Lear specialized in drawing birds. His illustrations of parrots, published when he was just 18, are quite breathtaking in their use of colour and detail. Alongside the macaws and parakeets, which are so remarkably true to life, Lear often painted a hybrid species not to be found in nature. It is Lear the “Learned, nonsensical jargon bird”, the “spectacled owlet”, sitting morosely on a perch, his greatcoat folded like wings. The irate expression on his face would make him a cousin of Sukumar Ray’s Hunko Mukho Hyangla, another hybrid creature with hanging jowls, cucumber-nose, bat-like ears and two tails, who has lost his smile after failing to find an effective method to ward off flies.

Sukumar Ray, who was born in the year preceding that of Lear’s death, seems to have found a kindred soul in the jargon bird. The Monday Club (with a pun on the Bengali word, monda, a kind of sweet — the members were famed as gourmets) he used to convene at his place was also known as the Nonsense Club. Here all kinds of weird experiments with words took place. Animals’ names were spliced to bring forth new creatures like the hansjaru; onomatopoeia (pain has a resounding “thungthang dhong dhong” beat) was used liberally; illustrations completed the stories that words began (the Tyanshgoru has to be seen to be believed, so “Cheharar ki bahar — oi dekho chhabi tar: What a fantastic figure — look, there’s his picture”). All this is reminiscent of Lear with his Queeriflora Babyöides, a flower with babies for petals, frequent alliterations (“The Absolutely Abstemious Ass”), parodies, repetitions (the last line of his limericks usually repeats the first with a slight variation) and complementary illustrations.

So it was but natural that Satyajit Ray should translate a few of Lear’s limericks and his long poem, “The Jumblies”. Satyajit not so much translates as transcreates Lear, weaving him into Bengali culture, as Lear had given his own meanings to borrowed Indian words like ‘punkah’, ‘nullah’ or ‘bheesties’ in “The Cummerbund”. Lear’s “Old Man” who said, “Hush! I perceive a young bird in this bush!” becomes Shyam Ganguly of Salkia who goes out on a very Bengali expedition to pluck flowers (one guesses, in the wee hours of the morning) in Satyajit’s translation. Mr Ganguly does chance upon a bird in the bush, as the Old Man had, but the size of the bird — “four times as big as the bush” — is conveyed by a single word, “rambulbuli”. Satyajit retains Lear’s illustrations so that Mr Ganguly is both the middle-class babu (along the lines of Lalmohan Ganguly) of the Bengali imagination and the suited-booted sahib who stares at the bird, which looks like his mirror image (picture).

Even more wondrous is Satyajit’s “Papangul”, from “The Jumblies”. This is a perfect translation, in more senses than one. The unspoken melancholy, the lostness of the Jumblies who set out to sea in a sieve seems more palpable in the translation than in the original. Satyajit uses Bengali words that approximate the English ones in terms of sound and sense — “moony song” becomes “anmuni gaan”, dumplings become “dampuli”, with its suggestion of daalpuri. “Patkiliya pahar” has a sonorous, sad beauty that “mountains brown” cannot have. Perhaps it is just the inherent sweetness of the Bengali tongue or Satyajit’s genius that makes “Papangul” not merely a translation but an improvement.