SIGNPOSTS: BENGALI POETRY SINCE INDEPENDENCE Edited by Prabal Kumar Basu, Rupa, Rs 395 At first glance, Signposts - Bengali Poetry Since Independence, seems to be an attractively presented volume, made more elegant with Ganesh Pyne's Night of the Merchant on the cover, and illustrations by K.G. Subramanyan, Somenath Hore, Jogen Chowdhury and Ganesh Haloi, among others inside. But you begin to feel a sense of disquiet as you read Sunil Gangopadhyay's foreword, a rather interesting but offhand mix of truisms and generalizations. These are mostly to the effect that it was the fear of the oceans that prevented the eastern countries from expanding their horizons, that American writing and South American writing have managed to achieve greater 'dominance' than British or Spanish writing. 'Bengali-speaking people are known to reside all over the expanse of the world, as a community they are fairly well known to the cosmopolitan genre.' Nothing new in that, except that Ramachandra Guha would perhaps have used his delightful term, 'rooted cosmopolitans', for them. If this foreword itself is a translation, then it has been hastily done indeed. Next, Prabal Kumar Basu, the editor of this anthology, tells us in his prologue that fifty poets were chosen to represent fifty years of Bengali poetry. You wonder why (when it has been possible to represent most of the poets by four or five poems each) a few other important poets could not have been included by cutting down on some of the poems of the others who have been represented, or on some of the poets. No room, then, for Jiban- ananda Das; nor for the Hungry movement, which, the editor informs us, 'fizzled out', leaving no 'definite impression' even though 'many poets were put behind bars'. One would imagine that poets being put behind bars is itself a rather definite event! Surely, if the anthology is to be an enterprise in documenting 'the social, political and socio-economic evolution' of Bengali poetry post-independence, it could be less dismissive. Basu's prologue, rather than providing an informative overview of the landscape of post-independence Bengali poetry for a readership outside Bengal, is a welter of emotion: 'Distrust was still to come. Love was no longer a myth. Love sought to crack the myth apart and reach physicality.' Where one would have expected creativeness, Basu tells us that 'the translators have adhered to the original and have taken practically no liberties'. As a result, the translations are often staccato and uneven. Therefore, we are given the awkwardness of lines like the following: 'If I looked into someone's eyes I can tell/ whether love is possible with him...' from Mandakranta Sen's 'When Just you', translated by Sanjukta Dasgupta. Or, 'But in secret that you are so reckless/ When did I realize this?' from the same poet and translator. And surely the translator, Deepa Mukhopadhyay, could have come up with something better than 'Multi-hued birds are flitting about in the depth of verdure', from 'The White Letter' by Rupak Chakrabarty. 'They will call you an unsocial, too' translated by Bandana Sanyal from 'A Big Fool, Unsocial Too' by Shankha Ghosh, is another clumsy line. Annoyingly, the poems are undated, though the poets appear to be listed in a somewhat chronological order. Typos scatter the pages: 'I want the words to stand on their ownfeet'; 'For heavens sake'. Despite these flaws, the volume manages to capture some of the most wonderful creations of these poets. Poetry is alive in Bengal, and covers a wide range of subjects from the very personal to the political and the global; from language to nation; from the nostalgic to the forward-looking; from being awash with feeling to the hard-edged and satirical. As we read the very first line of the very first poem, 'At the sight of the smoke, I knew I had come among humanity...', in Samik Bandopadhyay's translation of Arun Mitra's poem, we know that we, too, have come among humanity.