Pleasures and perils of editing

Niaz Zaman

What Niaz did was go through all the books that the Bangla Academy had, while she had a list of the famous major poets and looked for poems about "Ekushey" and other poems on other themes. "The poem had to appeal to me," Niaz said, "I looked at the names that I didn't know, while Bangla Academy does not publish unknown writers. My poetry selection was guided by the materials that were available. However, I did go beyond this, e.g. I used two poems by Khondkar Ashraf Hussain, my colleague in the English Department, DU." As regards the short stories, Niaz made a list of famous writers, and she was again helped by Dr Rafiqul Islam in this. As she is familiar with major Bangla writers, her list was acceptable to Dr Rafiqul Islam, while he suggested a few more. Talking with UPL, her publisher, she said that she took their suggestion of including more writers. In fiction too, Niaz selected the writers whom she liked, not giving preference to women, as she had dealt with women's work at other times. As regards the drama selection, she has plays by a number of playwrights. "The problem with plays is that there are so many playwrights in Bangladesh that I had to leave out quite a few. But I had to include Munir Chowdhury. I also wanted to include Sayeed Ahmed, who has the distinction of writing in English as well as in Bangla. I have left out a lot of playwrights because otherwise the volume would have been too big." Some not so famous writers have been included partly because Niaz enjoyed reading their plays. In this book some of the not so famous writers have been included as they are different and interesting and make refreshing reading.

Talking about the writers in the book in general, Niaz said that there are about 41poets, 25 short story writers and five playwrights in her book "Under the Krishnachura". She says, "In the drama section, all the writers that I wanted to include could not be fitted in and I wanted to bring the book out in 2002." Touching on how she had managed to do the crash programme of selection and editing, Naiz said with the poems she had no problem as they had all been translated; while in the play section, she included Razia Khan's play, even though she is more famous as a short story writer and poet. Razia Khan had offered Niaz the play and the editor thought the treatment very interesting. "She has won an award for play writing long ago," Niaz reminded, "and this play had been published by the Bangla Academy, which was one of my criteria."

Niaz had a problem with the short stories as many of them had won awards and many of them have been translated, such as the ones by Shawkat Osman, Abu Rushd, Syed Waliullah and Munir Chowdhury. There was the dilemma as to which ones to select. As regards Waliullah, Zaman did not like the translation that she had come across. However, his wife had given Zaman another translation by two writers. Bangla Academy had also published a translation of this particular story. What she did was to translate it once again. Half the short stories in the collection have been translated again, some of which Zaman translated herself, others being translated by other translators. Some of the translators were Zaman's colleagues, some being very young, such as the A Level student, who worked on the story by Jharna Das, doing the translation along with her mother. The editor, in particular, wanted a number of translators. If the story needed major editing, so as not to lose anything in the translation, after the first translator had gone through it, Zaman then worked on it and put her name along with that of the first translator. Another short story by Rizia Rahman remains one of the editor's favourite ones. Selina Rahman is again another such woman writer, having been published both inside and outside Bangladesh. Maqbula Manzoor and Rabeya Khatun, according to Niaz, are among the very readable fiction writers in "Under the Krishnachura". Niaz tried to restrict one writer to one genre but sometimes the literary worth was so powerful that she included their works in different sections.

Asked what pleasures and problems she had faced when editing the book, Zaman said, "One of the problems was that when I got a young translator, very often this translator could translate literally but he/she did not have enough literary flair to be able to convey the short story in a literary form, in which the work could stand by itself as a literary piece. As regards collaborative translation, in Bangladesh, only the major writers, who become famous for other reasons, get translated and are known abroad. As a consequence we have poor translations by people who know a lot of Bangla but not enough English. This is why I believe in collaborative translation in which the editor has to sometime polish up the English." If Zaman changed only 20 per cent of the work then the work went in the translator's name. If it was more than that, Zaman considered it a joint effort. Most of her translators kept to the deadline.

As her husband had died in 2001, the setback took Zaman, a professor in the English Department, DU, longer than she had expected to complete the book. She has a number of short-story books, and an anthology of women's writings, all printed by UPL, to her credit.