Who is your favorite fictional character of all time?
Arthur from The Once and Future King by T H White.
Who was your first favorite writer and how old were you when you discovered them?
Enid Blyton. I was 5.
What is your favorite word in any language? Which word do you find most difficult to translate?
Favorite word in any language: sosegado. Most difficult to translate: the bengali phrase ‘mon kharap’ – signifying a state ranging from melancholia to misery, depending on the context. ‘Mon’ is a continuum between the mind and the heart.
What 5 books would you want with you if you were stranded on a desert island?
East of Eden: John Steinbeck; Complete Poems: W.H. Auden; Tithidore (Bengali): Buddhadeva Bose; Godel, Escher Bach: Douglas Hofstadter; 1Q84: Haruki Murakami
Which under-translated author do you think deserves wider recognition worldwide?
Premendra Mitra (Bengali)
Do you have a translation philosophy that guides your work?
Be led by the text alone. Leave out nothing, add nothing.
Which of the translations that you’ve worked on was the most challenging? Why?
The Chieftain’s Daughter, by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (published in Bengali in 1865). Imagine translating a racy romance loaded with passion and intrigue and written in a Sanskritised Bengali a century and a half ago into an English version for the modern reader!
How did you learn your foreign language and how did you begin working as a literary translator?
In Calcutta, many students learn and use English and Bengali simultaneously at school and at home. And English is the lingua franca of India. I began translating the way people do crossword puzzles. I was fortunate to find publishers interested.
If you could have been born in a culture other than your own which would you choose to be a member of? Why?
Brazilian. For the sheer joie de vivre, for Jorge Amado, and for football.
If you hadn’t been a translator what profession would you like to have tried?
I’m still trying to make translation a full-time profession that will enable me to give up my day job. But I would have loved to have been a teacher.
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Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and nonfiction from India and Bangladesh into English. Twenty-one of his translations have been published so far. Twice the winner of India’s Crossword translation award, for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), respectively, he has also been shortlisted for the UK’s Independent Foreign Fiction prize (2009) for his translation of Chowringhee. Besides India, his translations have been published in the UK and the US in English, and in several European and Asian countries through further translation. He was born and grew up in Kolkata, and lives and writes in New Delhi.