Contemporary Bangladeshi Poetry

Description

Poetry. This is a collection of poetry by 38 contemporary Bangladeshi poets, selected and translated by Hassanal Abdullah, made possible (in part) with a grant from the Queens Council on the Art with public funds from the New York City Council of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Poets include Humayun Azad, Rafiq Azad, Nirmalendu Goon, Saheed Quaderi, Shamsur Rahman, Naznin Seamon, et al.

"This thoughtful sensitive, and well-balanced collection presents a full range of contemporary Bengali poetry from the most famous authors to emerging voices. All share not only a sense of form and evocative language, but also the tragic history that has shaped their outcries and imagination. Through the lens of suffering, the poets have salvaged elements of beauty and moments of comedy. This is a beautiful collection to be savored from its panorama of Bangladeshi poetry made accessible through an elegant English translation."—Joan Digby

"Although there was great modern poetry in, say, Arabic (Kahil Gibran) and Urdu (Mohaamed Ibal), there was not an organized "modernism" in the Arab world or in the rest of British-ruled India as there was in Bengal. This make Bangladeshi potmodernism different from poetry written in Middle Eastern or South Asian in a postmodern time...Hassanal Abullah, who leads multiple lives as a poet, teacher, and political and civil-right activist...has here produced poems in English that yet give us the glorious past fifty years of achievement in Bangladeshi poetry."—Nicholas Birns

Reviews

REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY BANGLADESHI POETRY (EXCERPT)

Contemporary Bangladeshi Poetry translated by Hassanal Abdullah offers a captivating
introduction to a considerable range of previously unexplored poetry of Bangladesh. This
anthology is a long overdue achievement because it is the first attempt to represent the full scope
and diversity of modern and contemporary poetry from Bangladesh into well-wrought English
translations. Beginning with the generation after the two most well know, modern Bangladeshi
poets, Rabindranath Tagore, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and Kazi
Nazrul Islam, whose moniker “rebel poet” derives from his astonishing poem “The Rebel” which
taunted the Britishers with lines like “I am the king of the great upheaval,” Abdullah’s anthology
includes 38 poets who were born between 1917 and 1983. What kinds of poetry will the reader
encounter in this anthology? Well, just about every kind of poem that you might expect from a
country that cherishes poetry and the popular song: love poems, prose poems, political poems,
elegiac poems, sonnets, occasional poems, poems in numerical sections, philosophical poems,
historical poems—in short, a wide range of modes and styles that suitably reflect the major
ReReRReviewpoetical trends of modernism and post-modernism. Make no mistake, this
anthology’s selections are by no means predictable, restrained, subdued, or safe. Quite the
contrary. In a country were a writer can be attacked with a machete for a perceived religious
insult, these are volatile choices: some offbeat, some unconventional, some heterodox.

—Bill Wolak

Original poet and co-translator of Your Lover’s Beloved: 51 Ghazals by Hafez

Author Bio