“Translators are bridge builders, linking people and cultures”: An interview with Mohammad A. Quayum

ABSTRACT This interview conducted with Mohammad A. Quayum from October 2021 to February 2022 focuses on a wide range of issues in literary translation and Translation Studies. Quayum is one of the leading academics and translators from Bangladesh, currently teaching at Flinders University, Australia.A renowned professor of English literature teaching in various countries, including Australia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore, and the US, Quayum has published numerous books and scholarly articles in renowned journals. His works have also drawn critical attention as they have been published by Brill, Penguin Books, Routledge, Springer and Stanford University Press. Quayum has already translated and published major writers and poets of Bengali literature into English, including Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932) and Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976). In this interview, Quayum offers valuable insights about literary translation and his translated works. He argues that translation, which is an inter-lingual as well as inter-cultural activity, builds bridges between cultures. In his view, translators require clarity of mind and lots of free-floating energy to keep focused on their work. The interview touches upon Quayum’s deep involvement in research and translation activities, his thoughts on literary translation and Translation Studies, and the current state and prospects of literary translation in Bangladesh.


MSI:
A scholar, editor, translator, and professor of English literature, you carry out a lot of work at once, and you have a significant number of outstanding scholarly publications. How do you navigate so many areas simultaneously? Do you encounter any challenges in switching from one kind of task to another? What is your daily work plan? MAQ: I know it is cool to think that I am multitasking, but actually, I am a monotasker; I always do one thing at a time. Multitasking is for machines -for computers and R4 technologies in particular. When we toggle between tasks, the brain fails to focus, and we take longer to finish them and make more mistakes along the way. So, when I am teaching, I like to give my all to teaching; my energy is invested entirely in communicating with students. But when I am outside the classroom and focused on a research or translation project, I like to dig myself deep into it and stay there as long as I need to finish it. My brain has limited capacity, or what psychologists call "working memory capacity," so if I try to cram too many things in there at once, some of it will begin to fall or fizzle out. Perhaps the only exception is when I am working on a collaborative task like an edited book.
As for my daily work habit, I focus better at night when I have more time and space to myself. Weekdays are full of interruptions -teaching, meetings, student consultations, report writing -and it's challenging to get into a writing mode with such frequent disruptions. So I do administrative writing during the day and save my translation work or research writing for the night.

MSI:
As an academic, do you find the act of translation compatible? I mean, do all these acts attune to one another, or does one adversely impact the other? Would you also elaborate on concurrent contributions through research in literature and literary translation?
MAQ: They are all interrelated, organic and deal with literature; so there is no conflict. We should not think that translation does not involve research. It involves a lot of reading around, delving into the cultures of the source and target languages, lots of interrogation and dissecting, reading between the lines, going behind the words and beneath the surface of the text, finding the right expressions and equivalences in the target language, and so forth. The process is similar, if not the same, in literary research. No writer lives in isolation, and no text stands by itself; they all exist in a shared space and shared environment. So, a good translator needs to familiarize himself with the history and milieu surrounding the source text. He should also have a good grip on the writer's canon. Say, when I was translating Tagore's short stories, it was not just the individual story before me that was important, but also the time and context in which it was written and the spirit the author sought to convey in it. For this, I had to engage in considerable research.
As for juggling my interests as a researcher and translator, I find it seamless as I love both and consider the two compatible and complimentary. You know, much of my research also centers on Bengali literature, as I have not only translated the works of Tagore and Rokeya but also published several scholarly books and articles on them. In fact, I took up translation and research on these two writers around the same time.

MSI:
Where does literary translation stand compared to creative writing and scholarly work?
MAQ: I think they all have a mutual and reciprocal relation, belong to the same family and serve the same cause. Any thought that they are disparate and exist in some kind of a pecking order is a fallacy. Yes, there is some degree of "sibling" rivalry among them, and each thinks of itself as superior to the other, but at the end of the day, they depend on one another and help in each other's success. Writers can be touchy and like to be patted by critics but say bad things about them when they receive hurtful reviews. Saul Bellow, for example, once dismissed critics as "Stalinists" (Menand) and John Osborne compared them to "dog[s]" ("It's a Dog Eat Dog"). Yet, writers depend on critics as much as critics depend on writers, and Samuel Johnson was right when he said: "I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works" (Somers). Likewise, translators depend on positive feedback from critics and their interpretative evaluation once the work has reached the market. You can say that they are like the three petals of an orchid, and the flower will not be complete without all three of them.

MSI:
When you decide to translate a book, do you read the whole text first? Do you also read existing criticism about the book? MAQ: Yes, I read the whole text, often more than once, before putting pen on paper, and I read not just to gather the basic facts but also to get my head around the inferred and implied meanings in the text. When I translate a literary text, I try to inhabit it and obsess over it as long as I am on the project. But I do not read the critics because, unfortunately, my experience with criticism has not been very positive. In this era of University rankings, when every academic has to produce a certain number of articles to meet their annual KPI, much of the critical output seems mediocre, writing for the sake of writing or professional survival. Such forced publication has little to offer to the genuine appreciation of a text. However, if there is a good critic on the writer or the particular text, it may be well worth the reading, but on the whole, I do not feel compelled to read criticism while translating a text, whether it be a short story, a poem, an essay or a novel.

MSI:
Are your strategies or techniques in translating literary pieces consistent, or you shift from one strategy or technique to another as you select different texts for translation?
MAQ: I have one overarching strategy in translation: stay "loyal" to the author and text but remain flexible for dynamic or idiomatic translation where necessary. Translation is not just an inter-lingual activity but also an inter-cultural activity. The translator does not only carry over a text from L1 to L2 but also from one culture to another. Therefore, sometimes he has to be idiomatic in translating certain words, phrases and expressions and adopt other techniques such as transposition, modulation, compensation and reduction to make matters intelligible to the target language readers. However, the translator should try not to compromise the true intention of the author or the text. Translators are bridge builders, they link people and cultures, and that requires some degree of pliability on the part of the translator. But translation is not transcreation; it does not need any refurbishing or revamping of the text -it is not what Dryden would call "imitation." Having said that, every author and text is different, and the translator has to adjust his techniques (which I consider different from the method) according to the demands of the text. Deploying the same scaffolding for every text would be highly restrictive for the translator.

MSI:
What do you think makes a person deserving of a literary translator? MAQ: I do not want to play the gatekeeper for translators or translation; that would be arrogant and ill-advised of me. I believe anyone can be a translator as long as the person has an excellent grasp of two languages and cultures. But literary translation is a serious challenge even for experienced translators. A good translator must be able to comprehend the subtleties of meaning in the source text and "localise" it to audiences in the target culture. That would require in-depth awareness of what works and would not work in the two languages and cultures. Besides, a good translator must avoid being over-literal in his translation and strive to find equivalent words that convey the same level or intensity of expression in the target language without compromising the overall "feel" of the source text. A good translator should also try to retain the author's voice, style, rhythm and figurative language in the translated text as much as possible.
I should also highlight that translation requires an extraordinary level of patience, diligence, devotion and discipline. The more a person has these qualities, the more he is likely to succeed in the task. Since a translator's responsibility, to use Dryden's metaphor, is to decorate the "vineyard" that doesn't belong to him, he also needs to possess considerable aesthetic sensibility.

MSI:
How do you deal with a word that has multiple layers of meaning in the original language? How do you end up selecting the best option? MAQ: If a word has more than one meaning, we must check the context to see which one fits better. Most of the time, it is easy and happens naturally, but sometimes you may have to wait for the "light-bulb" moment. Mind you, all literary writing involves a certain degree of intuition.
MSI: Do you agree that a translator is also a creative writer? Would you also extend your observations on the superiority and inferiority issue concerning the original and the translation?
MAQ: All writers are translators, and translators are writers. Didn't George Steiner once say, "All acts of communication are acts of translation?" (qtd. in Haque 7). Marcel Proust affirmed, "The duty and task of a writer are those of a translator" (Ragonneau). Both writers and translators are tied by the same thread, the act of writing; both deal with words, dwell in the aesthetic realm, experience some degree of spontaneity and emotion in the process of their writing; both are creative in their own ways; both require the unique ability and energy to transform thoughts into expressions and create a world by stringing words. You can say that writers and translators are like two sides of the same coin. Creative writing can be seen as translating a writer's life experience, sensitivities and imagination; his feelings, observations, perceptions, memories, insights and voice into a unique product, a text. As Mabel Lee says, "writing is the translation of psychological reality into language so that it can be shared with another person or persons" (1). So if the writer's objective is to share his inner reality with the people out there through his writing, the translator only helps in the process by repackaging the product into another language -something that the writer himself would want to do but cannot because of his language constraint. So, the translator facilitates the writer's product to circulate in the broader world, making it accessible to readers beyond the writer's language group and culture. This makes their relationship interdependent, symbiotic, mutual, and horizontal rather than vertical.

MSI: You might want to talk about what makes a book worth translating.
MAQ: Any work worth treasuring and preserving, re-reading and reflecting merits translation. It must move us emotionally and appeal to our intellect and spirit; a work written beautifully, has a compelling idea and memorable characters if it is a work of fiction. In short, it ought to have the potential to capture the imagination of readers in the receptor language. Besides, it ought to be translatable; if a book is written entirely in a dialect, it may be worthy of translation but not translatable.

MSI:
What kinds of books of Bengali literature -contemporary or classical -deserve international attention and therefore should be translated into English? Would you explain why they should be studied as world literature? MAQ: Any literary work, Bengali or not, that meets some of the above criteria should be translated for readers of other languages because, as human beings, we share much in common despite our cultural differences. Our core sentiments are the same, and so is 99.9% of our DNA. Who would not like to read Kalidasa's Sakuntala, Homer's Iliad or Shakespeare's Hamlet, even though they have different spatial-temporal settings and speak about different peoples, cultures and civilisations? We have a natural curiosity to know about the other; that is why Bengali works of merit will be read and appreciated by readers of other cultures and should be translated into different languages, especially English, the global lingua franca.

MSI:
As a translator, do you imagine any target audience when you translate? Do you think translation varies if a translator has a fixed audience in mind?

MAQ:
For any translation, the target language makes the target audience. Since I translate works from Bengali into English, I assume that anyone conversant with the English language might be interested in my work. It could be someone in Hong Kong, Singapore or the US. The work could travel to many places or not travel at all. Once the book is out, the translator has no control over its readership. So I do not know what you mean by a fixed readership. My translated works have been reviewed in newspapers and journals in Australia, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Malaysia, India, Singapore, the Philippines and the US. Did I have these people or publications in mind when I began translating? No, not in the obvious sense. As I said, I translate primarily for my culturally confused daughter -I jokingly call her ABCD (Australian born confused deshi) -and her generation in the Bengali diaspora. But I also have the other potential readers at the back of my mind, although I could not be sure about their location, culture and nationality. I believe having a fixed readership in mind would create an artificial boundary for the translator.
MSI: Now I would like to focus on the works you have translated. So far, you have translated some wonderful works of significant figures of Bengali literature, including Rabindranath Tagore, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Kazi Nazrul Islam. Let me begin with your translation of Tagore's stories -The Ruined Nest and Other Stories, published by Silverfish Books, Singapore, which contains twenty stories from the author's seminal short story collection titled Galpaguchha. First of all, would you introduce the book to readers?

MAQ:
The Ruined Nest and Other Stories, as you rightly pointed out, contains twenty of Tagore's best short stories and came out in 2014. The title story, known as "Nashta Nirh" in the original, was made into a movie, Charulata, by another Bengali genius and Tagore's student at Santiniketan and Visva-Bharati, Satyajit Ray. Some of the other stories include "The Postmaster," "Kabuliwala," "Assets and Debts" (Denapaona), "Punishment" (Shasti), "The Professor" (Adhyapak), "Number One" (Pahela Number) and "Balai." These are some of my all-time favorite stories by the polymath. I read them in childhood and adolescence, and they have since stayed with me. I wanted my daughter and everyone else to read these stories; that is why I took the effort of translating them into English, the language I have been brought up in since childhood. I must acknowledge that although Bengali is my mother tongue or home language, English was the medium of instruction throughout my education and has become my dominant language. Besides, I have lived most of my adult life in counties where my community language has been English. This gave me the confidence to translate the stories by the most influential Bengali writer of all time.
The book was well-received by international reviewers. For example, Amrit Sen, in his review in the Visva-Bharati Quarterly, a journal founded by Tagore himself, wrote: Mohammad A. Quayum has been one of the leading literary critics of Rabindranath Tagore's works in recent times and his recent volume of translation reveals his keen insight into the inflections of Rabindranath Tagore's short stories . . . This is a rich volume of translation offering the lay reader a fascinating glimpse into Tagore's range of subjects and subtlety of craft . . . Quayum refers in his introduction to the 'poignancy, variety and colour of Tagore's stories' and the translation succeeds in conveying them to the reader.  Likewise, in a review in South Asian Review, Priyadarshini Gupta commented: Quayum's extraordinary translation skill bridges [the] gap between the cultural necessities of one language into the cultural adaptabilities of the other. His translation does more than transfuse a cultural situation; it obliterates the reader's need to look for the original. The manipulation of words and the communication of an alien culture in English seems effortless, almost natural. Not only does the translator eradicate the foreignness in the translated text, he also manages to incorporate cultural and political content from the Bengali source text to create a richly hybridized text in English. (160) Anwar Ibrahim, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia and the current Opposition Leader, wrote a letter to me in 2016 from prison after reading The Ruined Nest to express his appreciation for the book and said: My humble apologies-I feel compelled to craft this short personal note to you to express my appreciation for the excellent rendering of The Ruined Nest and Other Stories in English. As an avid reader and admirer of R. Tagore, I've devoured almost all available works in English . . . and I've re-read Gitanjali almost like a mantra and Dak Ghar is so compelling that it continues to vibrate half a century after first reading it in school . . . Congratulations on the commendable effort. (Personal letter 2016) I included a biographical essay on Tagore and an extended introduction to the volume for the convenience of readers.

MSI:
What aspects did you take into consideration to select the stories for translation? Do the stories in the collection have some common themes that prompted you to pick them? And what are the other qualities that make the stories distinctive?

MAQ:
You know, what strikes me most about Tagore as a writer is his intention to transform India into an inclusive and cosmopolitan society. India was (and is) a very diverse society, with many ethnic, religious and language groups living side by side. This has been its strength as well as its blight as a nation. Besides, many decadent practices have throttled the country's growth over the centuries. These include the caste system, untouchability, gender hierarchy, child marriage, dowry system, Hindu-Muslim animosity, rural-urban divide, and so forth. Tagore's imagination was far-reaching, and he knew that India could never attain peace or prosperity without overcoming these impediments. So he pursued them in much of his writings, especially in the short stories set in rural Bengal, and you will notice that except for "Kabuliwala" and "The Ruined Nest" all the other stories in the volume are set in a rural area and address these vexatious issues. For example, in "Sacrifice" (Tayag), "Mahamaya," "Purification" (Shangskar) and "A Woman's Conversion to Islam" (Mussalmanir Galpa), Tagore probes the caste system and its toxic effect on society, while in "Assets and Debts" and "The Editor" he takes a swipe at the dowry system and its deadly consequences on the innocent, adolescent village girls and their families. In the book's titular story, "The Ruined Nest" and "Punishment," Tagore denounces the Indian patriarchy and its brutal dehumanisation of women, while in "Kabuliwala" and "A Woman's Conversion to Islam" he demonstrates the importance of overcoming the Hindu-Muslim rivalry and embracing one another in a spirit of harmony and fellowship. I chose "The Path to Salvation" (Muktir Upai), "The Professor," "Privacy" (Sadar O Andar) and "Number One," for their humor and stress that although Tagore is often seen as a morally and spiritually inclined writer, he also had a humorous side to his personality.

MSI:
Maybe you would also like to comment on the individuality of Tagore's storytelling technique and style. Did you face difficulties in comprehending some expressions, and if you did, what strategies did you adopt to carry across their meanings? Also, explain your general strategies and techniques of translating Tagore.
MAQ: Tagore, as you know, was first and foremost a poet, and this aspect of his genius affected his entire oeuvre, including the short stories. As a result, he often used florid and figurative language in his short stories. There is a kind of a lyrical and pictorial quality in his narrative, an elegance and grandiloquence rare in fictional prose. This heavily laden poetic prose of Tagore, with its frequent use of metaphors, similes, alliteration, assonance and other figurative expressions, put me in a dilemma. My concern was how to retain the beauty and splendor of Tagore's writing without sounding archaic or cliched in the translation. This led me to forgo metaphrasing from time to time and adopt a "sense to sense" or "task-oriented" approach in decoding and reencoding the text, where retaining the author's voice and intention became more critical than fidelity to the lexicon.
Another predicament was comprehending the nuances of the culture in which the stories are set. Of course, Tagore was a Bengali like me, but he was a Hindu-Bhramin-Bhramo and I am a Muslim, and although I grew up with Hindu friends in childhood and have read several of the Hindu religious texts, including the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, I had to tread carefully to ensure that I fully understood Tagore's religious references in the stories. Therefore, whenever something was not clear to me, I took time to do some homework. This slowed down the process considerably, but accuracy in these matters was far more important to me than speed.
The temporal setting of the stories also added to the complication because, as you know, culture is dynamic, and many practices in our culture have changed over time and, again, I had to engage in considerable reading and reflection to try to be as precise and unambiguous as I could in my translation of the time-specific references in the stories. Probably one or more of these stories had attracted the attention of the then-Publishing Manager of Macmillan, and he invited me to submit a manuscript by the end of 2010 so that the book could come out on time for the anniversary celebration. This was a big break for me, and I hastily put together the manuscript for an anthology. Again, it was well-received by the reviewers. Two Australian reviewers, in a jointly authored review, for example, commented, "Quayum's translation of Tagore's stories is exceptional in its retention of the subtleties of Bengali expression" (Dalal and Lokuge), and a review in Hong Kong's Cha: An Asian Literary Journal stated, " [Quayum's] translation shows a feel for Tagore's voice, vision and cultural milieu, and he is skillful with the suggestive undercurrents of Tagore's stories (Rao). George Polley, in his view in Asiatic, recommended the book "to readers throughout the English-speaking world" (160).
However, the book was not available locally when I wanted to teach it to my undergraduate students in Malaysia (I was then working in Malaysia). So I decided to bring out a Southeast Asian edition. This is how The Ruined Nest came about. But before it went for publication, I edited the stories one more time and included Tagore's longest short story (or novella), "Nashta Nirh" as "The Ruined Nest" in it. I thought it would be a great story to teach to my young students, and they all came to like it a lot despite their limited knowledge of Tagore and South Asian literature and culture.

MSI:
The Essential Rokeya, a very significant book of some of the finest work by Begum Rokeya, is no doubt one of your major contributions. You have translated quite a good number of her essays, stories and letters, which are included in this book. The book also contains selections from Motichur (A String of Sweet Pearls), Vols. I and II, along with two of her books in full titled Sultana's Dream and Abadrodhbashini (The Zenana Women). How did the idea of publishing such a book with the work of a great figure of the Bengal Renaissance come to your mind? Would you also share your experience of publishing this seminal anthology?

MAQ:
In fact, the idea of translating Rokeya did not occur to me suddenly; I had been nurturing the thought since I read Shamsun Nahar Mahmud's biography of her, Rokeya Jiboni (The Life of Rokeya), during my undergraduate years at Dhaka University. Bengali women are often seen as timid, ignorant, silent and submissive, but Rokeya indeed turned that notion on its head. She is the most heroic woman I can think of, so obviously, translating her work into English would help dispel the wrong stereotypes about our women. Besides, I knew that Rokeya would be an excellent role model for my daughter and her generation of Bengali girls in the diaspora. Another reason for translating Rokeya's works is to show that feminism is not necessarily a western construct. It has also been there in the South Asian imagination at least since the days of the Bengal Renaissance, when Swami Vivekananda, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra, Kazi Nazul Islam and Begum Rokeya were all trying to beat back patriarchy and emancipate our women. I thought the world had to know about this legendary woman, so I followed up my translation of Tagore's short stories with this project on Rokeya. I think Tagore's fictional characters Nirupama in "Assets and Debts," Chandara in "Punishment" and Charulata in "The Ruined Nest" are all Rokeya's sisters in spirit; they all share the courage and fortitude that Rokeya demonstrated in real life.
As for my experience of publishing The Essential Rokeya, I sent the manuscript to Brill Publishing of the Netherlands upon completion. You know that Brill Publishing, founded in 1683, is a very well-respected publisher with a vigorous vetting process in place. They sent the manuscript to two external evaluators, and once the reports were in, which were largely favorable, they agreed to sign a contract with me. The whole process from beginning to end took me about three years.

MSI:
There is much to talk about Begum Rokeya, who was simultaneously a fiction writer, essayist, social reformer, activist, and educationist. Could you illustrate more about her, especially with reference to her English writing and her great Bengali literary works that deserve translation and wide circulation? MAQ: Rokeya was a trilingual writer; she wrote in Bengali, English and Urdu, but most of her writings were in Bengali. She has left behind only three pieces and a few letters in the English language, a short story, "Sultana's Dream," and two essays: "God Gives, Man Robs" and "Educational Ideals for the Modern Indian Girls." "Sultana's Dream" is, of course, Rokeya's most famous work. It was first published in the Indian Ladies' Magazine in 1905 and later as a book in 1908. It ought to be emphasized that the story appeared ten years before Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist utopian novel, Herland (1915). Rokeya wrote the story when her husband, Sakhawat Hossain, an England-returned Deputy Magistrate, had gone outstation for work; "To pass the time, I wrote the story" (Quadir 252). Rokeya recollects. When her husband came back after two days, he curiously enquired how Rokeya had spent the time in his absence. She then showed him the story, and Sakhawat, wrapped in curiosity, read the whole story standing at the entrance of the house and, after finishing, mumbled in utmost pride, "A terrible revenge!" (Quayum 9). It is, indeed, a remarkable story in which Rokeya took three thousand years of India's history and turned it upside down. She cast a fatal blow to Indian patriarchy by showing that although men have been degrading women by comparing them to slaves and crows, in fact, women were intellectually and morally superior to men. They can run a state better without engaging in violence and corruption; they are also more imaginative, dynamic and aesthetically gifted than men. She makes fun of them by playing at their own game, where women run the state and men are confined to the kitchen and, to add insult to injury, they are endowed with the traditionally feminine attributes of being irrational and timid. It is hard to imagine that a woman who was brought up in the strictest of purdah, had no formal education and was forbidden from learning both Bengali and English, could come up with such a bold, visionary story and write it so elegantly too.
Her essay, "God Gives, Man Robs," is about how Muslim men deprive their women of the right to an education enshrined in the religion. "Educational Ideals for the Modern Indian Girls" is also about women's education and how best to educate them so that they can retain their ethnic and religious identity and yet move forward to keep pace with the modern way of life. We ought to remember that Rokeya was an educationist; she set up one of the first schools for Muslim girls in British Bengal. So throughout her writing, Bengali or English, she remains preoccupied with the idea of education. This is another similarity between Rokeya and Tagore because Tagore, too, was an educationist and set up several institutions, including a university, at Santiniketan, West Bengal, and devoted much of his writings on how to modernize India through education. Both of them worked relentlessly to develop an indigenous model of education to replace the colonial model that they believed corroded the Indian mind. I will not go into the details of Rokeya's Bengali writings here, as this answer is already quite long. However, in summary, all her writings in different languages and genres pivot on two interrelated themes: emancipation of women and education of women or the emancipation of women through education.

MSI:
Why did you think Begum Rokeya's work should be translated into English? What particular aspects of her writing provoked you to venture upon translating her work? How is she relevant in the framework of world literature? Do you think she stands tall in the line of great feminists of the world? MAQ: Rokeya is a pioneering feminist writer who wrote with extraordinary zeal and courage. It is refreshing to know that a woman of her time -when Muslims were very backward and orthodox in their beliefs -and an autodidact to boot, could think and write the way she did. I believe her feminist tracts match in originality, insight and energy some of the best feminist works of western literature. As I mentioned earlier, her story "Sultana's Dream" was a groundbreaking narrative in the history of literature. So translating Rokeya should not come as a surprise. What is more surprising is that it took so long to discover her genius. She deserves far more global attention than she has received so far.

MSI:
Could you share your experience of translating Begum Rokeya's work, especially her essays and stories for The Essential Rokeya? Also, tell us in brief about the selections from her book Motichur (A String of Sweet Pearls) that you have translated and included in the anthology.

MAQ:
Translating Rokeya was an arduous but exciting process. I enjoyed every moment of working on it. But I did experience some challenges, too, the foremost being retaining her tone and the unique way she expresses her ideas and emotions by mixing humor with anger and irony with wit and satire. She has an oratorical style in her writing, and it was quite difficult to preserve it in the target language. Besides, Rokeya uses Urdu and Persian expressions from time to time, and I had to consult my Pakistani and Afghan friends to make sure that I understood them correctly.
As for the selections from Motichur, Vols. I and II, I translated only three essays from volume I and four stories from volume II. I also included five essays and three stories from her uncollected works, several letters and the two books you mentioned earlier. I regret that I left out the novel. However, the good news is that Brill has invited me to work on a revised and expanded edition of the book, and I plan to include the novel and several more essays and stories from the two volumes of Motichur in this new edition.

MSI:
You have recently translated Kazi Nazrul Islam's outstanding novel Kuhelika as The Revolutionary, which is a collaborative translation with Professor Niaz Zaman. I am curious to know what you think about collaboration in literary translation. Maybe you would like to offer your critical comments on collaborative translation as well.
MAQ: I am not very enthusiastic about working on a translation project with someone else. It can result in differences of opinion and bog the work down. After all, no two translators think or work alike, interpret a text in the same way and express their thoughts similarly. But if the relationship works out and is mutually respectful, it can bring positive energy to the task. So I believe there is no one answer to the question. Like everything else, it has pros and cons.

MSI:
Professor Niaz Zaman is one of the leading translators of Bengali literature, and in this project, you have worked with her. How was your experience of collaborating on the translation with her?

MAQ:
The experience was good. Professor Zaman was my teacher, and later, my colleague at the University of Dhaka, and it was a privilege to work with her. Perhaps because of the nature of our relationship, it worked out well for both of us.

MSI:
Could you introduce Kazi Nazrul Islam and the novel Kuhelika? Why do you think the novel needs to reach a global readership? In what respects does the novel stand apart from other works by the author?

MAQ:
Kazi Nazrul Islam is our national poet and one of the key figures of the Bengal Renaissance -a literary-cultural-intellectual movement that took place in British Bengal from the early nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. Nazrul was a multifaceted genius like Rabindranath Tagore, and like his senior contemporary, he wrote in diverse literary forms, although, like Tagore, he was primarily a poet. For example, in addition to his numerous volumes of poetry, Nazrul has left behind three collections of short stories and three novels. Kuhelika is Nazrul's last novel. It is about a young man, Jahangir, and his nationalist aspirations to free India from British rule. Jahangir is a revolutionary, much like his creator, who wants to foment a revolution against the Raj. However, by the end of the novel, Jahangir is arrested, tried and sentenced to transportation for life. Nazrul shows how difficult it was to uproot the invaders. He also wants to portray how much the Muslims sacrificed for India's independence, although they were often neglected and excluded by the majority of the Hindus. The novel has a second plot that depicts Jahangir's romantic relations, first with his friend's sister Bhuni and then with his revolutionary icon Joyoti's daughter Champa. This part of the novel explores Jahangir's complex relationship with women, arising from his failure to accept that his mother was once a prostitute. The author shows that his idealistic hero is also mentally disturbed because of his personal past; the self-sacrificing protagonist comes with a significant character flaw.
We decided to translate the novel because it provides a slice of Nazrul's revolutionary philosophy which permeates his entire writing. I was personally interested because after translating Tagore and Rokeya, it was appropriate to focus on Nazrul, their contemporary and a writer of the Bengal Renaissance.

MSI:
Translating Kazi Nazrul Islam is more arduous, I believe, than many other writers and poets of Bengali literature. His lyrical outpourings, extensive allusions, rhetorical expressions, and revolutionary spirit, among others, must pose a threat to any translator. What challenges, then, would you mention about translating his work? And you can note specific areas of challenges with reference to your translation of Kuhelika. Did you develop any special techniques to translate Kazi Nazrul Islam's work? MAQ: Your description suits Nazrul's poetry perfectly but not so much his fiction. Nazrul is fiery in his poetry, but he is rather level-headed in his fiction. I do not think the kind of zeal we encounter in his poetry would work in a novel where the writer had to construct a plot and create logically consistent characters to make them believable. I found his prose fluid, relatively modern, and highly readable. Yes, he occasionally uses some borrowed words from other languages, but they did not pose any significant challenge to us. Frankly, I enjoyed translating the novel thoroughly. It was a happier experience compared to all my other translation projects.

MSI:
You have been teaching English literature at various universities at home and abroad for a long time, maybe more than four decades. Translation Studies is taught as a discipline in several universities; since it is now an established subject, numerous theories are also taught to students. Do you think theories help translators progress confidently? When you translate, do you have any theories in mind? MAQ: I do not know if creative writers ever read the theories. Perhaps the same should apply to translators. Translation is a hands-on activity, and theories only create a cage for the translator. I am not sure if familiarity with the theories will help to build a translator's confidence. Yes, I have read some theories only because I want to be aware of them as a university faculty, but I do not think they play any constructive role in my translation process. What I need as a translator is clarity of mind and lots of free-floating energy to keep me focused on my work.

MSI:
Bengali literature has not drawn wide international attention, but it has merit to reach a global readership. Due to a lack of quality translation, we could not draw the attention of international publishers. Many scholars and translators are now trying to fill the gap in their limited ways. How can the culture of literary translation be expanded, and how can we ensure quality translation and wider circulation? MAQ: Like any other literary tradition, translation takes time to grow and bear fruit. As an art and craft, translation is still new in our country, and as you mentioned, only recently there has been an effort to fill the void. But still now, from where I live, I see only a handful of people seriously engaged in translation. This could be because these are the only people publishing internationally. I consider it absolutely pointless to publish a translated work locally. Who is the intended reader then? Every Bangladeshi can speak and read Bengali, so why should they read a work in translation? Furthermore, we have a strong attachment to the mother tongue because of our language history. It is not like India, where there are several regional languages, so if a work is translated from Bengali to English, speakers of other languages may pick it up. Ours is a monolingual society, with English as the distant second language but with no official status. So a translated work published locally will at best circulate among a small group of friends and acquittances of the translator. Besides, as you know, books published in Dhaka go nowhere. Our publishers have no distribution networks to disseminate books internationally or even to India. In addition to that, as far as I know, most of the local publishers lack the necessary infrastructure to bring out quality publications -no vetting process, no editorial support, no marketing. This instantly affects the image of the output. Unfortunately, we live in an era of cutthroat capitalism, where every product has to be branded, packaged and ranked. So if globally ranked publishers (yes, book publishers are also ranked like the academic journals) do not publish our translated works, they will not end up in western libraries or get the attention of first-rate journals for review. Therefore, the best remedy to the current situation is to get our works published by outlets with international recognition and good distribution facilities. I believe talent is there; perhaps we need some extra effort and a change of attitude.
MSI: Do you have any translation projects in your hand at present? What about your plans for future projects? MAQ: Yes, as I said earlier, I am working on a revised and expanded edition of The Essential Rokeya for Brill Publishing. I am also translating a couple of works by Begum Sufia Kamal. I hope at least one of these will come out by the end of the year.

MSI:
Thank you very much, Professor Mohammad A. Quayum, for making this interview possible.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Mohammad Shafiqul Islam is Professor in the Department of English, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh. His research interests encompass, but are not limited to, Postcolonialism, World Literature, Translation Studies, Anthropocene, and South Asian Literature. Other than scholarly work in literature, he is committed to creative writing, especially poetry, and literary translation. Dr. Islam is the author of two poetry collections, most recently Inner State, and the translator of Humayun Ahmed: Selected Short Stories and Aphorisms of Humayun Azad. His research articles, poetry, and translation have appeared in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Critical Survey, Journal of World Literature, South Asian Review, Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, English in Education, Journal of Poetry Therapy, Massachusetts Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poem: International English Language Quarterly, Dibur Lunch Ticket, Stag Hill Literary Journal, and elsewhere. His work has been anthologized in a number of books such as The Book of Dhaka: A City in Short Fiction, The Best Asian Poetry, An Ekushey Anthology: 1952-2022, When the Mango Tree Blossomed, Kazi Nazrul Islam: Selections, and Poems from the SAARC Region. He has also presented a good number of papers in international conferences and participated in workshops on literary translation and creative writing, including the ones organized by East Anglia University and the University of London, UK, and San Pellegrino University, Italy. Dr. Islam is currently at work on his third collection of poetry, a research project, and a few translation projects.