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.

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 6, 2022 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Asa Chen Zhang, Peera Songkünnatham, and Suhasini Patni

Prizes, poetry contests, and new works from India, Thailand, and China!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on publishing trends in India, the memorialization of the author Wat Wanlayangkoon in Thailand, and an exciting new development in Chinese to English interpretive translation, led by the Accent Society. Read on to find out more!

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

Temperatures are soaring and the country is experiencing grueling heatwaves. Indians have taken to social media to critique the Modi government’s negligent response to the climate crisis. Many are also sharing their memories of the devastating and nightmarish second wave of the coronavirus that led to numerous deaths in the country this time last year.

The pro-Hindutva, right-wing Bhartiya Janta Party is known to instigate violence, especially against Muslims, in the name of the Hindu religion. In the latest reform to eradicate voices of dissent, verses by Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz have been dropped from the CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) class 10 textbook. Faiz, one of the most celebrated Urdu poets and a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, addressed the issues of military dictatorships and tyranny in Pakistan. According to Scroll.in, “the verses were part of the ‘Religion, Communalism and Politics—Communalism, Secular State’ segment of the National Council of Educational Research and Training’s textbook called “Democratic Politics II.” The two poems are “Let Us Walk in the Market in Shackles” and “Upon Returning from Dhaka.”

In 2021, the New India Foundation (NIF) announced its inaugural grant for writing books relating to India’s history. The three winners of the NIF Translation Fellowship were chosen from ten Indian languages and each awarded a stipend of INR 6 lakhs for a period of six months with mentorship opportunities as well as publishing and editorial support. The three winners are Venkateswar Ramaswamy (literary translator) and Amlan Biswas (statistician) who will translate Nirmal Bose’s Diaries 1946-47 from Bangla; NS Gundur (academician and literary historian) who will translate DR Nagaraj’s Allamaprabhu Mattu Shaiva Pratibhe from Kannada; and Rahul Sarwate (academician and historian) who will translate Sharad Patil’s Marxvad: Phule-Ambedkarvaad from Marathi. More can be read about the winners here.

Highlights from Our Winter 2017 Issue

January 30, 2017 | in Essays | by Janani Ganesan and Poorna Swami

The editors of our Indian Languages Special Feature share how they curated the incredible poetry lineup

We begin the week again with an update on a new initiative that will help us continue beyond April 2017: This week, we’re thrilled to welcome Shelley Schanfield and Fiona Le Brun as our new sustaining members! Our most updated tally, as reflected on the right-hand column, is now 37! If you’re considering becoming a part of the family too, why not let lighthouse keeper (and hit author) Reif Larsen take you on a tour, before you sign up here!

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This body didn’t burn itself:
It was burnt down.
These bones didn’t scatter themselves:
They were scattered around.
The fire didn’t combust on its own:
It was lit and spread around.
The fight didn’t initiate on its own:
It was started somehow.
And the poem didn’t compose itself:
It was written down.

—from “Mohenjodaro” by Vidrohi, translated from the Hindi by Somrita Ganguly

India, according to its constitution, has twenty-two ‘scheduled’ languages, with hundreds more spoken across its twenty-nine states and seven union territories. While it is impossible to capture the full swath of India’s languages in a single Special Feature, Asymptote’s Winter 2017 issue offers a glimpse into the political and aesthetic possibilities of Indian languages. The Feature’s nine poets, covering seven languages, were chosen with the aim of celebrating the diversity and dissent within contemporary Indian language poetry.

Vidrohi’s “Mohenjodaro” emerges directly from a site of protest, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), the revolutionary spirit of which has recently come under attack from various political factions. Vidrohi spent most of his life as the unofficial, resident poet-activist of JNU, reciting but never writing down his poems—as a mark of resistance. But his words have been preserved in differing transcriptions by various students. “Mohenjodaro,” like many of Vidrohi’s works, has no definitive text—it carries on the centuries-old tradition of oral poetry in the Indian subcontinent. Aggressive and unabashed, the poem, with each line, builds its indictment of patriarchy, colonialism, and of the nation itself. To honor the poem’s orality and to observe how literature can exist in multiple lives, the Special Feature includes two translations of “Mohenjodaro.” Each translation stems from a different ‘original,’ and so is markedly different, reminding us that language resides beyond the page, in telling, listening, and remembering.