(Top) Aeneas Flees Burning Troy by Federico Barocci; (below) a page from Sargent’s translation

Year 1810. Lord Byron swims Hellespont, the US annexes Florida, Chile and Columbia declare independence from Spain. And in Bengal, H. Sargent, a former student of the Fort William College, gets his Bengali translation of the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid published.

The book, printed at the Mission Press in Serampore, was mentioned in the first bibliography of Bengali books prepared by Reverand James Long in the mid-19th century. But a physical copy was hard to come by. That is why Abhijit Gupta, a teacher at the department of English in Jadavpur University who is researching the history of the Mission Press, was excited on laying his hands on a hard-bound 65-pg book at Regents Park College in Oxford. “The college has a wealth of Baptist missionary material, which includes the printed output of the Mission Press,” Gupta explains.

He has been involved since 2003 in a project to prepare an online short title catalogue of printed Bengali books. “This book is not even catalogued in the 10-12 libraries where we checked. It was there only in Long’s catalogue and in an obscure 19th one. There was also a mention of a translation of The Tempest by Monckton, Sargent’s classmate at Fort William College. Translating Aeneid and The Tempest must have been their term papers.”

Gupta chanced upon the Aeneid in Bengali while looking at the papers of the Serampore trio — the missionaries William Carey, Joshua Marshman and William Wade. He wrote to Graham Shaw, head of Africa, Pacific and Asia collections at British Library, informing him of the find. “He wrote back that he had checked the racks and found two copies there which had not got catalogued under Bengali books because of a title page in English,” says Gupta, showing images of the book’s two title pages — in English and Bengali each — on his computer. WorldCat, the world’s largest library catalogue, shows another copy to exist in Rutgers University, US. “Not a single copy exists in India. Even if it does, it has not been found.”

The Asiatic Annual Register, 1809, in a section on the “gentlemen” of Fort William College, mentions “the eminence which Mr Sargent has attained in the knowledge of Hindoostanee (Urdu) as well as of the Bengal language…which places him in a higher rank than any who left the college in 1808”. It also chronicles that “Mr Sargent has qualified himself to translate four books of Virgil’s Aeneid into the language of Bengal and has performed the work in a manner to merit the recommendation of those who are competent to judge of it”.

The idiom is strikingly robust. Compare the English translation of Vergilius Maro’s statement of his theme “I sing of arms and of a man: his fate/ has made him fugitive; he was the first to journey from the coast of Troy as far/ as Italy and the Lavinian shores…. with Sargent’s Bengali translation “Oshtrer ebong je purush odrishto boshe Troy desher simar nikot hoitey polayan koriya Italiyo desher Lobiniar tirer opore uposhthit hoilen tahari upakhyan geet dwara kohi…” “Sargent must have translated it directly from Latin,” says Gupta. Interestingly, in the invocation, he translates Muse as Saraswati.

“Just 10 years after the Bible got printed from Serampore in a very stilted Bengali, at a time when Rammohun Roy was writing a heavily Sanskritised Bengali and Carey himself was struggling with the early translations, here was a young Englishman creating heroic idiom and syntax for an epic,” says Gupta.

After passing out of college, Sargent can be traced in 1818 as the acting secretary of the salt department and again in 1822 as secretary to the Board of Customs, salt and opium. The last mention that Gupta has found is as a member of the grand jury of the Supreme Court in 1823. “In short, his talent was wasted.”