[1] He has translated the works of Ramprasad Sen and Michael Madhusudan Dutt and written a biography of Bengali poet Jibanananda Das.
Around this time, Seely met the Bengali poet and journalist Jyotirmoy Datta at a writer's workshop in Iowa.
Consequently, Seely returned to Bengal in 1969, this time arriving in Calcutta, 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.
In the meantime, Seely had also completed his first work of translation – Buddhadeva Bose's popular and controversial novel Raat Bhorey Brishti, which appeared under the English title Rain Through the Night in 1973.
The translation of Dutt's epic poem Meghnad Bodh Kavya, a project that Seely began in the 1970s, would not be completed for another three decades.