Sunbird Author:Arthur Dobrin This is a special translated issue of Shabdaguchha, an international poetry journal, where 32 Bangladeshi poets are translated from the Bengali into English by Hassanal Abdullah. The guest editor of this issue is Nicholas Birns of New School University. In the editorial, Prof. Birns wrote, "Although there was great modern poetry in, say, Arabic ... more »(Taha Hussein, Khalil Gibran) and Urdu (Mohammed Iqbal), there was not an organized modernism in the Arab world or in the rest of British-ruled India as there was in Bengal. This makes Bangladeshi postmodernism different from poetry written in Middle Eastern or South Asian in a postmodern time, as Bangladeshi postmodernism was following in a wake of a modernist tradition in his own language a history not available to every stream of contemporary poetry worldwide." He went on to say, "Ezra Pound and Robert Bly have, deservedly, been important influences on English-language methods of translation; there is perhaps room for a little T. S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens as well. Hassanal Abdullah, who leads multiple lives as a poet, teacher, and political and civil-rights activist, knows both his native and his adoptive languages well, and has here produced poems in English that yet give us the glorious past fifty years of achievement in Bangladeshi poetry." The poets included in this volume are Ahsan Habib, Shamsur Rahman, Hasan Hafizur Rahman, Syed Shamsul Huq, Abu Hena Mustafa Kamal, Al Mahmud, Shaheed Quaderi, Sikder Aminul Haque, Rafique Azad, Nirmalendu Goon, Humayun Azad, Helal Hafiz, Abul Hasan, Abid Azad, Nasir Ahmed, Rudro Muhammad Shahidullah, Abu Hasan Shahriar, Kamal Choudhury, Nasima Sultana, Khondakar Ashraf Hossain, Maruf Raihan , Raja Hasan, Taslima Nasrin, Ruksana Rupa, Hassanal Abdullah, Tushar Gayen, Baitullah Quaderee, Rahman Henry, Tokon Thaakoor, Alfred Khokon, Shamim Reza and Naznin Seamon.« less