Rita Shabnam Nezami

Every year, on Christmas day, we celebrate another important event in Bangladesh. The world's first Bangla channel was inaugurated on that day in the year 1964. With that memory comes to my mind my playmates with whom I performed on BTV. Rita Shabnam Nezami's name tops the list. She first acted as the child character Sudha in Tagore's drama titled Dak Ghor and then as Tushar Konna in the children's drama Snow White. As we grew up together, we saw Rita taking part in dance, music (Esho Gaan Shikhi along with Shimul Yousuf) acting and then a very unique area-mime. I remember Rita miming a children's event of looking for pickles in the jar and finishing them off with satisfaction, much to the chagrin of her Mom!

In 1971, Rita left for London, her father Mr. Ruhul Amin Nezami was tortured by the Pakistani army during the liberation war. He was an eminent and progressive publisher and founded the Standard Publishers. Rita was surrounded by books when she grew up. It comes as no surprise that in later life, books filled up her world. She studied in Dhaka, London, Moscow, Barcelona, Paris and Dallas. She has lived and worked in four continents, currently as faculty in creative writing in the University of SUNY-Stony Brook, USA. For a few years Rita worked in Dhaka, working as a translation officer at the Bangladesh Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Speaking and translating from four languages, she has taught languages and world literature for more than twenty years. Rita earned her Master's degree in Russian language and literature from Moscow State University. She taught Russian language and literature at the University of Dhaka, and French and ESL at the American International School in Dhaka. For fifteen years, Rita lived and taught in Paris, and translated from French, Russian, and Bengali into English. Rita studied Spanish for a year in Barcelona and lived for three years in Tangier, Morocco, where she taught English and translated.

Taking a doctorate in literature and translation in 2007 from the University of Texas at Dallas, Rita translated for her dissertation a novel by Tahar Ben Jelloun, a Goncourt Prize-winning writer twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. She went on to translate and publish short stories by Ben Jelloun in American and Irish anthologies. In 2005, the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) awarded her a fellowship for her translation of the first chapter of Ben Jelloun's novel, The Public Scribe. She has been a featured reader at ALTA conferences since 2003. 

The New Yorker published Rita S. Nezami's translation of a novella on the Arab Spring by Ben Jelloun in 2013, and Northwestern University Press published her book of translations By Fire: Writings on the Arab Spring with a substantial introduction by Rita in 2016. Salman Rushdie and Naomi Wolf wrote the book's blurbs. Her work received excellent reviews by World Literature Today, and it was advertised in the New York Review of Books. Rita is currently translating a novel on racism against Africans of color in Morocco by Ben Jelloun. 

She has a very artistic daughter who is a renowned photographer. Rita's husband is a Professor of English, writer and classical pianist. Rita plays the piano herself and although I have not met her since year 2000, I have an image of her playing the piano, which when I had seen as a child (on BTV) had brought out much admiration, and now she has taken Bangladesh to international heights. In summary, I use Tagore's lines "Tumi kemon kore gaan koro he guni, ami obak hoye shuni".

The author is an Academic and Nazrul exponent and translator