otter of books

Category: Indian writers in translation

  • In Translation: I, The Salt Doll by Vandana Mishra

    In Translation: I, The Salt Doll by Vandana Mishra

      “A salt doll spends time frolicking on the shore, building sand castles or collecting shells. Enamoured as she is of the deep, calm sea…, one day the salt doll decides to enter the blue waters for a good bath. And never returns.” This brief note, slipped lightly in by the translator, Jerry Pinto, beautifully […]

  • In Translation: Subimal Mishra, the anti-storyteller

    In Translation: Subimal Mishra, the anti-storyteller

    “I do not want my writing to be converted into a commodity, or be capable of being digested in the intestines of middle-class babudom,” Subimal Misra wrote in his 1982 work, Actually This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale. There is little chance of this happening. The two collections of his short stories that have […]

  • Upendranath Ashk: The telescope and the microscope

    From Upendranath Ashk’s ‘Falling Walls’, translated by Daisy Rockwell, Penguin Books. On editors: “The editors of daily papers toil away like plodding oxen from noon to six in the evening, and then again from nine at night to two in the morning. When they get tired, they make incredibly obscene jokes among themselves. Their faces […]

  • The Translation Shelf

    (This was carried in Forbes Life’s winter 2011 issue–a look at some of the most interesting books of the year in translation.) “We live more of our lives in translation than you might imagine,” said the writer from Chile. His life was an extreme illustration of this. Born in Chile, Ruben had moved to Denmark […]

  • The BS column: Welcome to the tilism

    (Published in the Business Standard, June 16, 2009)Here is the single best reason ever proffered for attempting a translation of a long-lost, half-forgotten book: “What if all the storytellers are also still with us ‘in spirit’? And what if one day this battalion of ghosts feels nostalgic, and enters a bookshop to check the latest […]

  • The BS column: The Translator’s Tale

    How do you get the world to read in Indian? I’m quoting a young Italian editor who said this when she discovered the wealth of Indian literature outside the narrow confines of writing in English recently. It’s a great question. Ever since Indian writing in English took off in the West with R K Narayan, […]

  • 41 Indian Writers in Translation

    Amit Chaudhuri on Indian writing, from The Guardian: “As to the writers from the more troubled regions outside the metropolitan suburbs in which English alone was spoken, you could see, if you scratched the surface of their slightly bureaucratic veneer, that they possessed an eclecticism of taste and literary predilections, a formal curiosity, as well […]