The Bengali translations of Yeats attempted by the pioneering Bengali modernist poet Bishnu Dey (1909-1982) may be regarded as “domesticating” (to borrow from Venuti’s famous binary), but far from rendering himself invisible as a translator, Dey projects his own distinctive poetic style onto Yeats’ texts. Dey’s primary emphasis is apparently on the verbal music and formal structure of the poem and its readability in translation. Although the poems in translation adhere to the subject, cultural references, number of lines and often also the rhyme scheme of the source texts, they showcase Dey’s hallmark poetic style with its abstruse Sanskrit diction and obscure, elliptical syntax. In his essays on Yeats, Dey marvels at the unadorned epigrammatic compactness that Yeats achieved in his poetry around 1910, but Dey does not follow such a style in his translations of Yeats. Dey’s translations may be seen as presenting to an elite constituency of Bengali readers (trained in the appreciation of poetry) his own reading of Yeats as mediated through Dey’s own recognisable poetic idiom.
Keywords: Yeats, Translation, Modernism, Bengali Modernist Poetry, Reception of Yeats in Bengali.