Joe Winter is a British educationist and poet who is renowned for translating poets Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das.
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He was born in London in 1943 and educated, amongst others, at Exeter College, Oxford. He taught English in secondary schools in London from 1967 to 1994. Taking early retirement, he moved to India and lived in Calcutta until the end of 2006. Then he went back home and resettled in London.[1] He learned Bengali during this period and started to translate Bengali literary works into English. While in Calcutta, Joe Winter regularly contributed to The Statesman paper. He now teaches in Ardingly College, Sussex.
Joe Winter began to write poetry in 1962. His A Miracle was published in 1972. He has also written literary articles and essays. His works have been compiled in eleven volumes of poetry, an autobiography and a book on the poetry of schoolchildren. Just after arriving in India in 1994 he published Indian Song. The following year he published Night out, Meditation and Birth of spring. The same year another anthology of poems titled Page torn from a diary was brought out. The Green Box was published in 1996. Another collection of poems 1984 was published in 1997. A literary essay titled In defence of poetry was published in 1996. Later, To do with freedom was published in 2000.
Joe Winter composed a number of poems during his Calcutta life which have been published under the title 'Guest and Host'. As the book cover blurb informs, this group of poems 'records the experience of being welcomed into the household of a foreign country' and does so well. Many of the poems deal with the quotidian. The majority of the volume comprises two long poems. The first a sonnet-sequence ('Guest and Host') named after the collections title, and the other a poem on the 2001 earthquake in Kutch ('Earthquake at Kutch'). 'Guest and Host' is predominantly lyrical in style and diction : in 'Highway 34' he reads as follows.
Sometimes when I walk where trees were tall
I am in a prisoner-of-war camp debating poetry
with Colonel-General Loblein. Hostilities were over
and I was in charge of the German Officers' 'hostel'
outside Jessore. As part of my duties
I re-interpreted the Geneva Convention on canteen rights.
'Earthquake at Kutch', however, is less lyrical[2]:
Shadows of trees, branch-shadows, shadows of leaves
stray in the dust. Only the trees are standing.
Slight shapes chequer a quiet space of ground.
In addition to poetry of his own, he has published translations of Rabindranath Tagore's Song Offering (Gitanjali) and 'Lipika'. In collaboration with Devadatta Joardar, he also translated 'Atmaparichay' of Rabindranath Tagore under the title 'Of Myself'.[3]
He has translated Rupashi Bangla of poet Jibanananda Das. Other poems of Jibanananda translated by him have been collected in a book titled Naked Lonely Hand. He had also translated songs of Lalan Fakir into English which were published in The Statesman. Joe’s new title, The Golden Boat, a collection of Tagore poems (Sonaar Tori) in English translation, has been published by Anvil Press.
The latest collection of his own poems is Guest in Host.
Joe being a poet has been more successful than many others in translating Bengali poetry into English. Below is a translation of a poem by Jibanananda Das who is said to be the most difficult of all modern Bengali poets for translation :
SHE
She called me to her and said
‘The river-water
is your eyes’ faded cane-berry colour;
from weariness, from blood,
it soothes the ground around, makes new;
the river here is you.’
‘Might it be Dhanshiri?’
I asked the kingfisher.
The river had been given its name by her.
I seek the deep girl now: but she
adrift on water’s endless stair
is out somewhere.
An aeon ago within an endless interleaf of white and black—from Time’s interior,
in love with fish and soul and kingfisher,
a woman appearing . . . if she had not been
a 24-carat-city-girl, in love with the bright lights, she—
she would have been the Dhanshiri.