Clinton B. Seely

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Clinton B. Seely is an American academic and translator, and one of the leading Western scholars of Bengali language and literature. His path-breaking biography of the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das is recognized as a model of its kind. He has also translated the works of Ramprasad Sen and Michael Madhusudan Dutt, authored numerous scholarly papers, and written a number of pedagogical books and software packages for students of Bengali.

[edit] Life and work

Clinton Seely studied at Stanford University, where he majored in biology. Upon graduation in 1963, he joined the US Peace Corps, and travelled to the then-East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) as a Corps volunteer. There, for two years, he helped to teach biology at the Barisal Zilla School in the southern district of Barisal. He studied Bengali at a local missionary school. Seely's attachment to Bangladesh and its culture dates from this period.

Upon his return to the US, he entered the University of Chicago's Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. There he studied under the tutelage of Edward Dimock, a renowned scholar of Bengali, and gained his Master's degree in 1968.

Around this time, Seely met the Bengali poet and journalist Jyotirmoy Dutta at a writer's workshop in Iowa. Dutta encouraged him to take up Jibanananda Das as the subject of his doctoral research. Consequently, Seely returned to Bengal in 1969, this time arriving in Calcutta, the city where Das had studied during his early years, and where he had lived and worked intermittently later in his life. Seely's investigations took him far and wide, from the libraries of Calcutta to the very street where the poet was run over by a tram in 1954.

He returned to Chicago in 1971, and commenced teaching Bengali. His Ph.D thesis, on the life and works of Jibanananda, was completed in 1976. In the meantime, Seely had also completed his first work of translation - Buddhadev Bose's popular and controversial novel Raat Bhorey Brishti, which appeared under the English title Rain Through the Night in 1973. He turned his researcher's attention on the 19th-century poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. The translation of Dutt's epic poem Meghnadbadh Kavya, a project that Seely began in the 1970s, would not be completed for another three decades.