Journeys, translations and connections

Dominic Williams and Anisur Rahman

It is the first week of March in 2022 and in the furthermost reaches of Western Europe Spring is challenging the grip of Winter. I am sitting in my office in Glan y fferi, a small Welsh fishing village. I look through the small window to a bright blue sky that stretches above the Irish Sea, seeking some respite from the typesetting struggles I am encountering with Bengali fonts. Nearer to the building the trees are moving with the playful breezes of this new season, but the mischief on the wind carries the chill reprimand of the previous months and there are even a few flakes of snow dancing in the deceptive sunlight. I think briefly about another cup of coffee before I return my focus to the design files of this poetry collection on my laptop.

The subject matter of this collection of poetry is very clearly historically set. It deals with issues of worldwide concern during the pivoting years between the second and third decade of the twenty-first century. The Black Lives Matter movement; the Covid pandemic; the murder of George Floyd; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A series of poems written originally in Bengali over a period of a few short years and translations into English largely done in workshops over four days. Two days spent in Litteraturcentrum Uppsala, Sweden and two days spent at the National Writers Centre, Ty Newydd in Wales; early and late September 2021. Yet this volume is the product of nearly a decade of development in a relationship between two poets.

I first met Anisur Rahman in July 2014, a year that for a huge international poetry community was devoted to the celebration of the centenary of the birth of Dylan Thomas. I was engaged as curator of the first of many literary projects hosted by the Swedish arts organisation Kultivera and Anisur was a participant. It was not until over seven years later that I learned that The Dylan Thomas International Literary Residency was a significant catalyst in reversing a critical hiatus in Anisur's creative writing.

During his visit to Wales in September I had arranged for Anisur to meet with Ifor ap Glyn, the National Poet of Wales since 2016. Ifor met us at Trawsfynydd and gave us a personal tour of Yr Ysgwrn, the family home of Hedd Wyn, the Welsh language poet killed on the first day of the battle of Passchendaele during World War I. After the tour we followed Ifor through narrow lanes to Y Ring a pub in Llanfrothen where we shared a beer in Parlwr Bach. Ifor offered Anisur a literary gift, a translation into Welsh of an English language translation of Anisur's poem that he had found on-line "Poet in Residence".

from Bardd Preswyl

… Ond rhaid imi ddweud, nid bardd mo Anisur Rahman

dim ond delwedd aderyn mewn storm.

Mae'r aderyn yn canfod lloches mewn palas ar noson o ddrycin

Mae ond yn disgwyl am y wawr, 

ar ôl i'r storom beidio.

… I must say: Anisur Rahman is not poet at all

Just an image of a bird in the storm

The bird finds its shelter in the palace at stormy night

The bird waits just for dawn, afterwards of the storm…

 Ifor asked Anisur for a copy of the original Bengali poem so that he could revisit his translation to attempt a more accurate representation of sound in his creative work, to which Anisur replied the original no longer existed, only the English translation.

During a visit to the Gothenburg Book Festival with his family some years earlier, Anisurs' wife suffered the theft of her bag and in the bag was the original manuscript in Bengali of a new collection from Anisur. It was the only copy and never recovered. Thus the publication online of an English translation of one of the poems in this collection was the only existing manifestation of the poem that survived. Anisur was distraught; his passion for poetry damaged and disillusion clouded his creative muse. It was not until his participation in the Tranås residency in the summer of 2014 that he returned to writing. It was during this time that Anisur and I first collaborated on translations and his creative output throughout the residency was astonishingly prolific.

from Dylan Thomas

… after lines, tears from many eyes, smiles from many

faces, from many minds, from many hearts….

Witnessing all these, a reader getting lost

Asking you about the blessing of making words in poetry

Finding you the master in the craft in weaving your poetry

Where did you find the dynamite in words

For breaking, building and rebuilding …

I am a great advocate of digital channels of communication. I rarely write with a pen and paper myself any longer. My own poetic compositions are primarily created, edited and re-edited as oral pieces in my head while moving, while travelling, walking, driving, cycling, on a train. Someone once suggested that perhaps I need the rhythm of a journey to facilitate my creativity. If the opportunity arrives, and that is most likely to happen on a train I will transfer my poem from my head to a laptop. Very often the opportunity is not offered and so many poems slip way to be surrendered to the muse or later recycled.  When I engage in poetry editing or translation, my process is different, it is traditional and for me this collaboration requires tactility, intimacy, and physicality.

I believe that any translation is a new piece of creative work. It is not a rendering, or a re-representation. A translation is an original poem from a different poet, imbued with their own creativity, no matter how much they commit to and invest in an integrity and fidelity to the original composition.

I also believe that an artistic collaboration requires equal and contemporaneous creative output/input from two or more artists before it can be considered collaboration. A translation or an ekphrasis or any artistic response to a pre-existing work of art, even if they are exhibited or performed simultaneously is not the result of a pure collaborative process. This belief is very important to me as a collaborative artist particularly in terms of performative work.

There are several artistic processes I especially enjoy and sitting alongside a fellow poet with two manuscripts on a table in front of us, each of us armed with a writing implement of some sort, a coffee or a beer, this is one of them. Writing, re-writing giving birth to new thoughts, revising, this is a real human engagement, a fully immersive creative interaction. The product, the edited poem, the translation can be satisfying, but nothing brings the same joy as the smile, the meeting of eyes and the shared excitement of a completed line. These are the moments that Anisur and I have shared over the years, far too rarely it seems, but the more precious for that. We share, revise and edit work by email, we work together on international projects and events, but these translation workshops when we can be physically together are singular and fruitful.

The English language translations in The Lonely Crowd speak of shared experience and many of the original Bengali poems also. Sometimes a universal experience; sometimes a specific experience; sometimes specific to the poets and sometimes and so often, specific to the exile and his motherland. In his compassion and shared pain for the suffering of his fellow compatriots Anisur expresses his hiraeth for Bangladesh, a hiraeth that existed but was inaccessible to him until he finally experienced the familiarity that he did when he visited Wales for the first time in 2021.

In Wales and in Sweden, I am proud of the part I played alongside Anisur in the creation of the English language translations in this book. Now I look back over six months, reminded the strength of the sun that was losing its hold on Summer but still lighting our journeys around Wales. Soon this Spring will blossom into a new Summer and I imagine the sun over the country I have never yet visited, illuminating our poetic words as Anisur frees them from the page in Dhaka.