Bangla Translations of Latin American Poetry: A Critical Study

The aim of this study is to map the reception of Latin American Poetry within the corpus of the Bangla world of letters for three decades, from 1980 to 2010. In the 1970s and the 1980s, the influence and reception of Latin American Literatures in Bangla was reflected primarily in the introductions to translations, preludes, and conclusions of translations. During the late 1960s and the early 1970s Latin American poets like Pablo Neruda, Victoria Ocampo, Octavio Paz, and Jorge Luis Borges had caught the attention of eminent Bangla poets like Bishnu Dey, Shakti Chattopadhyay, and Shankha Ghosh who started taking interest in their works. This interest soon got reflected in the form of translations being produced in Bangla from the English versions available. The next two decades saw the corpus of Latin American Literatures make a widespread entry into the world of academic essays, journals, and articles published in little magazines along with translations of novels, short stories and poetry collections by leading Bangla publication houses like Dey’s Publishing, Radical Impressions, etc. This period was marked by a proliferation of scholarship in Bangla on Latin American Literatures. By the 21st century, critical thinking in Latin American Literatures had established itself in the Bangla world of letters. This chapter in particular studies the translations of Latin American poetry by Bengali poets like Shakti Chattopadhyay, Subhas Mukhopadhyay, Bishnu Dey, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Shankha Ghosh, Biplab Majhi among many others. The analysis relates to issues they focus on including themes like self, modernity, extension of time and space, political and poetic resonances, and untranslatability. Through a step by step research of the various stages of translation activities in Bengal and Bangla, it traces how translations of Latin American Literatures begin to take place on literary grounds that had already become sites of engagement with these issues. The chapter further explores the ways in which all these poet-translators situate their translations in relation to the issues of concern. In addition, it also addresses the question of what they hence contribute to Bangla literature at large. I first chose to explore the ways in which these issues are framed in the reflections and debates on translation in India and Bengal in the 20th century. Thereon I have tried to show how these translations of Latin American poetry developed their own thrust in relation to these issues and concerns.

Las ciudades simultáneas de la vanguardia transnacional: Borges, Neruda y Joyce

El artículo explora la recepción de la obra de James Joyce en la escritura de Jorge Luis Borges y Pablo Neruda dentro del contexto de las vanguardias latinoamericanas en los años 20 y 30 junto con la configuración de los discursos estéticos que las estructuraron. A lo largo del artículo se trazan puentes entre la condición “descentrada” de Joyce como escritor perteneciente a Irlanda y autores como Borges y Neruda, cuya identidad los ponía en una relación conflictiva con España. Se argumenta que esta condición puede entenderse como un punto importante de identificación entre estos autores quienes se apoyaron en su sentido de pertenencia a una comunidad artística transnacional para formular algunas de las propuestas características del lenguaje de vanguardia. El artículo establece contrapuntos entre ellos para entender el sistema de puentes estéticos, angustias y libertades que los une.

CANTO GENERAL E SOUTH AMERICA MI HIJA: UM OLHAR SOBRE “ALTURAS DE MACCHU PICCHU”

“Alturas de Macchu Picchu”, second book from the poem by Pablo Neruda Canto General (1950), is, according to critics, the best known of the epic. The writer Sharon Doubiago, in South America Mi Hija (1992), makes with such book an intertextual dialogue from which stand out similarities and differences, that is why the purpose of this study is to investigate some of the resonances that this dialogue provides. For this purpose, bibliographic research was made based on authors such as La Vega (1604), Steel (1967), Alegría (1981), Kirk (1993), Santí (2011), among others, and the presentation and analysis of excerpts from corpora poems, the dialogue between them will be shown in this article. It is evident that the notions of ruin and poetic justice are contrasted by the way in which writers somehow redeem narratives that are components of the history of the defeated, placing them as a component of the identity of the Latin American peoples, resulting in a voicing strategy (be it from the collective, be it individual characters – mostly female, in Doubiago) that start from a look at the past with a view to understanding the present.

Cruces Sur-Sur. La recepción de Paz, Neruda y García Márquez en India

Los mundos post-coloniales de América Latina y de India, incluso a pesar de sus diferencias, comparten puntos históricos, sociológicos, politicos y culturales en común, los cuales parecen haber creado condiciones favorables para el intercambio y la recepción literaria intercultural. Pablo Neruda ha sido considerado en la India como un sensible poeta del amor y, al mismo tiempo, un marxista políticamente comprometido, casi reverenciado por los literatos de izquierda de todo el subcontinente. Su obra Veinte poemas de amor ha sido traducida a muchos idiomas locales y ha sido interpretada, cantada y recitada a lo largo del país junto con poemas de la última etapa de Neruda. En el mundo literario hindi es sin duda el poeta más famoso del mundo de habla hispana. El autor colombiano Gabriel García Márquez también ha dejado una profunda impresión, especialmente en el cine y en la literatura malayalam. El premio Nobel mexicano Octavio Paz, que fue embajador de su país en la India durante casi seis años, estableció un intercambio artístico con muchos poetas y artistas hindis. Con el objetivo de contribuir con la investigación actual en este campo, el presente artículo ofrece un panorama de los ámbitos y agentes no académicos que han facilitado la recepción de los escritos latinoamericanos en la India.

Defining Reality: Photography and the Surrealist Concept of the Image in Poland in the 1940s

The text discusses definitions of photography formulated in Poland in the 1940s. The author analyses Zbigniew Dłubak’s series of photographs inspired by the poetry of Pablo Neruda in reference to surrealism, Marxism, and, primarily, to Władysław Strzemiński’s theory of vision. Particular emphasis is placed on the concept of the image shared by Dłubak and Strzemiński, a concept that links the issue of realism with individual expression, allowing for a formal differentiation of representation (abstraction). In consequence, the analysed series by Dłubak is presented as sharing similarities with seemingly formally remote series of collages To My Friends the Jews by Strzemiński. Both demonstrate an ambition to express in the modern form both collective realism as well as individual memory, primarily of the war events. Proposed interpretation suggests that the use and understanding of photography as a medium closely tied to reality had a decisive meaning for the new formula of the image constructed right after 1945 – formula open to experimenting, yet also ideologically radical, addressing the existential problems of the individual involved with the new political order.

THE INIMITABLE BLEND OF POETICS AND POLITICS: READING NARENDRA MODI AND PABLO NERUDA AS THE POETS OF PEOPLE

This research explores and contributes to knowledge pool of poetry and polity in the creative literary work of Narendra Modi and Pablo Neruda. It traces the course of discovering the poet's expression as the journey within, a divine communion with cosmic consciousness an idea of nation building and collective harmony. This quest of comparative reading of Narendra Modi and Pablo Neruda as poets of people began long back in 2011. I am glad to present this study after working on it gradually for long, I have selected to study few poems from Modi’s Blessed are these Eyes/ Ankh Aa Dhanya Chee and Neruda's Spain in Our Hearts/ Espana En El Corazon, as a more radical investigation into the possibilities and limits of poetics and politics as field of human activity. Focal points of the paper are:  How and why poet Narendra Modi and leader Narendra Modi, is promising. Why and how poet Pablo Neruda and leader Pablo Neruda appeals.  Their works reflect that the poet in their individuality chant about internal order of man, while the leader relates to the external well being and ordering of men.  A quest for internal order in a given epoch coincides with the external ordering and this finally leads to construction of better society, newer nation and a novel world.  An anatomizing of Narendra Modi‘s and Pablo Neruda’s sensitiveness towards Nation, it‘s people and the vocalization of their devotedness through literature.