Clinton B. Seely: 'In Nature the most beautiful is usually the hybrid thing'
Khademul Islam
Clinton B. Seely is Professor, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, at Chicago University. Though he has been around this region and made lasting friends since the early '60s it was with the publication in 1990 of the definitive English-language biography of Jibanananda Das (A Poet Apart: A literary biography of the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das (1899-1954), University of Delaware Press) that he came to be widely known among academics/writers in West Bengal and Bangladesh. Last year he published an English translation of Michael Madhushudhan Dutt's Meghanadabadhkabya (The Slaying of Meghanada: A Ramayana from Colonial Bengal, New York: Oxford University Press). Clinton Seely visited Dhaka to attend the 37th Bengal Studies Conference held by Stamford University from January 4-6, 2005. I caught up with him at Belal Chowdhury's house, sitting on the sofa quietly sipping garlic tea--'rescued', Belal bhai said, from 'people who wanted to make off with him for purposes unknown.' Seely's speech is noticeably interspersed with Bengali words and phrases, enunciated clearly and deliberately, no doubt the result of having spent a lifetime in American classrooms trying to communicate the beauty of the Bengali language to struggling students. Due to considerations of space, published below is only a small selection from what was a fairly long, wide-ranging talk.
Khademul Islam (KI): If you could give us your name and background to just start off with. Clinton Seely (CS): It's sort of accidental that I ended up in East Pakistan then, in 1963. After getting my degree from Stanford University in biology, I joined the Peace Corps, and they had a program then called the 'pilot high schools' in Pakistan, both East Pakistan and West Pakistan. And our job was --we were all science majors--to work with the science teachers at these chosen high schools, the best high schools in the country. There were 22 high schools in the east and 22 in the west, and the invitation was: would you like to go to East Pakistan? And I said fine--at that point I didn't even know where East Pakistan was, I had to look on the map and find it. KI: How old would you have been in 1963? CS: I was then 22, just graduated from the university. We had three months of training in Chicago, learnt a little Bangla--Muzaffar Ahmed and Roushan Jahan were two of our instructors, and Mazharul Islam was the third--and then we came to East Pakistan, and I was sent to Barisal. KI: Did you have a choice of countries in the Peace Corps at that time? CS: We could say no. Well, you could probably say, I'd like to go to Asia, or something like that. And if you knew Spanish, they'd of course always try to send you to South America. I didn't have any particular language, so it was any place. I didn't specify. They just said there's a job there, would you like to go? Okay, fine. So I came, and I spent two years in Barisal at the zilla school. The interesting part about this trip, one of my former students contacted me--he's now in Sydney, Australia--and he said, when you go to Dhaka this time there are a number of your former students, all from Barisal zilla school, and they want to have some sort of gathering in which you can sit with them and reminisce over old times.So tomorrow we have a plan to get together, 6:00 to 8:00, where--I don't know how many will come but somewhere around 35 students will be there and we'll talk about the old days, the good old days. ****KI: So how long did it take to do Meghanadabadh, to translate it? CS: I actually have been working on it for twenty-five years, when I was actually starting to teach and Edward Dimock, my professor, and I combined to teach a two-quarter course, a sort of a literary and cultural survey of Bengal and Bengali literature. His field was moddhojugiyo Bangla, he took responsibility for the pragadhunik, the earlier period, and my responsibility, by default, was the modern period. When does the modern period start? Well, if you read almost any history of Bangla shahitto, almost everybody says it starts with Michael. So I figured I ought to be able to tell my students--they don't read Bangla, they're studying it through English--be able to tell them about this text that is so very important. So I started translating bits and pieces, and I started out by translating into goddo, into prose. I left it at that for a while, and then I decided that why leave it in goddo, it's kabita. KI: In other words, go the whole hog? CS: So I began to re-translate, into my version of payar, amita-okkhor chondo, unrhymed, but I took as my unit the fourteen-syllable line, because payar is fourteen-okkhor--the fourteen-syllable line. KI: Right. CS: It is one of those things where you have to decide as a translator what you're going to keep versus-- KI: Well, you've done Das translations, specially the sonnets, and so you thought that this is something-- CS: Something in between, right--- KI: --that you could possibly bring some kind of Bangla rhythm to, you know, bear upon this. CS: Yeah, I'd hoped I could. And particularly, as William (Radice) points out, most readers of English cannot sense 14-syllables. I mean, they don't go, ah, fourteen, fourteen, fourteen-- KI: Right. CS: Still, when you see it on the page, it gives that impression of being a particular unit, a particular length for each pongkti. There was a question at the seminar I gave at the Asiatic Society of Bengal on Michael just last month and the head of the department of English, who had invited me to participate in the seminar, asked me, you know, how can you possibly take a non-stressed language like Bangla and put it into a stressed language like English-- KI: The old question. CS: Right. So what do you do? You try a little bit, if you lose a little bit, then you compromise a little bit, and it's one--not the only--solution. ****CS: Gautam Hajra's little comment on my translation that appeared I think in Desh (magazine). He says that on the very first page of the translation, and I really accept this, urmilabilashi of Lakkhan I translated as the 'joy' of Urmila, but no, it is the 'enjoyer' of Urmila. KI: That's a radical difference, bilash and bilashi! CS: Yeah, bilashi. He's actually taking advantage of Urmila, he's not simply the beloved husband of Urmila. Okay. And I'm sure there are others. In the Introduction there's one place where, for whatever reason, I call Dasaratha'r bou, Sumitra, I say it's the youngest wife but in the Glossary I have it corrected: it's the newer wife. And there are a couple of other places… KI: I guess we'll just have to wait for a second edition. CS: And so there are those things, and that's reasonable criticisms. I have no problems with that, I mean that should be pointed out. ****KI: Did you come across certain aspects of Michael you hadn't known before? No matter how well acquainted you were with him in the past, then teaching him, didn't doing this (translation) change your view of Michael as you knew him? Some aspect of him that intrigued you. CS: One of the things that intrigued me, you know, starting the project, was that even though you read in Bengali literary histories that this (Meghanabadhkabya) is the pinnacle of modern text writing, the very start of the modern period, in the sixties among my colleagues there was a feeling that purity somehow was a value--purity in this instance, that 'pure' South Asia, whatever they meant and I think you understand what I mean--that 'pure' South Asia is more valuable than something that was misri, something that was mixed-- KI: Mongrel? CS: Yes. 'Mongrel' is a particularly good word that one of my colleagues used in a footnote to an article, where there is a reference to Meghanadabadh, where she says that it is basically neither the Ramayan nor the Iliad, it is somewhere in-between and does not reach the heights of either the Greek or of the Sanskrit. And she used the word 'mongrel,' and mongrel is of course a pejorative word, in English-- KI: Yes, it's got all those associations. CS: Yeah. When I first started, it was my preconception that it would be some sort of a lesser work. And the more I realized that it's sort of our preconception of what 'purity' is which makes us come to the conclusion that anything that isn't pure somehow isn't beautiful or isn't of value. I mean when you think about it, what is 'pure'? It's an awkward word to even use. Nobody is pure, there is no sort of pure jaat, there's no pure anything, and in fact in Nature I would often tell myself that the most beautiful is usually the hybrid thing, and as you think about this text one of the beauties of it is the fact that it is an amalgam of wonderful literary influences--influences, texts, whatever you want to call it--and to say that it is 'mixed' it's therefore by definition inferior, at some point I just decided that was hypocritical, and that was a campaign I was willing to wage against my colleagues in the sixties. They've since outgrown that, okay, but in the sixties it was just sort of (hip) to say that the colonial period was less classical, and therefore less valuable, than the pre-colonial period because the pre-colonial period was somehow pure. How can it be pure? There were the Aryans and there were the Dravidians, there's never been anything pure, nobody's ever been pure. KI: It sounds like a very Sixties kind of campus rebel-- CS: It is, yeah. KI: Most of the classics, you know, are on the heights, and you're battling for the-- CS: Right. Right. So misrito has nothing whatsoever to do with ugly or inferior or unsuccessful--it is the very combination which makes (Meghanadabadh) end up being an extraordinarily beautiful text, and one of the reasons why it is extraordinarily beautiful is that without making it obvious to you or to me, he takes elements from all sorts of texts and melds them into one really beautiful piece. So that--during the course of the translation I was actually fighting my own, sort of-- KI: Ideological skirmishes? Fighting the good fight? CS: Yes, exactly. Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.
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