Place: India

Elementalia: Chapter III Earth

April 3, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Kanya Kanchana

What does Earth know that Word does not?

Humans throughout history have been fascinated by the elements. Unfathomable forces of nature, they entered our myths and minds aeons ago. There’s no time when we’re not in their thrall. Drawing from the vast store of our collective imagination across mythology, philosophy, religion, literature, science, and art, I present Elementalia, a series of five element-bending lyric essays that explores their enchanting stories and their relationship with the word—making, translating, and transforming meaning and message. This is not an exhaustive (nor exhausting) effort that covers every instance of and interaction with each element, but rather an idiosyncratic, intertextual, meditative work—a patchwork quilt of conversations with other writers, works, and texts across space and time. 

Earth is cracking along her fault lines. And most of these fault lines are now human.

 

*

[William of Baskerville, a Franciscan friar-turned-detective:] “This is what we need: a way to get into the library at night, and a lamp. You get the lamp. Linger in the kitchen after dinner, and take one…”

[Adso of Melk, his protégé, a Benedictine novice:] “A theft?”

[William:] “A loan, in the name of the greater glory of the Lord.”

[Adso:] “If that is so, then count on me.”

– Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

 

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The Movement of Language: Matt Reeck on the Best Unexpressed

April 2, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

But holding two languages ‘open’ at once is imperfect . . . you can get lost in between these two natures.

Matt Reeck’s rich, sonically layered translation of Olivier Domerg’s psychogeographic writing, from Portrait of the Puy de Manse, was published in Asymptote’s January 2025 issue as part of its special feature on new forms. In the piece, we leap from prose to verse, stepping with each new utterance from alignment to alignment, just as the puy becomes a stream becomes another mountain. “Collapse: debris,” writes Domerg in Reeck’s precise, pensive hand. Does translation depend on a similar, geological rhythm of change? In this interview, Asymptote’s Senior Assistant Editor of Fiction Michelle Chan Schmidt speaks with Reeck about his translative art, the sonic aura of language and space, and the process of decolonising knowledge.

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): In an interview with Asymptote from 2014—eleven years ago!—you state that your translation philosophy is ‘best left unexpressed’. Yet in a brilliant 2019 essay for Public Books, ‘Translation’s Burden’, you highlight what you call the ‘Hermeneutic Truth’, deconstructing the cliché of ‘semantic invariance’, or the so-called untranslatable element—apparently intrinsic to each text—that causes their translations to wither. How would you express your translation philosophy today? What role might ‘unnecessary original language words’ play in translated texts?

Matt Reeck (MR): First, I have to say that while I know people use the word ‘philosophy’ in this context, I tend to avoid it; why does everything have to have a philosophy when ‘practice’ would do, when intelligence and sensitivity would do? That word also tends to make ‘practice’ appear uniform and to regularise what is naturally variable. Even if there are guidelines, choices are always particular and individual. I think that means translation is an art and not a philosophy (and is not governed by a philosophy).

These days, I think about the role editors take. (Patrick Hersant has a great essay forthcoming called ‘The Third Hand’, translated by me (!), that talks about the role editors play in the publication of translations.) I think about any book’s birth as a collaboration. So many people are involved, and the relationship with editors can be good or bad. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

March 28, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by René Esaú Sánchez, Sayani Sarkar, and Wambua Muindi

The latest literary news from Kenya, India, and México!

This week, our editors-at-large take us to India, Kenya, and México. From a cross-cultural poetry retreat to a crime writer’s conference, read on to find out more!

Réne Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting from México

Not so long ago, I was talking with some friends about the Guadalajara International Book Fair and how, for many locals, an event like that was actually their only chance to find certain books, meet certain authors and even reflect upon their literary activities. Despite the importance of the Fair, literary circulation remains centralized in Mexico City, while book commercialization in other places like Guadalajara, Monterrey, or Oaxaca is always secondary.

This is why I find it important to celebrate events like the Yucatán International Reading Fair (FILEY), which will conclude this Sunday, March 30. This year, it has hosted important authors including Cristina Rivera Garza, Verónica Murguía, Brenda Lozano, Jorge Comensal, and Xita Rubert. At the Fair, the 2025 José Emilio Pacheco Award for Excellence in Literature was presented to Alberto Ruy Sánchez, a prolific novelist who, in his unique style, shared the reasons behind his writing:

I write to know, to explore vast dimensions of reality that only literature can penetrate. I also write to remember, but no less, I write to forget. I write to extend my body, my senses, to experience the sensuality of the world day after day. I write for pleasure, for desire, for rage. To expose the falsification of icons, the abuse of public power. I write to be hated and to be loved, more so, to be desired. I write to propose new spaces in this world, to create places.

As its name suggests, FILEY has also been a space to reflect on why, how, and from where we read, something essential if we want to address the problem of cultural centralization. As María Teresa Mézquita, the Fair’s director, said in her opening remarks at the festival, beyond numbers and sales, the event is driven by a desire to foster personal growth, learning, and a cultural environment enriched precisely through reading.

It is good, as Ruy Sánchez’s remarks suggest, to know why we write; just as important is knowing why we read.

Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large reporting from Kenya READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Seven Poems by Manglesh Dabral

March 18, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Nisarg P.

Opening the invisible doors of air, water, and dust, you have left for a mountain, river, or star, to become a mountain, a river, a star yourself.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a selection of works by Indian poet and journalist Manglesh Dabral. Dabral wrote in deceptively simple yet precise language; his artistic sensibility, which comes across as modest and humble in its ambitions, inquired into some of the most pressing questions of postcolonial India. Ranging from social themes, like the way postcolonial modernity blinds itself to its own past, to themes of personal memory, the experience of displacement, and the unending longing for home, Dabral embraced a vast spectrum of human emotions. A line from “In Memory of my Father” could serve as a statement for his poetic vision: “Within empty containers[,] torn-up books[,] and things infested with granary weevil, whatever life was left in them[,] you used to believe in it.” Translated from the Hindi by Nisarg P., the seven poems featured here are perfect representations of Dabral’s poetics―in their language, their form, and the themes with which they engage.

Here was that River

She wanted to reach there in haste
the place where a man
was heading for a bath in her water
a boat
was waiting for its travelers
and a line of birds
were approaching in search of her water

In that river of our childhood
we used to see our faces moving
on her shore were our houses
always over-flooded
she loved her islands and her stones
days used to begin from that river
her sound
audible at all the windows
her waves knocking on the doors
calling us incessantly
we remember
here was that river [,] in this very sand
where our faces once moved
here was that awaiting boat

now there is nothing
except at night when people are asleep
a voice is sometimes heard from its sand.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2025

March 10, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ben Goldman, Eamon McGrath, Jonathon Atkinson, Matilda Nevin, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Xiao Yue Shan

Reviews of eleven newly published books from Argentina, India, Austria, France, Japan, Chile, Bulgaria, Sweden, and Denmark!

This month, our selection of noteworthy titles include a collection of revolutionary Hindi poetry, an erotic thriller from an extraordinary Chilean modernist, an incisive novel concerning the disabled body in contemporary Japan, an intimate socio-philosophical contemplation of a loved one’s life and death by one of France’s foremost intellectuals, and more. 

bazterrica

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses, Scribner, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

There’s something seductive about the nightmare, perhaps because fear is the most vivifying sensation, perhaps because beauty and horror are so finely intertwined. In Agustina Bazterrica’s The Unworthy, the night-terror has never looked so exquisite, so shimmering. With an eye for the luminous and ear for the otherworldly, familiar gothic tropes are here relieved from their muted gloom; a chimeric language sings the shadows awake, and in this chorus even the most basic signifiers of darkness regain their fearsomeness, mysticism, sensual enthrallment. The cockroach has a gleam, a crunch; a derelict cathedral is as diaphanous as a dragonfly’s wing. There are the recognisable plot-pieces—violent sacraments, echoing halls, and a wasted world—but those who command fear’s aesthetic know that the most disturbing capacity of pain and transgression lies not in their repellence, but their strange and unpronounceable allure. It is not the torturous that Bazterrica is adept at bringing to life, but the smile that slowly creeps across the face of the tortured, when they are somewhere we can no longer reach.

The Unworthy is a post-apocalyptic convent story, wherein the only known patch of livable land is occupied by the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, a cult that is at once spiritually vacuous and deeply devotional, with its faith reserved more for the House’s singular rites, rituals, and rules than any principle or entity. As is the standard for any secluded sect that positions oblivion as the only alternative to obeyance, the Sisterhood’s hierarchy is strict and immovable, the leaders are mysterious and merciless, the eroticism is violent, the violence is erotic, and the practices are senseless but methodical. The founder and head of the House is a man, but in the name of Sisterhood, all his acolytes are woman: some are servants, some are the Unworthy, some are Chosen, some are Enlightened—and only this latter group is given contact with the one known only as He. One guess as to what that means. Our nameless narrator wants to rise through the ranks, but stubborn fragments of selfhood prevent her from completely assimilating into the Sisterhood’s processions. She still has memories, desires—though they are but frayed remains. READ MORE…

Elementalia: Chapter II Water

March 6, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Kanya Kanchana

The more I try to hold it, to shape it, the more it slips away from me, laughing at my hubris that tries to contain water.

Humans throughout history have been fascinated by the elements. Unfathomable forces of nature, they entered our myths and minds aeons ago. There’s no time when we’re not in their thrall. Drawing from the vast store of our collective imagination across mythology, philosophy, religion, literature, science, and art, I present Elementalia, a series of five element-bending lyric essays that explores their enchanting stories and their relationship with the word—making, translating, and transforming meaning and message. This is not an exhaustive (nor exhausting) effort that covers every instance of and interaction with each element, but rather an idiosyncratic, intertextual, meditative work—a patchwork quilt of conversations with other writers, works, and texts across space and time.

Water above and below.
Water outside and inside.
Water of the past and water of the future.
Water of the world and water of the word.
Water always finds a way.

 

READ MORE…

Taking a Stand: How the Jaipur Literature Festival Fails to Deliver as A Space For Dialogue

February 24, 2025  |  in Dispatches  |  by Matilde Ribeiro

The question thus becomes whether the JLF . . . will continue to grow into an increasingly overt vehicle of privilege, elitism, and capitalism.

Branded as “the world’s grandest celebration of books and ideas” and “the greatest literary show on earth,” the Jaipur Literature Festival has grand ambitions for storming the world stage as a thoughtful and progressive interchange of literary excellence and social engagement. Now in its eighteenth edition, however, the festival has shifted towards an alignment with pro-establishment sponsors and government entities, initiating questions on how a necessarily commercial event can serve to dismantle exclusive hierarchies and status quos. In the following dispatch, Matilde Riberio discusses the various shortcomings of the festival in its conduct and programming, as well as its ideological evolution over the years.

The Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF), India’s largest literary event and one of its first to attract an international audience, has long positioned itself as a confluence of ideas, texts, narratives, and genres—a place where, as the academic Soni Wadhwa wrote after the 2024 edition: “Nobody tries to distance themselves from it. All are welcome.” At the same time, the festival has always been a space of political contest, and nearly every edition has been caught up in controversies involving the stifling of free speech, corporate sponsorship by companies with markedly unethical practices, and sexual misconduct allegations against various panelists and the cofounder, William Dalrymple.

The question thus becomes whether the JLF can transcend these roots to actually become a junction of subcontinental voices, or whether it will continue to grow into an increasingly overt vehicle of privilege, elitism, and capitalism as the years pass. Unfortunately, the issues that have mired the 2025 edition, taking place over January 30 to February 3, suggest that the festival may have finally shed any pretensions of being anything other than a business-friendly, upper-caste Hindu-dominated, and state-sanctioned “tamasha,” as the journalist and activist Aakar Patel described an earlier edition, using the Hindi and Urdu word for “spectacle.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

February 21, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by MARGENTO, René Esaú Sánchez, and Sayani Sarkar

Our editors bring you the latest from India, Mexico, and Romanian letters.

A vital new project to resurrect the works of a great Romanian poet in the English language, a slew of ambitious and global-minded book festivals in India, and a fair to highlight Oaxacan writing and languages in Mexico—our editors are bringing you the latest from a literary landscape that continues to expand in richness, variety, and intercultural exange.

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Romania

In 1889, Mihai Eminescu—the iconic late romantic/early modernist Romanian poet—died at the age of thirty-nine, leaving behind only one published collection but tens of thousands of unreleased manuscripts. As they were gradually unearthed and released over the decades following his death, the posthumous publications only increased Eminescu’s fame and critical acclaim. Despite this unparalleled stature in Romanian literary history, however, the poet is relatively unknown to English-language readers—an issue that paradoxically has nothing to do with a lack of translations. In fact, a sizeable portion of Romanian and Anglophone translators and writers have tried their hand at this hugely demanding task, but they’ve all largely failed in two essential respects (to smaller or larger extents): first, in rendering the oceanic vastness and depth of the oeuvre, and, second, in capturing the exquisite euphony to an extent by which a non-Romanian reader could sense the original’s inescapable fascination.

One of the most important recent events in Romanian letters has now set out to address both those shortcomings in a spectacular fashion; K.V. Twain (Diana Cârligeanu’s pen-name), a young poet, writer, and translator educated in the US and Japan, has undertaken the task of translating Eminescu’s collected poems in an eight-volume series to be published by Eikon Press, and the first instalment was launched in January under the aegis of the Romanian Literary Translators Association in Bucharest. The association’s director, multilingual poet and performer Peter Sragher, was the event’s enthusiastic host, while literary critics Christian Crăciun and Vianu Mureșan contributed generous praise for the project.  READ MORE…

Elementalia: Chapter I Fire

February 6, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Kanya Kanchana

Primal flame, visceral, of a kind long before gunpowder made fire cerebral.

Humans throughout history have been fascinated by the elements. Unfathomable forces of nature, they entered our myths and minds aeons ago. There’s no time when we’re not in their thrall. Drawing from the vast store of our collective imagination across mythology, philosophy, religion, literature, science, and art, I present Elementalia, a series of five element-bending lyric essays that explores their enchanting stories and their relationship with the word—making, translating, and transforming meaning and message. This is not an exhaustive (nor exhausting) effort that covers every instance of and interaction with each element, but rather an idiosyncratic, intertextual, meditative work—a patchwork quilt of conversations with other writers, works, and texts across space and time. 

Fire blazes in the news now, while elsewhere in the world—where people have less, where media doesn’t look as hard, where photographs aren’t as terribly beautiful—water churns, earth cracks, air howls, and the void always awaits.

/

*

Bastian: “Why is it so dark?”

The Childlike Empress: “In the beginning, it is always dark.”

– The NeverEnding Story, 1984 film

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

– Sri Aurobindo, Savitri

अ॒ग्निमी॑ळे पु॒रोहि॑तं य॒ज्ञस्य॑ दे॒वमृ॒त्विज॑म् । होता॑रं रत्न॒धात॑मम् ॥ १.००१.०१

agnimīḻe purohitaṃ yajñasya devamṛtvijam |
hotāraṃ ratnadhātamam || 1.001.01

– The Ṛgveda

/

*

Out of the primordial darkness, something appears. A little spark. So it begins.

Agni, Fire, is the first god to be invoked, the foremost, in the very first verse of the oldest of the Vedas, themselves among the oldest texts in the world. Agni is the one placed first, the priest of the sacrifice. Agni—two-headed, seven-tongued, born from the open mouth of Prajāpati, the progenitor—devours the oblations. That’s how he was coaxed back—with a share of the offerings and an injury-free, immortal-ish lifespan—when he ran away from his duties and hid in the waters and the plants. Agni, the conveyor, carries the offerings to the gods. And Agni, a god among mortals, is himself the summoner of gods.

READ MORE…

Winter 2025: Highlights from the Team

February 3, 2025  |  in News  |  by Anna Rumsby, Carissa Coane, Daniel Yadin, Devi Sastry, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Sayani Sarkar

Dive into our new issue with these choice recommendations from our amazing intercontinental team!

Translated by Samuel Bollier, Jurj Salem’s “At the Circus” is a discombobulatingly charming, disarmingly hair-raising tale that elides joy and frustration, obfuscates reality and performance, and makes irony sincere. Things are not what they seem, which renders Bollier’s excellent translation of Salem’s easygoing prose all the more stirring; there, suited in the circus, we must imagine S. happy.

I’ve had the chance to read Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s breathstopping beautiful self-translations in The Margins before; these two pieces in the new issue exude that same intrinsic conscience of precarious simultaneity, numbered and reversed, punctuated with “+” signs, a “delirious net of ten thousand dewdreams.” Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s wordly creations turn from imagistic manifestation into pure interpretation.

Samuel’s parodic brilliance in his essay “Poets of Mirror Hatred” yields real laughter in an entirely serious, paradoxically internal essay about the division between the social and the cultural in poetic personas. What language exists for that which must not be expressed, at all costs, lest the self split? How must the reader read repression? Linking Kafka to two generations of modern Korean poetry, Samuel ends by critiquing the bright, hegemonic Asian American discourse of pain, transformed by their loudness into white noise: “To want more representation of Asian-American faces in American literature is to dream of your own cage.”

When Brandon Breen translates that “writing is obliquitous, but also ubiquitous,” I return to Ubah Cristana Ali Farah’s original contrast, “obliqua” versus “ubiqua,” in “The House of Termites,” a juxtaposition that encapsulates the attractions of Ali Farah’s style. By obliquely rebounding between various writers of exile, from Baldwin to Said to Kristeva, Mernissi, and Zambrano, Ali Farah’s essay makes a sensual ubiquity of this obliquitous displacement. To misappropriate Baldwin, you need strength to live in the “house of termites”; another kind of strength to let the termites get at it. Both strengths inhabit this essay.

Zhou Junyi’s conversation with filmmaker Tan Pin Pin crystallizes a certain vision of Singapore: a prism of public languages, spaces, and systems that shift as the microwave’s glass plate spins. I particularly love how the interview conveys the sounds of Singapore, and how we intellectualize it through subtitular structures, and formal and editorial decisions. Tan’s work lies in the instant before the intellectualization: “People will always know when a guest of honor arrives, but they don’t know what it feels like before the guest of honor arrives or even question why we have a guest of honor in the first place.”

—Michelle Chan Schmidt, Senior Assistant Editor READ MORE…

Our Winter 2025 Issue Has Landed!

January 23, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

New forms abound in our bountiful 14th anniversary issue, from Robin Munby’s “parasite poem” to Elsa Gribinski’s absurdist diary entries. 

With Trump’s inauguration, the world’s strange turn continues apace in the new year and the old ways of apprehending reality are struggling, as ever, to keep up. As Olivier Domerg puts it succinctly: “What can language do face to face with the inertia and the power of something?” This pressing question finds an enjoinder in #NewForms, our 14th anniversary issue, featuring never-before-published writing from 32 countries, by some of the most beloved names in world literature—Osip Mandelstam, Natsume Sōseki, Andrey Platonov, Agustín Fernández Mallo, and Damion Searls in our wildcard feature on new forms. Organized in memory of the recently deceased postmodernist Robert Coover, this Special Feature highlights works that transgress the boundaries of the literary form, opening our eyes to new aesthetic and ethical possibilities. From Robin Munby’s “parasite poem” whose hyperbolic language tests the boundary between translation and original authorship, to the laconic and darkly absurd diary entries of Elsa Gribinski’s “A Finger of Blue,” these pieces chafe against the strictures of traditional form (the poem, the journal, the letter) even as they pay homage to the artists who have shaped them.This spirit of formal ambition is by no means limited to our Special Feature. After all, “as the reality of each time changes,” says Fernández Mallo in an illuminating interview, “so does the notion of realism that the works of each era explore.” Thus, Vietnamese poet Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng splices words and fragments into a manifesto for a new writing and both Macedonian novelist Lidija Dimkovska and Syrian author Jurj Salem put their fingers on an unexplored aspect of the contemporary condition—the urge to retreat from society—and envision new ways of being. Elsewhere in Fiction, Johanna Sebauer’s Pickled presents the anatomy of a cancelling in rural Austria, when a journalist splashed by acid pickle juice launches a media crusade against Big Gherkin. Notable among our nonfiction entries is frequent contributor Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s The House of Termites, a slow-burning, lyrical meditation on her “unstoppable nomadism,” which finds an echo in award-winning Singaporean director Tan Pin Pin’s many evolving versions of banjia (Moving House) from the Visual section. Finally, in our Criticism lineup, Tomoé Hill trawls the thrilling concepts—around truth, and storytelling, and immortality—buried in Douglas Penick’s The Oceans of Cruelty, while Samuel notes the arrival of a new wave of talented young Korean poets on the shores of the United States and distills the lessons their work might hold for their Asian American counterparts.

For all the world really. The lessons that Samuel comes away with apply just as well to those not writing from a hegemonic position but who have to pitch themselves to a readership unfamiliar with their culture. It’s a conundrum we know all too well, having been the first point of contact between countless authors and readers in our fourteen years’ of work in world literature. If you’ve personally benefitted from the “Asymptote effect” (which former President of ALTA Aron Aji cited in 2017 as one of the key factors contributing to the ever-growing reception of international literature in translation), we hope you’ll consider standing with us as we enter our fifteenth year. The best way to support us is to sign up as a sustaining member from as little as USD5 a month. If you are able to afford it, come aboard as a masthead member, as wonderful readers like Yann Martel have done. Finally, if you would like to be part of an upcoming issue or even our dynamic volunteer team, check out our submission guidelines (Korean translators, take note: submissions to our upcoming paid Special Feature, organized in partnership with LTI Korea, closes Feb 15) and our latest recruitment drive (we’re on a lookout for a new Nonfiction Editor, among others; deadline: Feb 2). Thank you for your readership and your support, which have made this all worthwhile.

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A Paradoxical Man of Letters: In Conversation with Kiriti Sengupta

January 20, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Dustin Pickering

I . . . aimed to break free from being overly symbolic . . . perhaps I sought to reach out to readers who wished to interpret my poems quickly. 

When I first met Kiriti Sengupta in 2015, I was unaware of his literary efforts. He contacted me on social media as a publisher in the United States, after which I had the honor of naming a few of his books while he inspired two of my most notable poetry collections, including Salt and Sorrow. Our friendship led me to learn more about the history, culture, and literary traditions of India, a country for which I have a special fondness.

Sengupta’s literary corpus include writing, editing, translating, and publishing writers across the globe to bridge the communities. He was awarded the 2018 Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize and the inaugural Nilim Kumar National Honour (2024). I have since read all of his books and published him twice with Reflections on Salvation (2016) and Oneness (2024) under the imprint Transcendent Zero Press. He is a paradoxical man of letters, and his efforts sustain a bridge between the United States and India through literature. His poetry is fresh and cryptic, sometimes leaving the reader frustrated for meaning, but it is also ripe with cultural references and idioms that astound me. Finding his work intriguing, I sat down for a thoughtful conversation to better understand this literary figure.

Dustin Pickering (DP): Kiriti, you have authored numerous poetry collections and are established as a translator. Your translation of Bibhas Roy Chowdhury’s Poem Continuous has received exceptional praise worldwide. You are also a publisher with Hawakal in India (New Delhi and Kolkata). Surely, these roles must clash at times! I am curious about why you believed you should translate Chowdhury in particular.

Kiriti Sengupta (KS): My roles clash all the time, Dustin. And they create a clamor when they jostle with each other. (Laugh) So, when I write, I indite my own thoughts. When I translate, I slip into another’s shoes. When I work as a publisher, I think of the readers who would buy the product and whether it would be worth their funds. Money is precious. All these roles influence my psyche in multiple ways, and the Kiriti Sengupta you are talking with will invariably lead to all these attributes rolled into one. So, when someone calls me multi-faceted, I flash a broad smile, thinking I have no choice but to surrender helplessly to my creative instincts to sport several hats.

READ MORE…

Revathi And The Dismantling Of Neoliberal Respectability

January 15, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by mk zariel

This book has never been more necessary, offering a framework for trans reclamation and negation of the nonprofit industrial complex.

Revathi: A Life in Trans Activism by A. Revathi, translated from the Tamil by Nandini Murali, Tilted Axis Press, 2024

In November 2024, Tilted Axis Press published Revathi: A Life In Trans Activism, the story of transfeminine writer, actress, and community organizer A. Revathi’s experience at the intersection of the radical hijra community and the more traditional non-governmental bureaucracy. This memoir, originally written in Tamil, spread profound awareness of the transfeminine community in India when it was released in 2011; now, it is accessible to the English-speaking audience via Nandini Murali’s translation. A. Revathi, no stranger to a less than trans-friendly political climate, first wrote this text to critique the nonprofit industrial complex—a system in which state-sanctioned institutions prop up hierarchies of power and control—and share her experiences in making her NGO more inclusive and liberatory. In the United States especially, where even explicitly gay and lesbian nonprofits are prone to neoliberalism and transphobia while centralized government can border on the fascistic, this book has never been a more necessary read.

As an organizer at the nonprofit Sangama, Revathi wasn’t expecting to feel the same sense of belonging that she did in her hijra community, a subculture of transfeminine organizers who were assigned male at birth, which had helped her realize her own gender identity. But when she worked with trans men for the first time, she discovered the kinship she felt with others across the gender spectrum. Saying that she “literally lived their lives” after conducting interviews about their needs surrounding resource access, she found herself questioning the concept of binary gender as a whole. While lamenting that she would never be seen as a participant in an idealized binary, she eventually declared that “we need to go beyond male/female distinctions and learn to look at people as humans,” a sentiment that was less than popular with the binary and even transmedicalist establishment in the nonprofit world. READ MORE…

The Dance of the Torn Skin: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra on the Indian Anglophone Essay and Prākrit in Translation

December 9, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I’ve always been slightly more interested in the less visible than I am in those who are always in the limelight.

As an essayist, literary historian, and critic, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has been identified as one of the writers who wrestle with ‘what it means to connect the ideal of personal authenticity with wider forms of cultural identity’ by The Oxford History of Life-Writing (2022). As a poet, Modern Indian Poetry in English (2001) defines him as an experimentalist ‘who . . . has formed a poetic from local material, parody, and the conscious manipulation of chance’. In the late 60s, as a student at the University of Allahabad, Mehrotra started the avant-garde literary magazine damn you: a magazine of the arts, and later in Bombay, he founded ezra (1966-1969) and fakir (1966). In 1976, together with Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, and Gieve Patel, he started Clearing House, a small press. Along with Eunice de Souza, they’ve come to be known as the Bombay Poets. Today, he is a renowned figure in contemporary Indian literature, with a voluminous bibliography spanning poetry, literary criticism, history, translation, and essays.

In this interview, I conversed with Mehrotra on The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose (Permanent Black/Black Kite, 2020), an anthology he edited, its earliest essays appearing in periodicals that were, as Henry Derozio described them, ‘short-lived as bugs, and not so infrequent as angel-visits’; his translations of the fifteenth-century bhakti poet Kabir; and of  love poems translated from the ancient Indo-Aryan language, Prākrit. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Let’s talk about your selection process for The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose (Black Kite, 2020). In an interview with Saikat Majumdar for Ashoka University, you commented that you had wanted to include V. S. Naipaul and Jhumpa Lahiri, but had to ‘narrow the field’.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (AKM): The suggestion to do an anthology of Indian essays came from Rukun Advani, the publisher of Permanent Black/Black Kite. We discussed a few names—perhaps also some essays to possibly include—but at the time nothing came of the idea. Then, in 2019, under a pile of brown paper envelopes, I came across one marked ‘Black Kite essays’. I’d recently finished reading the proofs of Translating the Indian Past and had been wondering what to do next. In that envelope was the answer: a bunch of photocopies, the beginnings of what became The Book of Indian Essays.

It was decided early on—more for practical reasons than parochial ones—to exclude writers who had spent most, if not all, of their lives outside India. The exceptions were Santha Rama Rau and Victor Anant, forgotten writers who I felt should be brought back into the conversation—not that any conversation was taking place. By leaving out Naipaul, Lahiri, and a few others, I was also able to bring in people like Gautam Bhatia, who is an architect, and the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam.

Since the essay is more pliable than poetry or fiction, it has been wielded with considerable style and effect by writers who might be widely known for their work in their professional fields—as Bhatia and Subrahmanyam are—but are less visible as essayists in English. I’ve always been slightly more interested in the less visible than I am in those who are always in the limelight. The latter can look after themselves and are doing it very well. There will, however, come a time when present limelight will fade into the harsh glow of oblivion, and they too will be forgotten—which is why we need literary histories and anthologies. READ MORE…