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164 Texts on Translation and Translational Norms in BengalMy concern in this paper is with the modern period and thetranslation of poetry where one does not encounter any overtprescriptive agenda imposed from above as in the case of prose. Inan indirect manner, however, through English education chiefly, anentire school of poetry gets adapted and some translated, though it isnot until the first decades of the twentieth century that anthologies oftranslated poems appear. Here again we come across a large range ofsource language texts and various different attitudes towards whatwe would call translational norms, and our understanding oftranslation as activity in Bengal would be incomplete if we read itsolely in terms of a colonial paradigm.During the second half of the nineteenth century, and thefirst few decades of the twentieth century to a certain extent, onecomes across a large number of poems that are called adaptations,literally chhaya abalambane (in the shadow of) and quite often thelanguage is mentioned, but not the name of the poet or the poem. Acomparison with the source language text of some of the poemswould reveal a strong presence of an invariant core, and this,according to Gideon Toury, would allow the poem the legitimacy ofa translated text. In others one may find just a distant echo of theoriginal, although this is rare. The phenomenon may also suggestthat the concept of translation as an activity that involves thedecoding of a message in a particular language/literary system andencoding it in another, taking into account the denotative and theconnotative elements of the message in the sphere of poetry, has notyet taken any definite shape. Yet again, the attitude also has at itspoint of origin an idealistic, universalistic notion of poetry thatshapes horizons of poetic activities in the literary system and thisdespite experiences of colonialism over a long period of time. It isuniversalism with a difference as articulated by Rabindranath in hisspeech 'Visvasahitya' or World Literature delivered in 1906. Therehe talks about his view of literature as one constituting a world of itsown, where each single work contributes to the perfection of the