What to read after Capt. Cave Brown Cave's Translation of Songs of Atul Prasad Sen?

During a get-together in 1942 at Mrs. Hiran Iyengar’s (the eldest sister of Atul Prasad Sen) residence in Calcutta, Capt. Cave Brown Cave, an English poet, suggested a possibility of translating poems from one language to another even without knowing the rendered language; rather, expressed his interest in translating some verses on the basis of phonetics, rhythm and the meanings of some phrases.

Evaluating these translations, Professor Binayendra Dasgupta commented, “Cave’s translations are a unique experiment. It is generally believed that verse rhythms are untranslatable particularly when the two languages concerned are as alien as English and Bengali. Those who have rendered Bengali verse into English have tried to reproduce as faithfully as possible the meaning of the original in the rhythms of a foreign tongue. It is for this reason that these renderings even when accurate seem to be unsatisfactory. This is why when Tagore made his translations in the English GITANJALI and other books, he abjured verse and adopted the other harmony of prose, giving his English versions new rhythms that are not to be found in the Bengali originals. Cave started his work at the other end. Ignorant of Bengali he approached Atul Prasad’s poetry as a concord of beautiful sounds and tried primarily to import into his English translations the peculiar melodies of some exquisite Bengali songs. .. The method is particularly interesting here because Atul Prasad was a musician (Composer cum Tune-setter) first and a poet afterwards — at least, all his poems, beautiful as they are, came in the form of songs. How far Cave has succeeded it is for the experts and connoisseurs to judge but there can he no doubt about the originality of his approach.”