Sandip Roy gives us an excellent article in The Hindu (June 19, 2021), on the genius of Sukumar Ray’s nonsense and the new volume called Three Rays, which collects Satyajit’s translations of his father and grandfather, Sukumar and Upendrakishore, in addition to his own work. We, the collective Nonsensical Norns (for which I speak occasionally on the Abstemious Ass’s Authority), are delighted also to hear that Sukumar Ray continues to break into the typically conservative Literature canon bubble in Indian Universities and Colleges (or at least those in West Bengal). Satyajit’s translations, by the way, are not exactly translations. In the volume Nonsense Rhymes (1970), the first set of Sukumar Ray “translations,” Satyajit calls them “transcreations,” as they tend to take more liberties than a conventional translation, in the spirit of making them relevant, melodious, and playful–and also as a response to the difficulty of translation when dealing with his father’s nonsense, which is so language-dependent. On the title pages below, we see both the word “translated” and “transcreated,” in addition to a Very Serious portrait of the transcreator, “anno aetatis six months.”
