Mahfuzur Rahman makes some points on a volume of poetry.
Most of us Bengalis profess to love our mother tongue. Most of us also think of the language movement as a quest for national identity. Twenty-first February 1952 stands out as a symbol of both. It speaks for Bengali language and identity. Does it also speak for other languages in the world?
Muhammad Habibur Rahman, eminent jurist, writer of scores of books, and himself a veteran of the language movement, apparently thinks so, as do many others. The United Nations declaration of the day as the International Mother Language Day underlined the symbolism.
There is poetic hyperbole lii the title of the book. In less rhetorical terms, how do other nations and communities see and feel about their own language? Are they perhaps as emotionally attached to their mother tongue as we think we are to ours? Oneis tempted to turn the title of this book on its head and ask: Do all languages speak for themselves? Muhammad Habibur Rahman (the strange use of the initial H does not disguise the well-known authors middle name from well-read Bengalis, to many of whom he is Justice Habibur Rahman) sets out to explore.
The first of its kind, the book is primarily an anthology of poems about the mother tongue of the poet. Justice Habibur Rahman leaves his readers in no doubt about the importance he attaches to the mother tongue and his highly discursive introduction is strewn with quotations to show how others have valued their language. The anthology itself contains some one hundred and fifty poems, mainly translations into English and some written in the English language. The author humbly writes that he has been able to explore “only’ seventy languages in this “pitifully incomplete t’ anthology. There is little need for this modesty, however. Nobody has attempted a work of this nature and seventy is no mean number in this case. The book is a result of painstaking search and tenacious labour of love. He fully deserves our congratulations.
The poems have, of course, to be read in order to see the range of feelings that the mother tongue evokes and no summary can be adequate. The range is wide. As poems, many of the pieces do not make the grade, though some do. There is a wide variety of sentiments expressed in a wide variety of ways. There are notes of despair: “Our language is shedding tears all over! because its own children are deserting it†(p. 44); bland prescriptions: “Be proud not because you speak English/Be proud only if in your mother tongue… you think and / express your thought†(p. 3), or simplicity: “And I love my language very much†(p. 66); defiance: “And we shall preserve thee, our dear Russian speech (p. 4) or “You can beat my skin! You can eat my flesh! But you cannot take away! The right to my language†(p. 104) ; overdone sentimentality- “One who does not love the native tongue? Is worse than putrid fish and beast†(p. 143); an almost comic piece (p. 55); playfulness (p. 102). Something close to chauvinism appears on p.105; a fine poem on the rich diversity of world languages is on p. 153; on page 115 the poet wants to write in a foreigii language to “lose myself in the worldâ€; mother tongue is seen in all its splendour, from the scream of the mother in labour pain to the language of first love. One could go on, wading through seventy languages, from Albanian to Yiddish, to Zula
Most of the poems are by little-known writers. But there are some well-known names: Anna Akhinatova, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Brodsky, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Jalaluddin Rumi- (though in only two lines), Carl Sandburg, and Czeslaw Miosz. Bengali stalwarts Rabindranath Tagore, Michael Madhusudan Datta, and Atul Prasad Sen appear on these pages, the latter with “Moder gorob moder asha’ in nanslation, as does Abdul Hakim with his famous rebuke of those Bengalis who despise Bangla.
The anthology presents the pieces in the original English as well as translations into English. It is, as usual, difficult to say how much of the original has been lost in translation. It is fair to say, however, that in the majority of the cases the English translation is palpably unsatisfactory The worst example is. perhaps, the piece on page 86, a translation from Japanese.
But what do we mean by language? In the present context the answeris language used as a means of communication, spoken or written, within a given commi.inity, distinguishing it from languages of other communities. In plain words, it is national language we are talking about. It is closely linked with national identity but obviously they are not identical. There are a number of poems in this anthology that have more to do with national identity than with language per se. The poems on pages 10-11, 53, 69-70, 117 and elsewhere talk about national identity rather than the mother tongue. A more serious concern is the inclusion of poems that have little bearing on national language or even identity In the poem on page 8 the sea has nerves, waves write poems and pebbles clatter words, which is language in a special sense; the art of writing is the theme of the poem on page 9; Joseph Brodsky’s piece on page 25 is not on national language, despite the allusion to “Russian languageâ€; Lu Chin (p. 29) talks of language in general and how ‘the poet crafts ideas! into elegant language’; the word the poet forgot (p. 45) has nothing to do with his mother tongue; the language that the piece on page 1.64 speaks of is the language of flowers, not national language. Far from illuminating, as the author suggests in the introduction, this is confusing. Neither is it necessary to be overly attracted to the word “language†without the context. Omission of such poems would have meant a slimmer volume, hut a much neater one. I note incidentally that the most famous lyric on twenty-first February (Abdul Gaffar Chowdhury p. 34) has no mention of “mother tongue†or “language†and is still a poem on language.
The book suffers grievously from lack of proper editing, a fate that afflicts most publica-tons in the country. Mistakes abound and cannot all be attributed to the printer’s devil alone. Reading a poem, the reader would also wish to find out without great difficulty what language the original vas written in. On many pages he would be disappointed and-would need to go to the notes about the authors at the end of the book for help. A further problem arises with some of the poems written with the tragedy of twenty-first February as the background. For non-Bengali readers, I think it was essential to explain that background, even at the risk of repetition. In its absence, Abdul Gaffar Chowdhury s piece, for example, would perhaps seem rather perplexing to foreign minds. Finally, the blurb of the book is wholly perfunctory and quite meaningless.
None of these are meant to detract the value of this unique book, Forthose who care about the mother tongue and the rapidly diminishing diversity of world languages, it is well worth reading.
Mahfuzur Rahman is a former United Nations Economist and occasional contributor to The Daily Star.