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Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta 167were translated for the sake of beauty and variety or, in other words,not because they complemented one's sense of being in the world. Infact, to many poets writing at the time, translation becomes anecessary act. If we do not have as many adaptations (chhayaabalambane) as in the last few decades, we have Bangla poetry, or atleast one prominent stream of Bangla poetry being compulsivelydrawn into a larger arena of world poetry. The notion of difference,strongly present but unstated in the concept of visvasahitya, isglossed over at least on the surface level. Translation thensupposedly has an active place in modelling the target system.Sudhindranath Dutta writes an essay called 'Kavyer Mukti' or the'Emancipation of Poetry' where he emphasises the need for an openendedprocess of reception. The very act of translation gets linkedwith the writing of poetry. On the pragmatic level this can implygreater degrees of equivalence between content or semanticcategories as well as metalinguistic or cultural and semiotic aspects.Given the differences in the two systems this happens within certainlimits and to the extent that it does it also brings in a gap betweenthe popular and the cultivated circuit of readers of poetry. In the nextsection, I will take up texts on translation by three important poettranslatorsof the period.I will go back to Sudhindranath Datta, an important poettranslatorof the period who believes that the ground for creatingpoetry is not as fertile as before and so the poet has to roam theentire world and gather seeds that can germinate into poetry. In hisintroduction to his volume of translated poems Pratidhvani (1954)he takes up the notion of translation and states that poetry isuntranslatable – it is impossible to create the same poem in anotherlanguage at another time and in another place and especially wherethe systems are as different from each other as for instance, Banglaand French. Yet he translates. His translations of Mallarmé's'L'après-midi d'un faune' and of Valéry's 'L'ebauche d'un serpent'have been acclaimed as poems of considerable achievement. Thefirst has a hundred verses of the same length with end rhymes, while