Book Review: Translating Firesongs – A tale of bravehearts
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Nabanita Sengupta reviews Firesongs (BEE Books, 2019)- a Translation of Dinesh Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Duranta Eegawl by Somrita Urni Ganguli and calls it a faithful rendering of the original.
- Name of the book – Firesongs (A Translation of Dinesh Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Duranta Eegawl)
- Translated by Somrita Urni Ganguli
- Publisher – Bee Books
- Year of publication – 2019
- No. of pages – 471
- Price – INR. 664
Some works of literature carry within them the essence of an entire period. They become testimonies of time for the future generations, familiarizing them with an age gone past. In their narration of a particular time and space, they carry a sense of history, so crucial to one’s understanding of the past, because what are we, if not the product of times that we have left behind. One such work is Dinesh Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Duranta Eegawl, translated into English from Bengali by Somrita Urni Ganguly as Firesongs.
Somrita’s translation is a lucid, engaging, and faithful rendering of the original. Through her translation, she makes an iconic work of Bangla literature available to English readers. Her sensitivity and understanding of the nuances of both the Source and the Target languages come out clear in the uninterrupted flow of the narrative. The translation of the novel, published on the occasion of the centenary birth anniversary of its original author Dinesh Chandra Chattopadhyay, is definitely an important addition to the corpus of world literature.
