"Quality of translations has been a factor, given that most of the translations were prepared through individual initiative and not under the supervision of a proper institution.
"The response has been rather discouraging most of the time," UPL publisher Mahrukh Mohiuddin shares. Yet the feedback on these initiatives have been lukewarm.
"We need someone there who can find, scout, and curate interesting texts."īangladesh's University Press Limited (UPL) is an industry leader in the same operations as Seagull in terms of exchanging rights with overseas presses including Hurst Publishers, Columbia University Press, and notable others. This means the Library is stagnant," Naveen Kishore, publisher of Seagull, tells The Daily Star. "The pity is that along the way, no fresh books have found their way. Rights for the books' distribution in the "Rest of the World Other Than Bangladesh" were shared with India's Seagull Books, who could then circulate them across the US and UK through the University of Chicago Press.
BENGALI BOOKS SERIES
From Bangladesh, among the most laudable of these initiatives came in the form of the Library of Bangladesh series started by Bengal Lights Books edited by the Dhaka Translation Centre and author-academic Arunava Sinha, for which writer Shabnam Nadiya has translated Shaheen Akhtar's Beloved Rongomala (2019), Professor Kaiser Haq has translated Shaheed Quaderi's Selected Poems (2018), and Pushpita Alam has translated Syed Manzoorul Islam's Absurd Night (2018), among others.
The first step, in the case of circulation beyond borders, is the consistent flow of such good quality texts. I began exploring this idea with high hopes when I first decided to write about it, but conversations with publishers, editors, and book bloggers have revealed to me that Bangla literature has managed to make a very tiny space for itself in the thriving virtual world of books.įor all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. Sixty nine years since the Language Movement, if we are to examine the performance of Bangla texts across the world, the role of these platforms in helping not only to create texts but to circulate them, is vital. For the past decades, translation has played a major role in this process of circulation, and for the past few years, digital platforms including virtual marketplaces and social media have all but commanded the fate of books brought out by publishers. I begin with this comparison because it highlights the significant impact that circulation can make in the endurance of languages, literatures, and histories, as has been highlighted by the scholarly works of Roger Chartier, Pierre Bourdeau, or even by the ideas of Tagore in " Bishsho Shahittya", his essay on World Literature. Upon achieving success, that personal struggle became part of global history when UNESCO proclaimed February 21 as the International Mother Language Day, in 1999. It was a deeply personal struggle for the close to 4 crore 40 lakh Bangla-speaking people of East Pakistan who demanded that their mother tongue be instated as one of the official state languages of Pakistan. Something similar happened to the metaphysical life of the Bangla Language Movement of 1952. And yet a future journey for that text does emerge with or without the author's intent-for every story written, there exists somewhere a community of readers, and through the process of publication it becomes part of the larger network of produced literature.
Imagining, experiencing, and putting the story down on paper takes precedence during those moments of creation. While writing a text, a literary text in particular, many authors tend not to think about its afterlife.
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