaning. Still, a compromise should have been made. After all, the word 'bhaat' here is a synecdoche, a figure of speech in which the part stands for the whole, as in the prayer "Give us this day our daily bread", where 'bread' stands not just for bread alone but for the meals taken each day. So too 'bhaat' here stands not for literally cooked rice, but also for food. And so here 'rice' or 'food' or some imaginative variation thereof could have been done instead of this…this…well, words fail me! To be shortly followed by these two dead lines in the body of the poem:
Given twice a day two fist-full meals,
demand comes for nothing else
If I was Rafiq Azad, I too would join Al Mahmud in wincing and never open the damn thing again. But this was Norton's choice, and they have to live with it.
The range of poems and poets here is admittedly enormous, and it'll take weeks, months, to really go through the poems and poets, and come to know them. Or arrive at any definitive conclusion about the anthology as a whole. What one can say at this point is that nearly all of them are major poets within their cultures and lands, and it really is a privilege that Norton is extending to us by providing such easy access to such a multiplicity of voices and bards. The book is beautifully produced, with a lovely, clear font and spacious layout accompanied by a thorough indexing of poets, languages, and countries. Wisely enough, it was published as a paperback, which lowers the burden of cost and makes for ease of carry.
But (and there's always a but!) there's one thing that needs be said, and here I have to be careful to try and get it right. It is the persistent feeling that some of the products of the diaspora poets, especially those living in the United States, come across as artificial and contrived. It is a condition akin to what Timothy Brennan labeled as the "new cosmopolitan writing" in the context of his critique of the postcolonial critical industry (At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now), where he points out that postcolonial literary studies, criticism and readings have begun to spawn a new literary genre (upsetting the natural process of literature first and criticism later) dictated by the conventions generated by that particular criticism and reading. As he put it "several younger writers have entered a genre of third world metropolitan fiction whose conventions have given their novels the unfortunate feel of ready-mades." Diaspora poetry, too, has by now evolved certain conventions whose lineaments can be clearly discerned, and there are poets who readily succumb to it, thereby stripping their poems of shock, originality and well….genuine poetry. The editors would have done well to be more aware of this development.
But all said and done, one has to wish the editors and Norton well, that may their hopes of putting forward 'an alternate vision of the new century', at least for the anthology's readers (American or otherwise) succeed beyond their fondest hopes.

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.