My mother had read Shesher Kobita out loud to me one summer back in my teens. The prose has the qualities that make it absolutely unforgettable. J is a year away from college and I thought it would be a nice rite of passage to give her the gift of Shesher Kobita. I found her a translation by Anindita Mukhopadhyay.
I wish she would go easy on the introduction which runs a whopping twenty-six pages for a book that is under just two hundred pages. I started to read Mukhopadhyay's introduction with interest and by page ten I really wanted to get on with the program. She is well-intentioned in providing readers all the context and commentary they could need, but most of it should become self-evident to the reader as they read the story. For those who are strangers to Bengal and India as J is, it would take much more than twenty-six pages to provide them with a primer that is remotely useful in appreciating the life, times or work of Tagore. It was unclear to me who Mukhopadhyay was attempting to edify here.
Happily, she does justice to the translation. I could hear Tagore's amazingly lyrical Bengali prose play in my head as I read chapter one. I hope J will derive from it what I got decades ago. The cultural and social framework in which I was introduced to this book could not be more different than that of J's. Yet the universal questions about the nature of love and marriage transcend time and place. As she embarks into her own adult life, maybe she can find some wisdom from the story of Amit and Banya to help her along the way.
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