Language: Bangla

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

November 3, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Wambua Muindi, and Zohra Salih

The latest literary news from Hong Kong, India, and Kenya!

This week, our Editors-at-Large report on documentaries about poetry, award-winning short stories, and exciting translation fellowships. From novels shortlisted for big prizes to upcoming movie screenings, read on to find out more!

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

Taiwan’s 60th annual Golden Horse Awards will be held on November 25 and Hong Kong film director Ann Hui’s most recent documentary Elegies is nominated for the Best Documentary Feature. Elegies was already selected as the opening film for the Hong Kong International Film Festival earlier this year, which was a rare occasion as poetry—the subject of the documentary—used to be a niche literary interest in the city. The first part of Elegies presents a sketching of contemporary Hong Kong poetry through interviews of Hong Kong poets and archival materials of Xi Xi and Leung Ping-kwan. The second and third part of the documentary are dedicated to two Hong Kong poets, Huang Canran and Liu Wai-tong, respectively, who both have deep cultural roots with Hong Kong but choose to live elsewhere. Hui studied literature at university, and poetry had long been a subject matter that the director wished to explore through the medium of the moving picture. The film is her way of paying homage to local poetry and the city, as well as an elegy for a bygone era.

To celebrate the nomination and achievement of Elegies, M+ Museum has organised a few screening sessions of the documentary in November. The November 18 screening includes a post-screening dialogue with the director and the featured poets, moderated by M+ film curator Li Cheuk-to. Ann Hui will discuss her ideas about poetry and the implications of poetry for her film productions. The three artists will engage in conversations on the essence of poetry, as well as their own stories of poetry writing. READ MORE…

Realizing the Myriad Possibilities of the Text: An Interview with Arunava Sinha

November 4, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Suhasini Patni

This is the truth of the world, that we live in various languages and not just one.

Arunava Sinha is a Delhi-based translator literary translator who works from Bengali to English and English to Bengali. He is the winner of the Crossword Book Award for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), and sixty-six of his translations have been published so far, including a collection of Modern Bengali Poetry, novels by acclaimed writers such as Buddhadeva Bose and Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay, and a collection of Bengali short stories. He teaches in the creative writing department at Ashoka University and works as the books editor at Scroll.in.

I met him for the first time in 2019, when I worked as his teaching assistant. In a small class of six students, translating out of Hindi, Tamil, and Bengali, we worked on hearing the voice of a book and how to articulate it in a different language.

In this Zoom conversation, Sinha talks about translating Khwabnama by Akhtaruzzaman Elias, the questions he receives in his literary translation classes, and the publishing industry in India.

Suhasini Patni (SP): You’ve been translating for many years. In your latest interview with Forbes, you said you developed an interest in literary translation after realizing that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was a translation. Can you talk about your journey so far?

Arunava Sinha (AS): It began as an interest in college. I was an English literature student, and as you said, it struck me that these words we’re marveling over when we’re reading Garcia Marquez are really written by somebody else. I wanted to know what writing those words might be like. And of course, it immediately showed me that translation is completely different from what we assume it is. It’s all that is not said but that you are hearing at the back of your head. It is so little about the dictionary meaning because that’s the most easily solved problem. That is what makes a text so rich and what makes translation so interesting.

I had forgotten about translation because I moved to Delhi and switched jobs. It wasn’t until an editor at Penguin called me, asking me about Sankar’s Chowringhee that I rekindled my journey. And it was just at the right age for a midlife crisis, too!

SP: What kind of books did you begin with translating?

AS: I started with the canon, partly because there were not too many translations of the best-known books from Bangla at the time. There were a number of English publishers, and they were hungry for books to publish and there were not enough writers in English. So, it was quite a happy combination of circumstances. There was plenty of variety in the writing in the canon, but if you really step back and look at the big picture, it represented just one segment of possible writing in Bangla. That is what led me to start looking for texts with more diversity, both in terms of the content and the writer. People who wrote regularly did with a certain kind of lucidity which I think was market-facing even if they didn’t tell themselves so. But their books were written to be read by large numbers of people. They adopted a certain lucid idiom. Their art lay in playing with lucidity, but they never became obscure except for some experimental writers. When the field widened and I had other types of books to look for, they were not as bothered about the market. And they wrote in much stronger, much more literary—by literary I don’t mean high literary—but much more of an idiom that only literature can accept and accommodate. This of course has also made translation a more complicated but invigorating task. As you do more of the same thing, you want your challenges to get bigger.

It was partly this that led me to the text, until now, I think was the toughest to translate, which is Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s Khwabnama, which is daunting not just because of the actual language but also because you immediately realize the quality of that book and you are terrified that you will not be able to preserve it in the translated version. I think this was the biggest concern for me. I’m still not sure if it has worked or not. And I don’t think I ever will be. When you’re translating, your real challenge is the language, it’s not the literature. At that point, you’re not thinking of the literature, you’re just thinking of how to get a sentence across. Miraculously, somehow if you do it right, then all the pieces fall into place.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 3, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Jacqueline Leung, and Suhasini Patni

Stay up to date with the literary world from Hong Kong to Palestine to India!

This week, allow our editors-at-large to take you around the world to find out about the most exciting literary news. From Hong Kong, the highly anticipated 21st Hong Kong International Literary Festival has announced its first slate of writers. New lyric dispatches allow us to hear from a variety of voices from Palestine. Finally, fellowships and festivals from India are worth your attention. Read on to learn more! 

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong:

After a two-year-long hiatus with its main website, Cha, Hong Kong’s popular English literary journal, is open for submissions again from July for their Auditory Cortex 2021 special feature. Co-edited by Lian-Hee Wee and Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, the issue accepts poetry written in various Englishes, acknowledging the diversity of the language across multiple territories. The auditory cortex is the first point in the brain reacting to sound, and as such the publication is looking to document the acoustics of lesser known varieties through a series of recordings accompanying the texts. Cha is also calling for abstracts for the Backreading Hong Kong’s 2021 academic symposium, “Translating Hong Kong,” with Hong Kong Baptist University and The University of Toronto Scarborough this December. In addition to new insights into translation practice, the symposium hopes to explore the cultural and linguistic implications of interpreting works about Hong Kong, whether translation reiterates the colonial dominance of English and how it feeds into the city’s culture.

Back for its 21st year, the Hong Kong International Literary Festival just announced its initial line-up of writers and speakers. Held between November 5 to 15, this year’s festival is entitled the Rebound Edition and will focus on themes of resilience, recovery, and mental health. It has so far confirmed the appearance of Amor Towles, Paula Hawkins, Damon Galgut, and Mary Jean Chan, as well as local emerging writers Alice Chan, Virginia Ng, and Angus Lee, with more details to be announced in late September.

Beyond the page—and my usual reportage of Chinese-English translation happenings—Asia Society Hong Kong Center is hosting a series of six screenings and talks of Korean films with English subtitles between now and December. Titled “Beyond K-pop: Korean Families in Films,” the program features new and classic hits including Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019), Ode to My Father (2014), and Minari (2021) which won the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language. The films offer portrayals of Korean families in different eras and social contexts, addressing issues of historical strife, separation, and immigration. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 23, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, José García Escobar, and Suhasini Patni

This week, we bring to you literary news from Palestine, India, and Central America!

Want to find out what’s happening in the literary world? This week, our Editors-at-Large bring you news from Palestine, where a landmark issue of World Literature Today features nearly two dozen of the most eminent Palestinian writers; India, where lockdown is slowly being lifted, and bookstores begin to bustle; and Central America, where writers from Guatemala to Costa Rica are releasing new books. Curious about this wide-ranging itinerary? Read on to find out more! 

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

“While most writers offer their writing to the masses, Palestinian writers offer their very souls,” writes the Guest Editor Yousef Khanfar in his introduction to “Palestine Voices,” the Summer 2021 issue of World Literature Today (released earlier this month). Throughout its ninety-five-year publishing history, World Literature Today  (published at Oklahoma University), has never devoted a cover feature—let alone a dossier—exclusively to the literature, art, and culture of Palestine. Even when WLT dedicated an issue in 1986 to “Literatures of the Middle East: A Fertile Crescent,” Palestinian writers were conspicuously absent from the lineup, reveals Editor Daniel Simon. Indeed, in Mona Mikhail’s essay introducing the 1986 issue, one of the most pivotal events during the modern era of the Middle East—the Palestinian Nakba that led to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948—isn’t even mentioned.

With less attachment to the Nakba but more freedom for exploration and imagination, the expanded issue, at 128 pages, “represents a long-overdue—and especially timely—attempt to remedy this deficit” writes Simon. “As with other recent dossiers dedicated to so-called “stateless” literatures, WLT’s Summer 2021 issue recognizes an autonomous literary tradition that dates back centuries and now, in the diaspora, is one of the most cosmopolitan literatures in the world.” The voices gathered in “Palestine Voices,” according to Khanfar, “speak a universal language: one of life filled with human dignity that celebrates a rich cultural heritage and vibrant present along with aspirations for freedom, justice, and hope for a better future.”

Nearly two dozen of the most eminent Palestinian writers and poets are gathered in WLT’s Summer 2021 issue, along with the work of twenty renowned artists and photographers. Since a number of the pieces are web exclusive, it is all worth it to explore the issue online, and to appreciate the well-chosen art works that compliment the texts. As “colonization slowly dehumanizes Palestine and the Palestinians,” according to Khanfar, Simon believes that the work by the writers featured in this WLT issue “rehumanizes a people who have much to offer the world.” At any rate, trust them when they say “these voices are designed to captivate and not to convince.” READ MORE…

Asymptote Book Club: In Conversation with Rimli Bhattacharya

February 12, 2018  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Chris Power

Doesn’t the strength of a work of fiction lie in its lack of closure?

Our second Asymptote Book Club interview is an in-depth discussion of Aranyak, a seminal work of Bengali literature translated into English by Rimli Bhattacharya.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Asymptote Assistant Editor Chris Power, Rimli Bhattacharya reflects on Aranyak’s enduring importance, how a bout of “language sickness” led to its translation into English, and why author Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s “extraordinarily sensitive” portrayal of women was ahead of its time.

Chris Power’s review of the novel is available to read here.

Chris Power (CP): I’d first like to ask about the history of Aranyak’s reception. Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay wrote this classic Bengali novel, based on his years spent in northern Bihar, between 1937 and 1939. What new significance does it take on in the twenty-first century? What inspired you to translate it? When did you first read it, and how has your reading of it evolved?

Rimli Bhattacharya (RB): Aranyak was serialized in the late 1930s—the same decade in which a clutch of other remarkable novels, such as Aparajito and Drihstipradip, were published. Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay was already celebrated as the writer of Pather Panchali. The interesting thing about Aranyak is that many forests meld in the novel, not only Bibhutibhushan’s years in Bhagalpur in the 1920s, but also his travels in Singbhum and Mayurbhanj in Orissa in the mid-1930s, as his biographer Rusati Sen points out.

READ MORE…