Rabindranath Tagore

Three Women

Trish

When the heart is already in agony, the smallest hurt exacerbates the pain.


I never truly valued translators until I embarked on a quest to find an English version of Rabindranath Tagore's works that appeals to the modern reader (like myself) while conveying the essence of what the author captured in the Bengali language. And let me tell you, it has been a JOURNEY. I have bought, started and stopped reading SO MANY translations of a variety of Tagore's works because they were either too confusing to wrap my head around or tedious to get through. Not this one. Arunava Sinha is a godsend. 

Here is an example of a passage below that I thought was really well translated and the sentiment aptly expressed: 

“Bhupati was astonished at this tumultuous outpouring of grief. ‘Did I misjudge Charu?’ he thought. ‘She is so much of an introvert that she will not reveal her heartache even to me.’ People of this nature loved deeply and suffered deeply too. Charu’s love was not as demonstrative as was the case with ordinary women, surmised Bhupati. He had never seen any exhibition of emotion from her; that day he realized that it was because Charu’s love flowered in secret, deep within. Bhupati was not skilled at expressing himself either; discovering the deeply private nature of Charu’s emotions gave him a sense of satisfaction.
Sitting down by her side, Bhupati caressed her lightly, without a word. He did not know how to comfort her—and he did not realize that when someone tries to strangle their grief in the dark, they’d rather not have a witness to the act."

I loved the first two short stories in this collection and found them compelling and hard to put down. The third story didn't quite hit the mark for me and paled in comparison to the complexity and emotion of the first two stories - hence the 4/5 stars. If anyone is curious about Bengali literature though, Arunava Sinha is the translator to trust.

Three Women

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