Posts by Tristan Foster

As Close to 600 BC As We Are to Tomorrow: A Conversation with Saudamini Deo

May 8, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Tristan Foster

The role of the translator is to madden a language, drive it insane, do unimaginable things with it.

Writer and translator Saudamini Deo is expanding the English-speaking world’s understanding of Hindi literature, working to translate forgotten works by avant-garde literary outsiders into English for the first time. Several years after she began this series of translations with a collection of short stories by Bhuwaneshwar, the second book in the project, Traces of Boots on Tongue by Rajkamal Chaudhary, is being published by Seagull Books as part of their India List series. 

I first spoke to Deo about her translation project in 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The writers she was interested in were almost totally unknown outside of India, and I was curious to know what it meant to have them recovered, translated, and presented to an English readership navigating life in the twenty-first century. We exchanged questions and answers while both of our countries were in strict lockdowns—her in India, me in Australia. In the fog of fear and uncertainty that had overcome us, I wondered if Deo’s project was a way of coping with the immediate reality of living through something lifted straight from a history book—would it last beyond those early days of COVID-19 or was it a mere distraction?  

Three years later, the project has not only outlasted lockdowns, it has expanded and matured, taking on the shape that Deo had envisioned from the beginning: where Bhuwaneshwar’s stories are dreamy and deeply pessimistic, Chaudhary’s stories face the concrete absurdity and hardships of the everyday head on—their subjects span time and culture. As Deo states in her introduction: “Written more than 70 years ago, the stories sometimes read like they were written just this morning.”

Chaudhary wrote at a time when India was still a young nation, yet its promises of a future filled with hope and opportunity were slipping further and further beyond the horizon; as Deo puts it, it was a “world where there is no longer either god or morality, not even the desire for it.” Maybe, regardless of time and place, we always feel as though the riches we were promised never actually eventuate.

I asked Deo about the act of translation, the direction her translation project will take from here, Chaudhary the writer, and the parallels between his time and the present moment.

Tristan Foster (TF): Your English translation of Traces of Boots on Tongue by Rajkamal Chaudhary is due to be published by Seagull Books. What, in your view, makes Chaudhary significant to a modern English readership?

Saudamini Deo (SD): I think, in the last few decades, there has been some interest in Indian writing and Indian writers in the anglophone world. However, this interest or exposure is, to a large extent, limited to diaspora writers and writing. It’s about time that India is no longer seen or understood as a mere background to its diaspora. It’s not just a reference point or historical source, it’s a living and evolving country where people live fully human and complex lives, and is just as interesting or incomprehensible as anywhere else in the world. Rajkamal Chaudhary takes his readers through this maddening incomprehensibility of the modern Indian existence in the 1950s and 1960s. And India is not just about India much the same way as Europe is not just about Europe. It’s part of the entire world, it’s part of the reason why our present reality looks and feels the way it does. Chaudhary’s work would be significant to anyone interested in arriving at a fuller understanding of the human existence in these mad modern times. READ MORE…

Translation as Séance: Saudamini Deo on Forgotten Hindi Authors

June 24, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Tristan Foster

. . . in order to survive, they must get used to the absurd horror of life.

An unfortunate reality is that every language has great writers who have faded from the collective memory; either they fell out of favour, or their writing spoke only to their time, or perhaps they practiced on the margins, and their work never made it beyond a small readership. Difficulties in categorising a writer’s work is especially likely to put them in peril—writing that doesn’t fit neatly into one particular genre or tradition is easier to overlook than to perpetually seek its niche. And when these writings are forgotten, a small miracle needs to occur for them to be rediscovered again.

For the first time, English language readers will have the opportunity to read forgotten Hindi writers thanks to a new and, arguably, miraculous series from Seagull Books, based in Kolkata. First to be published are short story collections by Bhuvaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary, names which may be unfamiliar to readers in their native India, let alone to readers beyond. Wolves and Other Short Stories by Bhuwaneshwar will be released in Fall 2020, and Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories by Rajkamal Chaudhary is due for release in early 2021.

To understand what was lost and what has been gained with these new translations, I asked translator Saudamini Deo why we should refresh the collective memory by reviving the work of Bhuvaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary, and what it means for the English-speaking world to have access to their work for the first time.

—Tristan Foster, June 2020

Tristan Foster (TF): Your translations of short story collections by Bhuwaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary are forthcoming from Seagull Books, with translations of work by other forgotten Hindi writers to follow. How did the series come about?

Saudamini Deo (SD): Last year, I wrote a series of articles published by Scroll.in about forgotten Hindi writers. Naveen Kishore of Seagull Books read those articles, and graciously offered to publish some of these writers as a part of their Hindi series under their India list. Neither Bhuwaneshwar nor Rajkamal Chaudhary has ever been translated into English before, which is indicative of a larger pattern: Hindi literature rarely gets translated.

TF: I want to talk first of Wolves and Other Short Stories by Bhuwaneshwar. His narratives are rhythmic, dreamy, and brutally pessimistic. The story “Wolves” tells of a caravan being chased by a pack of wolves in the night; girls are thrown off to lighten the load and stop the attack. In “Sun worship,” he writes: “This is hell, doctor, hell! A colony of the dead. This bustling city is a colony of the dead . . . Imagine that rain dissolves this place like a load of cow dung. But it will not make any difference in the world.” This harshness is even occasionally acknowledged—in “Alas, Human Heart,” the narrator discusses the carefree life he lived with friends, playing card games and going on hikes, all of them optimistic because “no one had yet had a break to look life in the eye.” The Bhuwaneshwar story looks death square in the eye. What was your experience immersing yourself in his world?

SD: As with most experiences, it was both strange and not strange. It was the first time that I was translating him, but I have been reading him forever—I wrote a paper on him during my master’s degree. So, I knew what I was getting into—I already knew the brutal pessimism and the omnipresent death in his work. What was new to me were the moments of tender insight and human ambivalence. In the story “Wolves,” right before the father is about to jump off of the caravan amidst wolves, he takes off the new shoes he is wearing and instructs his son to sell them (dead men’s shoes are never worn). I thought about this little detail for a long time. A man about to kill himself thinking about his shoes. In the story “Freedom: A Letter,” a single mother describes her life in a hill station hospital (she is a doctor) and the story is not dramatic, nothing happens, and in the end she just writes, “What is this thing called freedom? Nothing can be known about it without acquiring and using it.” It is especially moving because of its simple truth. It also acquires a political meaning considering Bhuwaneshwar was writing in pre-independence India, and he seems ambivalent about the idea of freedom itself, not necessarily politically—the idea of freedom as the ultimate harbinger of hope. Freedom can change everything except human nature. We are witnessing this in India right now. In any case, I can’t think of anything more symbolic of our times than wolves constantly chasing us. I think I emerged out of my immersion in his work with the feeling that perhaps we are all already immersed in Bhuwaneshwar’s world. READ MORE…

Fiction as Seduction: An Interview with Anne Serre

January 29, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Tristan Foster

A writer’s only responsibility is to seduce without cheating.

Anne Serre has been published steadily in her native France since the release of her debut novel, Les Gouvernantes, in 1992, but it wasn’t until October 2018, when New Directions published it as The Governesses, translated by Mark Hutchinson, that her writing was made available to an English-speaking audience. The Governesses was followed by The Fool in October 2019, a collection of three unlinked but thematically cohesive novellas. Serre’s two books tell enchanting and surprising stories, both delightful in style and shocking in their disregard for moral norms. At their heart is the subject of the fulfillment of desire—desires which range from living absolutely for the story to the taboo of incest; this jarring mix of charm and discomfort makes for a unique and surprising reading experience. Here, in a rare English-language interview, Serre speaks about her work in translation, her “infinite conversation” with longtime friend and translator, Mark Hutchison, and unravels some of the mystery surrounding her untranslated work.

—Tristan Foster

Tristan Foster (TF): In your essay published in Granta, entitled “How I Write My Books,” you state that you begin with a sentence, that this is the gate through which the rest of the story enters—this sentence and those which follow are the product of your reading and your thinking and living life. You write: “It requires on my part months of silence and solitude, a form of inner tranquillity, and close attention to what is taking shape inside me.” You frame this as something less serendipitous than it is magical, using the language of the occult—mystery, trickery, secret ceremonies—to describe it. How important is the magical for you, both in your writing and how you think of it? 

Anne Serre (AS): I don’t believe in magic, neither in life nor in writing! When I try to describe how I write, I’m describing a mental process in which memory and imagination meet like two rivers that suddenly flow together. It’s a bit of a mystery because, for me, this only ever happens in writing. You might compare it to a child at play. When a child pretends to be a character and invents a situation, he is both himself and the invented character.  

TF: It was also a delight for me to read, in that same piece, your view that the writing is a patchwork—of memories, your previous work, and the imagination, but one which “appears to be cut from the same cloth, and a cloth that is new and without a snag.” I say that because the story told in The Governesses seems to me to contain a perfect world of its own, one that is recognisable from fairy tales encountered as a child as well as, perhaps, Emma and Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair, an ecosystem in total balance, so much so it might pop if poked with a stick. The Governesses was your first book, originally published in 1992; why has building this kind of world been so important to you from the outset? 

AS: I used to say that I came to literature through “the door of enchantment” because it was the only door open to me. I tried to find other doors but I couldn’t. Sometimes I think that 99% of my early material was made up of my reading and my daydreams about my reading. I was full of fiction. Maybe a little too much to make do with just living. READ MORE…