Download Complete Volume - National Translation Mission

166 Texts on Translation and Translational Norms in Bengallegitimise its entity as a translated poem. In Satyendranath'stranslations there is a strong presence of the source language poemin the general ambience and the form which are again layered withcultural and local connotations. There are also the demands of thecreative act – once a choice has been made with reference to oneparticular texteme, others necessarily have to follow. As a poet,Satyendranath occupies an important place for his experiments withsound patterns, and often as translator, he finds an incentive insource language poems to explore such patterns. The Japanese tankaand the Malaysian pantoum, the verse patterns of Paul Verlaine andVictor Hugo and certain metrical patterns of Sanskrit poetry areintroduced in Bangla through his translations. As for the act oftranslation, he says he engages with it to bring about a relationshipof ananda or joy (anander atmiyata korite sadhan).Satyendranath Datta belongs to the pre-modern period inBangla literature, if we go by standard periodisation in histories ofliteratures. Translation activities continue on a large scale during theseveral decades of transition from the pre-modern to the modern.Poets, especially from the mid-twenties, try to come out from thedominant presence of Rabindranath, to find new means ofexpression as they grapple with the times, the aftermath of the FirstWorld War, the economic depression and the resultant instability.Translation activities at this point of time get linked with theuncertainties of social life and receive a new stimulus. Anthologiesof translated poems by single authors are published a little later inthe fifties, but journals such as Parichay, concentrating to a largeextent on foreign literature, emerge. The poetry of the periodbecomes marked by an intertextual quality that becomes both thesign and symptom of modernity. As Alokeranjan Dasgupta andSankha Ghosh write in the preface to their volume of translatedpoems Sapto Sindhu Das Diganto, translation during the period is anintegrated activity, for the source language poem is not felt to be avery distant entity, whereas in earlier periods source language poems