Dr. Ratan Bhattacharjee
“Sk. Sadar Nayeem, Editor, Dainik Statesman and a man of profound poetic perception carved out his niche as a translator of Gulzar’s for a long time and his translation of Hindustani poems of Gulzar’s recently written book of lyrical poems Pluto (2015) published from the renowned publication Deys Publishing, Kolkata in 2017 is undoubtedly a wonderful feat of literary transcreation. The communicative dimension lying beneath the lines of the original Hindustani poems is brilliantly explored by the translator.”
Sampoorna Singh Kalra globally known as Gulzar, an Oscar winning lyricist, film director, playwright, short story writer, translator, is one of the most difficult poets to translate, as he is basically a song writer. Sk. Sadar Nayeem, Editor, Dainik Statesman and a man of profound poetic perception carved out his niche as a translator of Gulzar’s for a long time and his translation of Hindustani poems of Gulzar’s recently written book of lyrical poems Pluto (2015) published from the renowned publication Deys Publishing, Kolkata in 2017 is undoubtedly a wonderful feat of literary transcreation. The communicative dimension lying beneath the lines of the original Hindustani poems is brilliantly explored by the translator.
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The equivalence of words and sense is excellently maintained as a meaningful discourse by balancing the syntactical, rhetorical and pragmatics that enriched the nuances of the original Hindustani poems of Gulzar. A native of Pakistan and India Gulzar inherits the tradition of both the nation. Sk. Sadar Nayeem remains faithful to the text like Sampurna Dutt who translated the poems into English and to the art of communication in another language. Gulzar conveys through images which reflect his diverse and heterogeneous ideas and radical thinking. Moreover he himself being a translator is very much sensitive to any rendering or transcribing his images and symbols that he uses in his poems. So translating his poems is next to impossible as Gulzar himself is hesitant to translated the poems of Tagore. Still he did and Sadar Nayeem too proves his poetic calibre to translate the difficult poetic discourse in Gulzar. Each poem blooms in its own season and anyone who tries to understand the quintessence must commit his sensitivity to the exploration of the connotative structure. Words go dry and fade like the fallen leaves in autumn when the aim of the original poet goes missing in the transcription. But Sadar Nayeem excels more as a transcreator than a translator. Gulzar is a highly acclaimed Dadasaheb Phalke Awardee and his poems provide the translator an easy form of expression although this simplicity is deceptive and so thrilling enough for any translator of high standard. But being a classy translator chiefly because of his inherent poetic talent which he uses for transcribing Gulzar for the Bengali readers, Sadar Nayeem startles the readers on the one hand and on the other engages them in a deep musing on the inner soul of the expressive physicality of the poetic structure. Gulzar has come out recently with his debut novel in English on the status of refugees after Partition but his forte is poetry and lyricism. His exquisite collections are numerous. His early hits include Mera Gora Ang Lai Le, the first film lyric which he wrote for Bimal Roy’s Bandini in 1963, Mera Kucch Saman for Izazat , Naam Gum Jayega for Kinara Is mod pe jate hain and Humne dekha hai un aankhon ki for Aandhi and the ever enduring Dil Dhoondta Hai for Mausam. He won Oscar for the song Jai Ho that thrilled the whole nation nay the song lovers of the world and this song was composed for the blockbuster Slumdog Millionaire. Gulzar published several volumes of his poetry before and the popular musician Sting inspired him to write the song. The English translation of his poems published by Penguin -India will surely be lyrical gem for the poetry lovers.We can realise that ‘lyrics can survive on their own without a mannequin or a visual as Gulzar said it. Sunjoy Sekhar translated a few of Gulzar’s lyrics into English and they sounded suspiciously like poems. Gulzar distinguished a poem from a lyric because a poem for him was ‘a personal expression of the poet’ whereas in a lyric, the expression is primarily that of a character arising out of the situation of a film story’. For example the song Musafir hoon yaaron was a song he wrote for Pancham or R.D. Burman for the movie Parichay. It is really amazing to know that Gulzar excels in lyricism and so easily could transcend social barriers as he has the ability to write them for rickshaw puller or a Sufi Saint with equal sweetness. Gulzar himself as a translator knew how a lyric can interpret the world and life and from this point of view he translated nearly 60 poems of Tagore in two set of books Nindiya Chor (The Crescent Moon) and Baghban (The Gardener) .
The wonderful poem collection Pluto published by Harper -Collins in 2015 was recently translated into Bengali by Sk. Sadar Nayeem in the most inimitable way. Pluto lost its status as a planet only recently. Gulzar with a rare sensitivity saw Pluto sad on being rejected like this and his heart too sank. “It is so far away, so tiny, so all my pint-sized poems I gift to it.” In this short collection Gulzar touches all his favourite themes: Relationship with God, Nature, Time – an art of poetry all revealing his rare ability to find meaning in the mundane. The bleakness of these verses leading to light is beautifully captured by Sadar Nayeem in his Bengali translation. Nirupama Dutt translated them into English while Sadar Nayeem translated them into Bengali with an expertise and soft poetic sensitivity. Translation of Gulzar’s Hindustani lyrics into Bengali is a mammoth task but Sadar Nayeem an admirer of the poet for a long time has been translating them for the Bengali fans of Gulzar publishing them in various magazines and puja specials. Finally he did it consistently for Harper Collins and the famous Bengali publisher Deys Publishing came out to print his book containing 112 beautiful lyrics of unfathomable profundity. He remains so faithful to the words and sense of Gulzar on the one hand and on the other he maintained the excellence of Bengali in which even Tagore wrote.
The book began with a couplet: Kitni lambi khamoshi se gujra hun/ unse kitna kucch kahne ki kousish ki: which Nayeem translated as “Kato dirgho Nirabata periye eshechi / take anek kichu bolar chesta korechi”. Examples abound in the book. Sometimes the language is bold that Nayeem uses for a lyric like ‘Bahut din mai’ : ‘Bahut din mai tumhare dard ko sine pe lekar / jib katwata raha hun” which Nayeem transribes in Bengali as ” Ananta kal dhore tomar bedona / Samahito hoye ache amar hriday e”. We are inspired to recall here Gulzar’s own efforts to translate Tagore’s Bengali poem into Hindustani. Sadar Nayeem who also with a similarly deep and abiding love for Hindustani translated the poems of Pluto into Bengali . When asked about what he thinks about his translation , the busy Editor cum poet of the Dainik Statesman Sadar Nayeem however said the translations by him do not do full justice to Gulzar’s original works in Hindustani. Translation is not only about displaying a meaning in another language . It carries a complete culture which Sadar Nayeem again and again proves in his translation . He makes the readers feel the varied shades of character and the links of the scene envisaged in the lyrics of Gulzar. He translates the culture of the vocabulary. In a lyric Gulzar wrote : ” Woh zinda thi, main jab soya hua tha/ Woh mere jagte hi mor gayi hai/ Yehi khaslat hai khowabon ki” which in Nayeem’s Bengali translation equals the ambience of the original : ” Ami jakhon nidray , she benche chilo / Ami jege uthtei she more galo/ Sapner bishistotai ei”. Just incredible. Another lyric ” Sabhi dhundhla gay phir se’ is translated as :Abar Saboi Kuashachchono ” Abar saboi kuashacchchana jano/ Andhar abar probahito/ kono o kichu abar gole boye jacche / top top kore porche aboyob bindu hoye sobi kichu khhon bheshe thake , tarpar dube jai/ Amar chok abar jano Sikto hoye uthe.” ‘Raat Dhuni Thi Jab Maine’ is another wonderful lyric in this volume and Nayeem transcribed the lines : ‘Biswer tare rater chador bunechilam / kintu choto hoye galo sheta / gaye dilam jakhon ekdike dheke / anabrito roilo apor dik, / ghum pele nidrai jeo / hoito amay binidroi thakte hobe. ( rat dhuni thi jab maine duniya ke liye / toul me thodi choti pad gayi / ek taraf se odi jab bhi / tum so jana , nind aye toh/ mujhko sayad jagna hoga”.Sometimes in the translations the communicative dimension lying beneath the lines of the original is achieved through product to product comparison and can be discussed as meaningful discourse. We forget that Hindustani poem is the original. This is true of the translation of a few lyrics ‘ Ye sham ek wakka hai’ ‘Darkhat roj sham ko’, ‘Kabhi Kabhi’,’ Dagdar chitkobori subah nikli hai’ ,’Ahista ahista’,’Dhire dhire se jomi’,’Naye naye hi chand pe’,Mala ke monko ki tarah’ and Nayeem wrote some fantastic lines in translating these poems ” Ebar probonchona korlo sarir amar’,’Abortito kore jomi amay/ Ami matha tule dekhi biswa ke ‘. Sometimes Nayeem comes to the colloquial level where common experiences of life are described in the most smart semantic style. Gulzar wrote some lyrics for this volume :’Main cigarette pi raha tha’ or ‘Lost and Found’ .Nayeem wrote in equal smartness ” Hatat tomay aj dekhlam flight e / Jano tumi abar kamon nisshongo’.’ Ami cigarette tan dicchilam jakhon / Surjyo osto jete laglo/ Sudhu cigarette e du tinte tan baki chilo’.The romantic perception is wonderfully captured in a poem ‘Us par nadi ke pool se’ and Nayeem too focused on the essence of the poem ‘ Nadi par er ek setur upor/ Jakhon railgari jai , thomkai tar goti’ or in the lyric ‘Monjor-1′ Phir se phool nikal aye hain mohuye ke / Phir se mehakta hai mohuye ka ped usi ke angan me.’ (Pher phool phuteche mohuar dal e /Tar anginay pher phool er mo mo gandho) This lyric is a combination of a realistic and romantic situation. The beauty of nature and the floral backdrop echoing advent of the Spring coincides with the ghastly rape of a maiden by the soldiers .The mysteriousness of the dark night is sometimes portrayed with fidelity in a poem like ‘ Raat ko pechida sadako par’ ‘Rat er Sarake’ ” Rater sorpil sadok e cholte giye tar / nijer chayar songe pa joriye pore giye more galo she.’ (While treading along the nocturnal path / his own legs entwined with his own shadow / he fell down and succumbed to death’. The use of monosyllabic words in Bengali is an outstanding feature in the Bengali translation of Nayeem book. He provided a comfortable movement and easeful unpremeditated depth to the content. The resonance that his poems create is simply wonderful in understanding the culture of Gulzar’s vocabulary. The dynamic equivalence that Nayeem attempted in transcreation of the poems is incredible not only for lyrical support but also for the additional nuances that any good translator can feel jealous of him. Without being a poet this editor -translator could not delve deep into this poetic discourse that a poet of Gulzar’s stature has achieved in Pluto. It is a great contribution to regional language in which the Nobel laureate like Tagore too wrote. We can always count on Gulzar’s poems in Pluto translated into English by Nirupama Dutt. Bengali readers of Gulzar will now feel happy to read the poems in Bengali without losing the equivalence in sense and words of the original version. We may conclude with words of the Nobel Laureate 2017 Kazou Ishiguro on translation “I want my words to survive translation”. This is also true of the translation Gulzar’s Hindustani poems into Tagore’s language by Sadar Nayeem. Nothing is really lost in translation and Gulzar’s words will endure forever.
(Dr. Ratan Bhattacharjee is an Associate Professor and Head of the Post Graduate Dept of English, Dum Dum Motijheel College Kolkata and Poet cum book reviewer for national dailies. He can be reached at: profratanbhattacharjee@gmail.
