My grandmother's Bengali

I grew up in Leicester and I came to Kolkata for a research position in 2022 and what surprised me was not the city, which I had visited, but the Bengali. My grandmother's Bengali was something I grew up hearing. What I heard in Kolkata was the same language doing more things, moving faster, carrying references I didn't have. I stayed to learn it. I work at a cultural institute doing research into women's writing from the early twentieth century, and the translation project that has taken over my spare time is a set of poems by Bengali women writers from the 1930s and 1940s who have not been translated into English. The reasons they haven't are various and all of them are worth examining. I am twenty-seven and I am not a professional translator. I have good Bengali now, good enough, and I have English, and I have an English literature degree from De Montfort that gave me opinions about how translation decisions change meaning. I also write my own poetry, in English, that is not translation. It is about being a person formed in two places who has come to a third and is trying to figure out what accumulates versus what you can shed. Leicester in winter. Kolkata in June. The 37 bus and the Rabindra Sarani metro. I keep both.