Posts filed under 'book distribution'

Why are so few South Asian translations published in the U.S.? (Part V)

In Rahman’s penultimate post, he speaks with publishing insiders and literary translators to glean some surprising information.

Read all posts in Mahmud Rahman’s investigation here.

In the early 20th century and into the first decades of independent India, there were a small number of translations into English. Across language boundaries, Indians read writers like Tagore, Sarat Chandra, and Premchand. Though the translations were often clunky, these books played a role in building a sense of India as a nation.

Initially there were a handful of publishers who published translations from a few Indian languages into English. Quality translations came from one or two individuals, such as the writer A.K. Ramanujan. Rita Kothari in her book Translating India includes this telling quote: “Prabhakar Machwe, secretary of the Sahitya Akademi in the seventies complained that, ‘even after 25 years, we have not been able to develop a team of ten good, competent translators of Indian languages into English.’”

Things began to turn by the late 1980s.

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