Posts featuring Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 4, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, Charlie Ng, and José García Escobar

Dispatches from Hong Kong, Central America, and India!

In this week of dispatches from around the world, our Editors-at-Large report on literary awards, the establishment of a literature museum, and book fairs! From controversy surrounding the new museum in Hong Kong to the most recent Indian texts in translation, read on to learn more!

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

Public voices demanding for a museum of literature have been around for years in Hong Kong. On July 22, during the Hong Kong Book Fair 2023, Poon Yiu-ming, the Chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Writers, announced that the Museum of Hong Kong Literature would be inaugurated in April next year in Wan Chai with support from Chief Executive Lee Ka-chiu and the Hong Kong Jockey Club. Poon petitioned Lee last year on the establishment of a literary museum. However, the announcement has attracted controversy in the literary arena. 

The concept of a museum for Hong Kong literature was proposed by a group of local writers and scholars, including Dung Kai-cheung, Tang Siu-wa, Yip Fai, Liu Waitong, and Chan Chi-tak, among others, who formed the “Hong Kong Literature Museum Advocacy Group,” in 2009. A signed petition that successfully solicited signatures from hundreds of local and international Chinese writers and scholars was published in Ming Pao, which proposed to establish a literary museum in the West Kowloon Cultural District. Since the suggestion was not adopted by the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority then, the Advocacy Group proceeded to establish the House of Hong Kong Literature as a non-governmental organization for promoting and preserving Hong Kong literature.

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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.

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My 2019: Barbara Halla

December 20, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

Much is made of relatability in fiction, but it’s not something that I really think about.

As December winds to a close, we at Asymptote are once again reflecting and reminiscing on a year spent with books, those that have spoken to us, accompanied us, and in their own discreet way, carved their paths in the tracks of time alongside us. So today, in lieu of our weekly roundup, we return to our annual series with the following recap of Assistant Editor Barbara Halla’s literary year, filled with character-driven titles that range from the intimate to the epic. 

I had this strange impulse, as I sat down to write my “Year in Reading”, to scrap my outline and do something different: write not about the books that have stayed with me because of how good they were, but focus instead on the books I did not like. A “year in books that made me wish I didn’t know how to read” meditation, so to speak. And that would certainly be fun. Unsurprisingly, I seem to have a lot more to say about the books that made me miserable than the ones I loved, but I fought the impulse. What good would that do, just more misery (and free publicity) to spread in the world. So, back to my outline, and the more traditional rundown of some of the books that meant a lot to me this year.

I am going to start in reverse-chronological order. Much is made of relatability in fiction, but it’s not something that I really think about, unless someone tells me that a specific book is supposed to be particularly relatable to someone of my age/gender/nationality, in which case my brain takes this as a challenge to actively dislike it. While reviewers certainly mentioned its style (Joycean!) and its girth (a brick!), I don’t remember anyone specifically telling me that I should read Ducks, Newburyport because I would find myself in its pages. Lucy Ellmann’s opus, where an American housewife from Ohio spends her day making pies and thinking about everything from the challenges of motherhood to the climate crisis, is certainly a book of our time. But I didn’t expect that my overwhelming reaction to it would be a sense of “if someone could scan my brain this is exactly what I’d imagine it to look like!” As for relatable, this is the only book I have read in my life that shows some pity for tortoise-owners like me, and the fact that our care and attention are treated with complete indifference by the subject of our affection. There is a lesson in there somewhere about love and letting go. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An excerpt of Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s Panty

May 24, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Arunava Sinha

"The panty seemed to offer itself as a second presence in this solitary place. A feeling of companionship."

I entered the apartment at eleven at night, unlocking three padlocks in succession. The flat took up the entire first floor of a tall apartment building. I paused for a few moments after entering, trying to make out my surroundings in the light coming in from the passage outside. I found the switchboard near my left hand. Stepping forward, I turned on all the switches. One after the other. And not a single light came on. But I could tell that a fan had started whirring overhead. Once my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I found myself standing at one end of a hall. The main road below me had begun to quieten down. The light from the street lamps filtered into the dark hall through large windows, creating an unfocused chiaroscuro that came to my aid. Advancing in this hazy glow, I realised that there were doors running down both sides of the hall. On a whim I turned towards an open door on the left.

The room I entered was a large bedroom, with an ensuite. This time, too, I succeeded in locating the switchboard. I swiftly flicked all the switches on. Still not a single light came on. But this time, too, the ceiling fan began to rotate. I tried to understand the layout of the room. It wasn’t empty like the hall; rather, it was crowded with furniture. I found myself standing before a mirror stretching across the wall. The reflection didn’t seem to be mine, exactly, but of another, shadowy figure. I touched my hair. Eerily, the reflection did not. I paid no attention. Setting my bag down on the floor, I returned to the hall.  READ MORE…