Posts featuring Subimal Misra

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 3, 2023 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Areeb Ahmad, and Wambua Muindi

Dispatches from Mexico, Kenya, and India!

This week at Asymptote, our Editors-at-Large report on book fairs, Annie Ernaux’s visit to India, and celebrations of International Mother Language Day all around the world. From the efforts of Trans activists and performance artists in Mexico to a recent multilingual anthology published by Olongo Africa, read on to learn more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

The literary community in Mexico City has been vibrant and active in the first months of 2023. Between February 23–March 6, the Feria Internacional del Libro del Palacio de Minería took place in Mexico City. This forty-fourth edition of one of the biggest international book fairs in Mexico brought together writers, scholars, editors, and artists from all over the world. They gathered in the historic downtown to host readings, panels, and roundtables on literature, social sciences, and politics.

There were more than a hundred events, ranging from book presentations to movie screenings to workshops for children. In one panel, Asymptote contributor Tedi López Mills presented an edited anthology of her poetry, published by the National University of Mexico in its pamphlet series Material de lectura. The publication will bring López Mills’s poetry to a wider public. In another event, Cuban poet Odette Alonso moderated a talk with Lía García and Jessica Marjane, two Trans performance artists and organizers that have been at the forefront of the movement for Trans rights and recognition in Mexico. García and Marjane founded the National Network of Trans Youth, which has strengthened the community bonds among Trans young people in Mexico. García has acquired international recognition, having been invited to perform and read to institutions outside of Mexico, among them Harvard University and the University of Illinois’s Humanities Research Center.

Translation Tuesday: Subimal Misra’s Anti-Fiction

December 11, 2018 | in Translations | by V. Ramaswamy

It’s because of the trustworthiness of the writer’s effort that a piece of text is simultaneously story, history, proclamation, and personal diary.

Subimal Misra began writing exclusively for little magazines in the late sixties. His stories soon came to be known as ‘anti-stories,’ although he calls them ‘films.’ Misra credits Jean-Luc Godard with teaching him language, i.e., cinematic language, where the film is like an argument. By the end of the seventies, Misra was the uncrowned prince of Bengali parallel literature. But he had not written a novel because it would have been too long to get published. However, he had already started thinking of a longer format and the anti-novel, Actually This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale, a meta-fiction, appeared in 1982. This was followed by When Colour is a Warning Sign (1984), in which Misra carried the form he adopted in Ramayan Chamareven further—a kind of kaleidoscopic look at the society, world and times around him, focussing pointed beams of light on slivers of lived reality. With The Feathered Neck (1990), Misra completed his anti-novel trilogy. In 1988, Misra also wrote an essay explaining his ‘anti-novel.’

In this excerpt from When Colour is a Warning Sign, Misra shares an account of giving his manuscript to an editor to read, becoming dejected after the latter’s comment, and finally emerging with greater clarity and vision.

—Translator V. Ramaswamy

In the course of writing, I gave the manuscript to Nirmal-da of College Street to read and he later sent me his valuable opinion by letter. Nirmal Gupta was in his fifties, his sideburns were entirely grey, he ran a serious little magazine called Eikhon, it sold about a thousand copies. After reading his letter, as I was wondering whether I could write afresh, in a simpler way—as I was grappling with the subject—I saw to my surprise that Nirmal-da too was becoming entangled in the text, he was becoming another incident and clearly the complexity was continuously growing, multifarious, and more, what I have never thought also emerges clearly, page after page.