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Clinton B. Seely (Bengali:ক্লিনটন বি. সিলি) (born June 21, 1941) is an American academic andtranslator, and a scholar ofBengali language andliterature.[1] He has translated the works ofRamprasad Sen andMichael Madhusudan Dutt and written a biography of Bengali poetJibanananda Das. He has also authoredsoftware packages related to Bengali. His latest book,Barisal and Beyond, was published inIndia in 2008.[2]
Clinton Seely studied atStanford University, where he majored inbiology. Upon graduation in 1963, he joined theUS Peace Corps, and travelled to the then-East Pakistan (nowBangladesh) as a Corps volunteer. There, for two years, he helped to teach biology at theBarisal Zilla School in the southern district ofBarisal. He studiedBengali 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 theUniversity of Chicago's Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. There he studied under the tutelage ofEdward C. Dimock, Jr., a scholar of Bengali, and gained his master's degree in 1968.
Around this time, Seely met the Bengali poet and journalistJyotirmoy Datta at a writer's workshop inIowa. Datta encouraged him to take up poetJibanananda Das as the subject of his doctoral research. Consequently, Seely returned toBengal in 1969, this time arriving inCalcutta, the city where Das had studied for his university degrees, and where he had lived and worked intermittently later in his life, before finally settling in 1946. 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 toChicago in 1971, and commenced teachingBengali. His Ph.D thesis, on the life and works of Jibanananda Das, was completed in 1976. The title of the doctoral dissertation was:Doe in Heat: A Critical Biography of the Bengali Poet Jibanananda Das (1899–1954).
In the meantime, Seely had also completed his first work of translation –Buddhadeva Bose's popular and controversial novelRaat Bhorey Brishti, which appeared under the English titleRain Through the Night in 1973. He turned his researcher's attention on to the 19th-century poetMichael Madhusudan Dutt. The translation of Dutt'sepic poemMeghnad Bodh Kavya, a project that Seely began in the 1970s, would not be completed for another three decades.
Seely retired from the University of Chicago in 2008.
In addition to numerous chapters and poetry that Professor Seely has contributed to various books, following are the titles he has published so far. His upcoming book to be published from India isBarisal and Beyond: Essays on Bangla Literature.
Professor Seely has written four computer programs to facilitate language learning. These are:
Academic and literary awards received by Professor are as follows :
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