Explaining his location clearly as writer, translator, and linguist, the author Professor U.N. Singh paints a wide canvas on translation as an instrument of language growth. A growth that is essential to make languages ‘modern’, ‘a step which makes a given speech capable of being used in a much larger number of domains and in many manifestations’ (p. 183)…
Translating Saratchandra Chattopadhyay is no easy task: his novels are so deeply embedded in the social and cultural atmosphere of his time, and the events and emotions he describes are so inextricably bound up with the energies, ideas and interrogations that shaped contemporary experiences that it…
A remarkable compendium of fascinat-ing tales, Chitra Deb’s book is an unselfconsciously written account of generations of women in Bengal’s most significant family. The name ‘Tagore’ is synonymous with creativity in art, literature and music, but also stands for bold innovations in social thought…
All the three novels that are grouped together in this collection, one of them separated from the others by more than 30 years, explore situations of extra-marital rapport that have the potential to become full-blown affairs. In the earliest of them (Nashtaneer that was later filmed by Satyajit Ray…
For quite a few decades, the world outside Bengal knew Rabindranath Tagore primarily as a poet since it was mostly his poems that were first translated into other languages. Now Harper Collins seems determined to introduce him primarily as a writer of short fiction. Why else would they be marketing Sipra Bhattacharya’s English…
An Endless Winter’s Night presents 19 commendably translated contemporary short stories (and two poems)—all of equal literary merit—written in various Indian languages over the last two decades.