Contributors to the Rabindranath Section of Parabaas
Professor Alokeranjan Dasgupta teaches Indology at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany. In addition to about 12 volumes of poetry, and many essays in Bengali, English, and German, he has also done many translations of Indian literature into German and European literature into Bengali. He received many prizes for his work, viz., Goethe Award in Germany (1985), Rabindra-Award (1987), Ananda Award (1985) and the Sahitya Akademi (in 1992, for Marami Karat, a book of poems).
Articles in Parabaas:
My Tagore (Text of a lecture given in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1993).
"Der Vater" and "Kinderleid" - 2 poems of Gunter Grass translated into Bengali by Alokeranjan Dasgupta
Amitabha Sen is a Chicago based former mathematical physicist now with a Swiss investment bank, UBS. He has been a regular contributor of cartoons, sketches and articles (in English - which have been translated into Bengali) to Parabaas.
Selected Articles in Parabaas:
The Legacy of Mr. Carr, A Gift for the Gifted (Essay on Indian Mathematician Ramanujan; Parabaas-10)
Namib-er Morubhumite (Travelogue on Namibia, translated into Bengali; Parabaas-1)
Sketches (Sketches,Parabaas-3)
Ana Jelnikar was born in Slovenia and educated in both Ljubljana and London where she is currently completing a PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her focus is on exploring the links between Rabindranath Tagore and the Slovenian poet Srecko Kosovel. She is the translator of the first Slovenian edition of C. G. Jung's Man and His Symbols, as well as six collections of contemporary Slovenian poetry, published in both America and Slovenia. Her most recent publication is an anthology of Six Slovenian Poets (Arc Publications, 2006) which she co-translated with Stephen Watts and Kelly Lenox Allan. Jelnikar is one of the founders and organizers of the annual Golden Boat International Poetry Translation Workshop in Slovenia. The name of the workshop alludes to the title of Srecko Kosovel's post-humously published collection of poems, which, in turn, is a direct reference to Tagore's poem Sonar Tari (The Golden Boat). Scholarly work is forthcoming in North America.
Articles in Parabaas:
Let him speak in his own voice:
Three books by Uma Das Gupta (Book reviews).
Anirban Dasgupta is the son and foremost student of Pandit Buddhadev Dasgupta, a well known exponent of sarod. From him Anirban has absorbed a vast repertoire of sarod compositons and performance techniques. Anirban has also been trained as a Software Engineer and pursues an engineering career alongside his music. He is currently based in Dracut, MA, USA.
Rabindra-Sangeet as a Resource for Indian Classical Bandishes (Essay, with audio samples)
Professor Brian Hatcher currently chairs the Department of Religion at the Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, Illinois. His publications include Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal and Eclecticism and Modern Hindu Discourse. He is currently translating Saradindu Bandyopadhyay's work from Bengali, some of which have been already published. More information can be found in his website.
Articles in Parabaas:
Aji Hate Satabarasha Pare: What Tagore says to us a Century Later - a Lecture (in English) by Brian Hatcher.
Chirantan Kundu obtained graduate degrees from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. Currently he is based in California as a software professional. He has been associated with Bengali little magazines since he was young. His Bengali articles regularly appear in Parabaas.
Selected articles in Parabaas:
Jhnakidarshan (a satire in Bengali on the state of Tagore appreciation)
Professor Clinton Seely is in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the author of A Poet Apart: A Literary Biography of the Bengali Poet Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) (1990). With Leonard Nathan, he has recently translated Ramprasad's songs in a book Grace and Mercy in Her Wild Hair: Selected Poems to the Mother Goddess.
Articles in Parabaas:
Translating Between Media: rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray (Text of a lecture in English, given in 2000)
Jibananander Upare Kichhu Chhinna Chinta - by Clinton Seely (in Bengali)
NibiD Paath - Clinton Seely's Jibanananda - by Ankur Saha (a review in Bengali of Clinton Seely's book on Jibanananda)
Damayanti Bhattacharyya sings mostly Rabindra-sangeet, and also songs by Atulprasad, Rajanikanta, D.L. Roy, etc. She had secured the first position (in First Class) in music in Vishva-Bharati, and also later acquired a Master's degree in the First Class from the Rabindra-Bharati University. She learned music from stalwarts such as Kanika Bandyopadhyay, Nilima Sen, and Subinoy Roy. Besides many performances in India, she has also performed in the Far Eastern countries in a team led by Nilima Sen. She can be contacted through Parabaas.
Songs in Parabaas:
Du'ti Rabindrasangeet (Two songs of Rabindranath from her first album.)
Dhriti Bhattacharya is currently pursuing a PhD in Materials Science at the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.
Dipali Chakraborti was a head of the Department of English of the Shillong College, India, before retiring to Chandannagar, West Bengal.
Articles in Parabaas:
I (Translation of Tagore's poem Ami.)
Indrani Chakrabarti studied English literature and Mass Communication at Jadavpur University, Calcutta. She has been working in the FM Radio section of the Times of India group for the past six years. Her hobbies are: books, movies of Satyajit Ray, Rabindrasangeet and Impressionist paintings.
Articles in Parabaas:
A People's Poet or a Literary Deity? (Essay)
Indranil Dasgupta was educated at St. Stephen's College, Delhi and at Boston University, from where he obtained a PhD in Physics. Besides writing, he also dabbles with many other things having to do with Bengali language and software, including Parabaas-Axar, a versatile wordprocessing application. The first Bengali novel to appear in the internet was by him (Rahuler Diary Theke). He has many articles in Bengali in Parabaas.
Selected Articles by Indranil Dasgupta in Parabaas:
The Trip to Heaven - Sunil Gangopadhyay (Short story translated into English)
Gora'r Rabindranath (bengali article on Tagore's novel Gora)
Loke Bole Aloukik(Complete Fiction; in Bengali)
Shakti'r Gadya (Essay on Shakti Chattopadhyay's Fictions; in Bengali)
Jayita Ghosh received training in Rabindrasangeet in Santiniketan from Santideb Ghosh, Kanika Bandyopadhyay, and Nilima Sen. Later she earned post-graduate degree in music from the Visva-Bharati. She can be contacted through her webpage.
Songs in Parabaas:
Du'ti Rabindrasangeet (1) (Two songs of Rabindranath)
Du'ti Rabindrasangeet (2) (Two songs of Rabindranath)
Jyoti Prakash Datta (1939-1998), an engineer and accountant by profession held deep interest in literature and liberal religions. Translating Rabindranath Tagore's non-fiction held a strong appeal for him in their potential to communicate Tagore’s world-view among a non-Bengali readership. He was also inspired by the absence of perceptive English translation of the majority of Tagore's essays, discourses and letters.
Jyoti Prakash was closely associated with the Brahmo Samaj and the Unitarian Universalist Association. He lectured in India, the Netherlands, United Kingdom and the United States of America, and has been published on a wide variety of topics in The Statesman, Tattwa-Kaumudi, Indian Messenger, Perspectives, ISTD Review etc. He was working on the Santiniketan translations and the book ISO 9000 : A Roadmap for Design, Installation and Implementation of Quality Management Systems at the time of his death.
Articles in Parabaas:
Selections from Santiniketan (Translation of Rabindranath's Santiniketan Addresses)
Ketaki Kushari Dyson is the author of several titles in Bengali and English in a diversity of genres: poetry, fiction, drama, essays, literary translation, and research-based books. She has four books relating directly to Rabindranath Tagore : Rabindranath o Victoria Ocampor Sandhane (Navana, Calcutta, 1985, a novel interwoven with her preliminary researches on Tagore and Victoria Ocampo, which received an Ananda Puraskar in 1986); In Your Blossoming Flower-Garden: Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo (Sahitya Akademi, 1988, based on her researches in India, Britain, France, and Argentina); I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems of Rabindranath Tagore (Bloodaxe Books, 1991, a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation); Ronger Rabindranath (a study of Tagore's colour vision and his use of colours in his writings and visual art, written jointly with other scholars, Ananda, Calcutta, 1997, for which she shared an Ananda Puraskar with co-author Sushobhan Adhikary in the same year); and Memories of Argentina and Other Poems.
Articles in Parabaas:
Biographical Sketch of Buddhadeva Bose
Two Poems from Bandir Bandana by Buddhadeva Bose (translated into English by Ketaki Kushari Dyson)
On the Trail of Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo(Essay)
Rabindranath Tagore and His World of Colours(Essay)
The Year 1400 - by Rabindranath Tagore(translated from Bengali)
On the Wings of Hummingbirds, Rabindranath Tagore’s Little Poems: An Invitation to a Review-cum-Workshop (Book review-cum-workshop)
Dialogue between Karna and Kunti (poem)
How hard should we try? – Questions of detail in literary translation (Book review)
A Tremendous Comet: Michael Madhusudan Dutt (Book review)
Anandamath, or The Sacred Brotherhood: A Book Review (Book review)
Since her birth in 1948, Liesbeth (Elisabeth Catharina) Meyer has been living in the Hague, the Netherlands. She works at the administration office of the Advisory Council for Science and Technology Policy and has been a member of the Theosofical Society Point Loma-Covina, the Hague, since 1995. Mother of three grown-up children, she hopes to visit Shantiniketan one day in the near future!
Articles in Parabaas:
Tagore in the Netherlands (Includes many letters exchanged between Tagore and Frederik van Eeden)
Dr. Martin Kämpchen is a writer on India and a translator of Tagore from Bengali to German. He lives at Santiniketan, India. For more information visit his website.
Rabindranath Tagore in Germany (essay)
Meenakshi Mukherjee has taught in several universities in India and abroad, the longest spell being at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She now lives in Hyderabad. Her publications include The Twice Born Fiction (1971, Reprinted 2000), The Perishable India (2000), Another India: An Anthology of Contemporary Indian Fiction and Poetry, (co-edited with Nissim Ezekiel; 1990), Uponyas-e Ateet: Itihas o Kalpa-itihas (2003), Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (1985, Paperback 1984), and The Virgin Fish of Babughat (translation of Lokenath Bhattacharya's Babughater Kumari Machh, 2004).
She has received the Sahitya Akademi award in 2003.
Articles in Parabaas:
Yogayog (Nexus) by Rabindranath Tagore: A Book Review (Review of Hiten Bhaya's translation of Yogayog.)
Nabaneeta Dev Sen was born in 1938 in Calcutta into a family of well known poets -- her father was Narendra Dev and her mother was Radharani Devi, who also wrote under the name Aparajita Devi. Her name was chosen for her by Rabindranath Tagore himself... (more).
Nandan Datta writes from an early age. He has been published widely in the print and electronic media. Reading, writing and travel are among his interests.
Muktadhara'r Dhananjay Bairagi: Kichhu Bhabna, Kichhu Prashna (an article in Bengali on a play by Tagore)
Nandini Gupta is currently in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. Prior to this, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, working in Plasma Physics. Her translations of Sunil Gangopadhyay's poems have appeared in Two Lines: Cells and Chandrabhaga.
Translations by Nandini Gupta in Parabaas:
An Emperor of Life (from Buddhadeva Bose's Sab Peyechhir Deshe. Also,
The Land Where I Found It All (Buddhadeva Bose's memoir Sab Peyechhir Deshe
is being serialized in Parabaas)
Poems by Buddhadeva Bose:
Now the Battle is Against the World
The Moment of Creation
Rain and Wind
To a Dead Woman
Poems by Sankha Ghosh:
The Storm of Desire
Fool
Four Poems from Pnajore DnaRer Shabda ('Oars in My Ribs')
White Tombstones
At the Bend
The Holy
Poems by Sunil Gangopadhyay:
This Hand Has Touched
Easy
Poems by Sunil Kumar Nandi:
Land
A Strange Farce
No
Poems by Rabindranath Tagore:
Grateful
Narasingha P. Sil went to the Presidency College and Calcutta University as well as the University of Oregon, obtaining his doctoral degree in English history from the latter institution. He has published monographs and journal articles on the history of Renaissance England and Renascent Bengal around the globe. He is presently Professor of History at Western Oregon University.
Artilces in Parabaas:
Devotio Humana: Rabindranath's Love Poems Revisited
(Essay)
Rabindranath and World-Life
(Translation of Niharranjan Ray's essay Rabindranath o Vishwajiban)
Nilanjana Basu has been regularly illustrating for Parabaas. She is currently based in California.
Rezwana Chaudhuri Banya came from her birth-place Dhaka, Bangladesh, on a scholarship to study Rabindra-sangeet at Santiniketan. There, she had the opportunity to learn under the loving care of the famous exponent of Rabindranath's music, Kanika bandyopadhyay. Endowed with a sweet voice and a unique distinctive style of her own, Banya (the name is after Labanya, the character is Tagore's Sesher Kavita) is a very popular and well-regarded musician with many recordings to her credit.
Amar Shilpijiban Sambandhe du-ekTi Katha (an article in Bengali)
Samiran Nandy is a professional photographer based in Santiniketan.
Shailesh Parekh (b. 1943, in Mumbai), after primary schooling in Ahmedabad attended Elphinstone College in Mumbai and continued his studies at the University of California, Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from where he obtained a Master's degree in Chemical Engineering in 1965. Upon returning to India after his studies, he worked for several years with the then Esso in Mumbai, before starting his own manufacturing operations in Ahmedabad in 1969, where he now lives. He has always had an interest in the fine arts in general and literature in particular. Seven years ago, he began to translate the poetry of Tagore into Gujarati from English. He taught himself Bengali in the past year. His publications include a transcreation of Naibedya and Shesh Lekha published by WRITERS WORKSHOP and a bilingual volume containing Tagore's English Gitanjali with a parallel Gujarati transcreation by Parekh. His English transcreation of Prantik will soon be published by WRITERS WORKSHOP and so will a bilingual volume of Shesh Lekha.
Artilces in Parabaas:
A Poet's Dream: Discovery of Tagore Texts (Essay)
Professor Sol Arguello Scriba is with the University of Costa Rica, San Jose, Costa Rica. She has been giving a seminar course on Tagore for more than ten years.
Articles in Parabaas:
Rabindranath Tagore at the University of Costa Rica (Essay).
Somjit Dutt is at SUNY, Stony Brook, where he is pursuing a PhD in mathematics. He is seriously interested in many subjects: history, physics, music, philosophy, linguistics, etc. As a child, he has been published in Sandesh and later on, he had published articles in The Statesman.
A Foreign Shine and Assumed Gestures: The Ersatz Tagore of the West (Essay)
The major area of research of Sumita Chakraborty, a Professor of Bengali in the Burdwan University, is on the twentieth century poetry, narratives and literary theories. Born in 1946 at Dhanbad, Bihar, Dr. Chakraborty received her education in Asansol Girls' College and in the Burdwan University. She has published 12 books so far, including Jibanananda: Samaj o Samakal, Adhunik Kabitar Chal-chitra, Chhotogopler Bishoay-Ashay, and Srishti-Swatantrye Nazrul. She has annotated and edited with an introduction Rabindranath Thakurer Sampadita Bangla Kabya-Parichoy--an anthology of Bengali poems originally selected and edited by Tagore. She received the Nazrula award in 2007.
Articles in Parabaas:
Shabda-kuTe Rabindranath (An essay on Tagore's use of some very unusual words.)
Itihas aar Kabita (essay)
Supurna Sinha did her PhD in Physics at Syracuse University, New York, USA. She then did post-doctoral research in Physics at the Indian Institute of Science and Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, India. Her technical papers have appeared in scientific journals like The Physical Review, Europhysics Letters and so on.
Since the birth of her daughter Roshni she became interested in making picture books and in making math and science education fun through games and art. Some of her writings and drawings have appeared in the Children's section (Open Sesame) of the Bangalore based newspaper Deccan Herald. She has also written educational and popular science articles for children of various age groups for the journals Jantar Mantar, Gyan O Bigyan and Resonance. She has always given importance to Art along with Science - has always drawn and made artwork. She has had an opportunity to get to know artists like Gopal Ghosh, Rathin Maitra, K. G. Subhramanyam and Satyajit Ray through her parents. At home, both her parents used to draw. Her mother's multifarious interests have inspired her in exploring new interests. As a teenager she had designed two book jackets with her mother.
Articles in Parabaas:
Juta Abishkar (Tagore's poem illustrated for children and adults alike)
William Radice was born in 1951 in London. He has pursued a double career as a poet and as a scholar and translator of Bengali, and has written or edited nearly thirty books. His volumes of verse include Strivings (1980) and Louring Skies (1985) for Anvil Press and The Retreat (1994) for the University Press Ltd. in Dhaka. His translations include Selected Poems and Selected Short Stories of Tagore for Penguin Books, both of which have been reprinted many times. In 1994 his Teach Yourself Bengali was published by Hodder Headline. He also translates from German, and his publications in India include a translation of Martin Kämpchen’s The Honey-Seller and Other Stories (Rupa, 1995). He wrote the libretto for Param Vir’s widely performed chamber opera Snatched by the Gods (1992, based on Tagore), and in 1995 he translated Puccini’s Turandot for English National Opera. His translation of Tagore’s play The Post Office was performed as a theatre in education project in 1993, directed by Jill Parvin. He has given numerous lectures and poetry readings in Britain, India, Bangladesh, North America, Germany, Mallorca and other countries in Europe, and has been given literary prizes in both India and Bangladesh. For the last four years he has written a fortnightly ‘Letter from England’ for the Statesman newspaper in India, and he has also been a regular contributor to BBC Radio 2’s early morning ‘Pause for Thought’.
William Radice is Senior Lecturer in Bengali at SOAS and from 1999 to
2002 was Head of the Departments of South and South East Asia. His
latest books are Rabindranath Tagore: Particles, Jottings, Sparks: The
Collected Brief Poems (HarperCollins, Delhi, 2000; Angel Books, London,
2001), Myths and Legends of India (The Folio Society, London, 2001;
Penguin India, 2002), Gifts: Poems 1992-1999 (Grevatt & Grevatt,
Newcastle upon Tyne, 2002), Traces of My Father, a translation from the
German of Sigfrid Gauch's autobiographical novel Vaterspuren
(Northwestern University Press, Illinois, 2002), A Hundred Letters from
England (Indialog Publications, Delhi, 2003), and Poetry and Community:
Lectures and Essays 1991-2001 (DC Publishers, Delhi, 2003). Beauty, Be
My Brahman: Indian Poems, a collection of his poems with Indian
connections has just (September 2004) been published by Writers Workshop
in Kolkata.
He is married with two daughters, and divides his time between London and Northumberland.
Eight Sections (poems, Secker & Warburg, London, 1974)
For more information on William Radice, including availability of all the books listed above, visit here.
Articles in Parabaas:
Zafar Billah is a much sought after artist in the tri-state area of the USA. He is based in New Jersey. He can be contacted through Parabaas.
Songs in Parabaas:
Main publications
Strivings (poems, Anvil Press, London, l980)
The Stupid Tiger and Other Tales (tr. from Bengali, Andre Deutsch, London, 1981, 1988; Rupa & Co., Calcutta, 1987; HarperCollins, Delhi, 2000)
Louring Skies (poems, Anvil Press, London, l985)
Selected Poems, l970-8l (Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 1987)
Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Poems (tr. from Bengali, Penguin, 1985, rev. 1987;
new ed., 1995; Penguin India, 1995)
The Translator's Art: Essays in Honour of Betty Radice (ed. with Barbara Reynolds, Penguin, l987)
Char Baktrita ('Four Lectures', Bangla Academy, Dhaka, 1990)
Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Short Stories (tr. from Bengali, Penguin, 1991, rev. 1994; Penguin India, 1995) + Cuentos (tr. Angel Garcia Galiano, Madrid: PPC, 1996) and L’esquelet i altres narracions (tr. Marta Marín, Barcelona, 2002)
Sakuntala (ed., Folio Society, London, 1992)
Snatched by the Gods, a libretto based on Tagore for an opera by Param Vir (Novello, London, 1992)
Rozsa Hajnoczy: Fire of Bengal (tr. from Hungarian by David Grant & Eva Wimmer, ed., University Press Ltd., Dhaka, 1993)
Juan Mascaró: The Creation of Faith/La Creació de la Fe (ed., Editorial Moll, Palma de Mallorca, 1994; Rupa & Co., Delhi, 1995; Bayeux Arts, Calgary, 1999)
The Retreat (poems, University Press Ltd., Dhaka, 1994)
Teach Yourself Bengali (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1994)
Martin Kämpchen: The Honey-seller and Other Stories (tr. from German, Rupa & Co., Delhi, 1995)
Before and After (poems, Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 1995)
Rabindranath Tagore: The Post Office (play, tr. from Bengali, The Tagore Centre UK, 1995)
The One and the Many, readings from Tagore with photographs by John Berridge (ed., Bayeux Arts, Calgary, 1997)
Swami Vivekananda and the Modernisation of Hinduism (ed., OUP, Delhi, 1997, 1999)
Particles, Jottings, Sparks: The Collected Brief Poems of Rabindranath Tagore (HarperCollins, Delhi, 2000; Angel Books, London, 2001)
Myths and Legends of India (retold by W.R., with translations by P.Lal, Folio Society, London, 2001; Penguin India, 2002)
Gifts: Poems 1992-1999 (Grevatt & Grevatt, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2002)
Sigfrid Gauch: Traces of My Father (tr. from German, Northwestern University Press, Illinois, 2002)
A Hundred Letters from England (Indialog Publications, New Delhi, 2003)
Beauty, Be My Brahman: Indian Poems (Writers Workshop, Kolkata, 2004)
Tagore's Poetic Genius (Text of a lecture given in Ahmedabad, India in 2003).
Gazing at the Sun: Bangladeshi Poets and Rabindranath Tagore (Text of Muhammad Shahidullah Memorial Lecture, 11 February 1998, delivered at the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh).
Reflections on Clinton B. Seely's Translation of Meghanad-Badh Kabya (Written for the 18th European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies, Lund, Sweden, 6-9 July, 2004
).
Du'ti Rabindrasangeet (Two songs of Rabindranath recorded in a live performance in New Jersey.
Send us your feedback
©2007 Parabaas
