বঙ্গভাষা ও সাহিত্য هلاسb has struck the popular imagination. But the question is how much people deformed his idea in putting it into the shape in which we find it? which is the part of the collaboration of the multitude in this work of re-casting, which is continuous and spontaneous P Rarely has any one had the happy Opportunity to seize an epic as one might say on the lips of the people who have given birth to it before writing had fixed it in some shape as you and Mr. Chandra Kumar have succeeded in doing in this case. I congratulate you sincerely for this beautiful work and I ask you, dear Sir, to believe in my high esteem and admiration. 4th March, 1924. ROMAIN ROLLAND From a review by MR. E. F. O ATEN, LL. B., M. A., published in the Fuglishman, dated the 7th of February, 1924. It is not easy for an Englishman to hazard an opinion as to the recepts which the ballad poetry of Eastern Bengal, recently rescued from oblivion by Dr. Sen, and now given by him to the world in the form of an English translation, will receive at the hands of literary Bengal. But one y is Certain. The measure of Bengal's appreciation of these ballads, not shere historical or literary curiosities, but as living literature, will be some yodex () { the extent to which her spirit is escaping from the trammels of artificiality in its effort to express itself not only in literature but in life. To the western critic, stumbling by good fortune up in Dr. Scn's book, these ballads, straight from the unsophisticated people's heart, come fresh and stimulant as the breeze that revives the jaded traveller 'rom Calcutta as he sits in stcainer and ploughs across the monsoon gusts of Eastern Bengal. In them we cscape, as regards the subject matter almost entirely from the priest, als regards the most universal of human passions, altogether from that ideal of chastity which caused a poet of an earlier age to place the following words in the mouth Ul Sita, as a defence to her character: "Even when I was a mere child, I never came too close to a malc play-fellow.' In the introduction which Dr. Sen prefixes to his translation, We lear that these ballads cover a period of 3oo years fro sixteenth century تحصیسے خ محبت- مہ حق۔ـــــــسیـــــــــ لمصعد صيتصميميجيسمعه د خصیr r معیبعہ ۔ یعن۔ مہ۔ ASTLCTLLSLLLSLSLSSTLSLSLSLSLSeSeSLSL LSLSSSLL LSSLLLLLS TLTSM
- Translated from French by Captain J. W. Petavel.
