Acrobat

An online search for Nabaneeta Dev Sen (1938–2019) reveals that she was an incredibly versatile writer of over 100 books, that she was a scholar, polyglot translator, feminist thinker, and a doyen of Bengali literature, and that she was beloved by many. Her daughter, Nandana Dev Sen, has distilled 60 years of Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s life into Acrobat, a posthumous poetry collection that is also a familial labor of love, a tender duet between mother and daughter. Although the majority of the book’s poems are translated from Bengali, the collection also includes translations and co-translations by Nabaneeta Dev Sen herself, as well as some poems she wrote in English. There is also one exceptional political-protest poem, “Festival,” translated by the poet’s daughter Antara Dev Sen. (“Some bastard has gouged out a boy’s eye? / We’ll rip out the eyes of the whole nation.”) 

To read Acrobat is to feel the poet’s clarity of compassion, the radiating warmth of her words unshakably ringing out “as an instrument for women’s freedom and unity.” Her poems are conversational and spontaneous, lightly touching on themes such as womanhood, family, language, time; although there is a plainness to the language presented in Acrobat, that supple modesty is often sincerely meaningful. A typical poem, like “A Night Drink,” might take on an aphoristic turn: “Drinking water in the dark / From a bowl of pickled chilies / The thirst is quenched / But the lips keep burning.” In her introduction, the translator notes her efforts to preserve Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s musicality and poetic form, yet one cannot help but wistfully wonder what the poet’s other stylistic feats, such as her “furiously obverse” poetic diction and her talent for neologisms, might have added to Acrobat’s richness and depth, if only those elements were not so “impossible to translate.”