Tag Archives: Translations

T.Janakiraman (1921–82), affectionately known as Thi Jaa, is one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century Tamil literature. He wrote about familial and interpersonal issues, with a focus on the ill-treatment of women, especially widows. His best-known novels, Mohamul, 1964, (The Thorn of Desire), Amma Vantal,1966, (English translation The Sins of Appu’s Mother) and Marappasu,1975, (Wooden Cow) present strong women with a mind of their own. Bilingual novelist, short story writer, poet and translator Lakshmi Kannan had published an English translation of Marappasu in 1979. She felt the need to do a revised version; the birth centenary of the novelist provided the occasion to publish it.

Considered as a master in the art of writing short stories, Fakir Mohan Senapati (1843-1918) played a leading role in establishing a distinctive Odia identity and is considered to be the father of Odia nationalism and modern Odia literature. Told in the simplest terms, his short story ‘Rebati’ (1898) narrates the story…

‘To assert that “Black Lives Matter” is to admit that they do not matter while maintaining that they should.’Nathalie Etoke, born in Paris to Cameroonian parents, and who has lived in France and later in the United States, occupies a unique position which allows her to deal with questions of race as also to argue against a tendency which ends up reducing the historical, political, cultural and social differences…

The paradigmatic method of studying the story of India is through its languages, declares Peggy Mohan with a rhetorical flourish in the title of her book Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India Through its Languages.Mohan’s thesis draws upon Jawaharlal Nehru’s…

Balbir Madhopuri lives in New Delhi. He grew up in Doaba, a region of Punjab known for its high population of Dalits. He has not forgotten his years of struggle against economic hardship and caste discrimination, but he does not advertise his pain and uses it instead to generate light and hope…

It is wonderful to see a reissue of the translation of Volga Se Ganga by Rahul Sankrityayan with a fine introduction by Maya Joshi. The original translation by VG Kiernan has been edited by Kanwal Dhaliwal and Maya Joshi with an additional translated chapter that had been missed out in the original edition…

‘ I remember a river flowing inside my father and never growing old, …’. This opening line of Apurva Narain’s Introduction beautifully brings out the essence of Kunwar Narain’s poetry.  The book is a tribute to a man who was not just a father, but also an artist par excellence…

We inhabit a noise-saturated world. The enveloping noise has not only stunted our sensibilities and sensitivities but has, as a consequence, tended to insulate us from ourselves and our surroundings. The crass materiality of the contemporary civilizational curve has taken its toll on our elemental connectedness and communicative empathies…

Urdu Dastan refers to an extant mode of storytelling where popular fantasies, literary tropes and a hint of history is melded to produce utterly entertaining and absorbing stories. Often about legendary characters, the charm of the dastan rests on its flamboyance, verbal excesses and a fine entanglement of the ordinary…

The blurb in the inner cover of this book describes it as a rich and lively first-hand account of life in the royal court of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal Emperor, in the Red Fort. The author Munshi Faizuddin lived in the Red Fort in his capacity of being a long-time servant of Prince Mirza Ilahi Baksh…

Does profoundness stem from simplicity? Do the unending complexities and deeper truths that elude religion, psychology and politics, become viewable in verses made up of simple words charged with captivating verbal richness?  Does elegant and sophisticated simplicity stamp…

Among one of the notable modern fiction writers in Urdu, Tariq Chhatari’s The Nameplate is a collection of eleven short stories selected from his first anthology Bagh Ka Darwaza (2001). Translated by A Naseeb Khan, this book has a spirited Introduction, in which he attempts to place Tariq Chhatari’s…

The remarkable story of the Indianization of South-East Asia is an instance of historical spontaneity. Hinduism and Buddhism travelled there with indomitable traders, adventurers and priests carrying along their religion and culture which the local population accepted enthusiastically…

In these troubled times, when even leisure reading requires motivation, a translation whisked me off to a fantasy land…a land of unparalleled beauty and unmatched courage, a land of love and romance. My own reluctance to be led away is just one part of the story, the growing discomfort…

Amaru Shatakam, translation of some hundred love lyrics is one of the best specimens of the genre in classical Sanskrit.  Nothing is known about the author but it is ascribed to a king of Kashmir. There is also the fantastic legend identifying him with the soul of Adi Sankaracharya transferred into the body…

In Kalyani Thakur Charal’s short story translated as ‘A Hundred Pens’, Rekha’s Thakuma/paternal grandmother, though illiterate herself, dreams of  a new generation rewriting the history of discrimination, oppression, neglect and deprivation that marks the caste-based politics of the Indian subcontinent.For thousands of years our people haven’t been able…

In the making of Rabindranath Tagore’s public image, apart from the voices of the critical establishment and the poet’s own forms of self-projection, the reminiscences of those around him also played a part. A compulsive globe-trotter, Tagore often travelled with companions who knew him closely…

Rabindranath Tagore’s androgynous imagination finds fulsome expression in the two books under review. How he extended his understanding to the mysterious secrets of women silenced by patriarchy remains a conjecture. Periodic translations open up the question in various social contexts…

Partition narratives accommodate some of the most difficult and irreconcilable spaces of human experience within the contested ideas of home, nation, and sense of belonging. Samaresh Bose’s Bangla novella Khandita written in 1985, translated into English by Rani Ray as Dissevered in 2019, registers the need to comprehend…

‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ said the other, holding him affectionately. ‘It’s what I want. It’s what you want.’ But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart: the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temple, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House…