"Can a work of art ever truly be washed clean of the hands that funded it? Is it possible to create a masterpiece in the shadow of a monster? Today, we are exploring these haunting questions through the lens of The Director—the latest novel by the brilliant German author Daniel Kehlmann. Set against the harrowing backdrop of the late 1930s and 1940s, the story follows the legendary film director G.W. Pabst as he returns to Nazi-occupied Austria.

Pabst finds himself ensnared by the propaganda machine of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda, who wielded absolute control over the German press and arts to serve the regime’s twisted ideology. Pabst believes his creative genius can transcend such a system, but at what cost?

Upon its original release in Germany under the title Lichtspiel, the novel became an immediate sensation, sparking intense literary debates about the moral compromises of artists during the Third Reich. This buzz has only grown as the book enters the global stage, with the English edition published in the year 2025. Now, having been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026, the novel stands as one of the most anticipated and discussed works of contemporary fiction."

Joining me today is the man who brought this intricate, tonal masterpiece into English: the award-winning translator Ross Benjamin. We discuss the 'moral acrobatics' of the artist and the 'tonal agility' required to translate one of the most important voices in contemporary German literature. This is a conversation about light, shadow, and the high cost of staying silent."

We believe that every great book is an invitation to a new world. Harshaneeyam serves as your gateway to these contemporary global masterpieces, connecting you with the authors and translators who shape our literary landscape.

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The Versatility of Kehlmann’s Voice

One of the most striking aspects of Daniel Kehlmann’s writing is his ability to shift registers with surgical precision. Ross Benjamin notes that as a translator, the greatest challenge—and thrill—is capturing Kehlmann’s "tonal range and agility." In The Director, the narrative moves seamlessly from the slapstick humor of a film set to the chilling, quiet terror of a propaganda ministry.

Kehlmann’s work is characterized by a "light touch." He avoids the heavy-handedness often found in historical fiction, opting instead for a style that is "sly and inventive." Whether he is writing about the magical realism of Tyll or the cinematic obsession in 'The Director' Kehlmann manages to be intellectually serious without ever losing his propulsive, vivid storytelling.

Cinema and the Shadow of Propaganda

The Director follows the life of the legendary film director G.W. Pabst. After a failed stint in Hollywood, Pabst finds himself back in Nazi-occupied Austria. The novel explores the "adventure of not-knowing"—the tragic delusion that an artist can separate their craft from the political machine surrounding them.

Ross Benjamin explains that the novel is not just a biography; it is a meditation on the "moral issues" of creation. Pabst believes he can make a masterpiece even under the watchful eye of Joseph Goebbels. The Original German Title Licht Speil - "light play" refers not just to the flicker of the film projector, but to the deceptive game the artist plays with a monstrous regime.

The Challenge for the Translator

Translating a work of this magnitude requires more than just bilingual fluency; it requires a deep understanding of historical subtext. Ross Benjamin discusses the difficulty of translating the "Propaganda Deutsch" of the era—a language designed to obfuscate and control.

"There’s a specific humor in Kehlmann," Ross shares. "It’s often found in the absurdity of the situations." In one scene discussed during the podcast, a group of officials descends on a film set, and the dialogue shifts into a terrifyingly polite, yet deadly, exchange. Capturing that "mask of civility" in English while maintaining the underlying threat is the "invisible labor" of the translator.

Why ‘The Director’ Matters Today

As ‘The Director’ makes its way to the International Booker Prize shortlist, its relevance is undeniable. It asks a question that resonates in every era: What is the cost of staying silent? Through the lens of 1940s cinema, Kehlmann and Benjamin provide a mirror to our own world, exploring how easily "art for art's sake" can be weaponized by those in power.

For listeners of Harshaneeyam, this interview is a deep dive into the "Philosophy of Translation" and the meticulous craft required to bring a German masterpiece into the global literary consciousness.

About the Author & Translator

Daniel Kehlmann Daniel Kehlmann is one of the most successful contemporary German-language authors. Born in Munich in 1975, he rose to international fame with his 2005 novel Measuring the World (Die Vermessung der Welt), which became one of the biggest-selling German novels since WWII. His works frequently blend historical fact with magical realism and philosophical inquiry. He has received numerous awards, including the Kleist Prize and the Thomas Mann Prize. His previous collaboration with Ross Benjamin on the novel Tyll was also a global sensation and a finalist for the International Booker Prize.

Ross Benjamin Ross Benjamin is an award-winning translator of German literature based in the United States. His translations include works by Franz Kafka, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Joseph Roth. He is perhaps best known for his definitive translation of The Diaries of Franz Kafka, which was hailed for its faithfulness to Kafka’s original, unedited prose. Benjamin’s work is noted for its linguistic sensitivity and his ability to capture the specific "musicality" of German authors. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize.

The Director' in press -

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2025

A New York Times Notable Book of 2025

A Telegraph Book of the Year 2025

A Guardian Book of the Year 2025

An Observer Book of the year 2025

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They discuss what’s coming next for the podcast and explore how the site serves as a complete library for all episodes. Now, it is easy to find favorite shows by category, leave detailed reviews, and sign up for the newsletter to stay updated.

Head over to www.harshaneeyam.com and take a look around—explore everything the platform has to offer.

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Lin King is a writer and translator based in Taipei and New York

Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Boston Review, and Joyland, among others, and has received the PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.

Translations include the graphic novel series The Boy from Clearwater by Yu Pei-Yun and Zhou Jian-Xin.

Her debut novel, Weeb, is forthcoming from Holt.

Her translation of the novel Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, which won the 2024 National Book Award in Translated Literature. 'Taiwan Travelogue' is longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.

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Padma Viswanathan is a Canadian-American writer and translator.

Her novels have been published in eight countries and shortlisted for the PEN USA Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and others. She has published short fiction, essays and translations in Granta, The Boston Review, BRICK, and elsewhere. Full-length translations include São Bernardo, by Brazilian novelist Graciliano Ramos and Where We Stand, by Djamila Ribeiro. Her most recent novel, The Charterhouse of Padma, was published in 2024.

She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, where she is Founding Director of the Arkansas International Writer-at-Risk Residency Program.

Her English language translation of On Earth As it is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.

Author photo © Alex Tran

Born and educated in the United States, David McKay is an award-winning translator of Dutch fiction and non-fiction

He holds degrees in philosophy, linguistics and international relations, and has lived in and around The Hague since 1997.

His literary translations include War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2017, and Multatuli’s classic Max Havelaar , as well as contributions to the Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories.

He has given talks, led workshops, and written articles on translation topics, served as a judge for translation prizes, contributed to Dutch-English dictionaries, and acted as an adviser to the American Translators Association and the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

He is the translator of Anjet Daanje’s The Remembered Soldier, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.

Link to David's Website -

https://openbooktranslation.com/

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Ruth Martin studied English literature before gaining a PhD in German

She has been translating fiction and non-fiction books since 2010, by authors ranging from Joseph Roth and Hannah Arendt to Volker Weidermann and Shida Bazyar.

She has taught translation at the University of Kent and the Bristol Translates summer school, and is a former co-chair of the Society of Authors Translators Association.

She translated Shida Bazyar’s The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran from German to English – the novel was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.

Set across four decades, from 1979 to 2009, this is a polyphonic novel of one family’s flight from and return to Iran.

1979. Behsad, a young communist revolutionary, fights with his friends for a new order after the Shah’s expulsion. He tells of sparking hope, of clandestine political actions, and of how he finds the love of his life in the courageous, intelligent Nahid.

1989. Nahid lives her new life in West Germany with Behsad. With their young children, they spend hour after hour in front of the radio, hoping for news from others who went into hiding after the mullahs came to power.

1999. Laleh returns to Iran with her mother, Nahid. Between beauty rituals and family secrets, she gets to know a Tehran that hardly matches her childhood memories.

2009. Laleh’s brother Mo is more concerned with a friend’s heartbreak than with student demonstrations in Germany. But then the Green Revolution breaks out in Iran and turns the world upside down.

The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran is a moving novel about revolution, oppression, resistance, and the absolute desire for freedom. It was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.

Credits for photo © Adrian Pope

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Jordan Stump has translated many authors into English from French, including Marie Redonnet, Eric Chevillard, and Honoré de Balzac

His translation of Jardin des Plantes by Claude Simon won the 2001 French-American Foundation translation prize, and was named a Chevalier (Knight) in the Order of Arts and Letters for his work by the French government 2006.

His English language translations of works by Marie NDiaye have been nominated for the International Booker Prize twice. Ladivine was longlisted for the prize in 2016, and The Witch was longlisted in 2026.

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Photo Credit: Tim Davis

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Photo Credit: Megan Taylor

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Originally written in Tamil as Kumari Thuraivi by the writer Jeyamohan, this novel tells the story of bringing the deity Meenakshi back to Madurai from her temporary abode in coastal Kerala.

Suchitra writes fiction and translates between Tamil and English. Her work has appeared in literary magazines including Asymptote, Granta and Narrative Magazine. She won the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize for Fiction Translation in 2017. The Abyss was her first full-length translated work. She also published a limited-edition volume of illustrated English translations of Tamil Sangam-era poems. Suchitra holds a doctoral degree in biological sciences from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA.

You can buy the novel 'The Daughter of Kumari' using the link given in the Show notes.

https://shorturl.at/jxuxu

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Mark Hutchinson was born in London and lives in Paris

Among his many translations from the French are René Char’s Hypnos: Notes from the French Resistance and The Inventors and Other Poems, and Emmanuel Hocquard’s The Library at Trieste and The Gardens of Sallust. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, The Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. His translation of René Char‘s The Inventors was one of The Independent’s Best Poetry Books of 2015, and his translation of Anne Serre’s The Governesses was shortlisted for the 2020 Scott Moncrieff prize.

His translation of A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025.

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Her novel Trofee (Trophy) has become a huge success across Europe. It won the Sabam Prize for Literature and received a special mention for the European Union Prize for Literature. The story is currently being translated into thirteen different languages, including Telugu.

Trofee is a provocative novel that follows Hunter White, a wealthy American hunter who travels to Africa to complete his 'Big Five' collection by killing a rhino. The story takes a dark, unsettling turn when he is offered an even more 'exclusive' hunt, forcing him to decide if he is willing to cross the ultimate moral line. Through this high-tension plot, Schoeters explores the chilling intersection of white supremacy, global capitalism, and the commodification of human life. The book has gained international acclaim for its 'muscular' prose and its fearless critique of the 'Western gaze' and the lasting effects of colonialism.

Gaea spoke on the occasion of the book's release in Telugu by Chaaya Books.

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సుస్మిత గారు పుట్టింది విజయనగరంలో , ప్రస్తుత నివాసం అమెరికాలో . తెలుగులో బ్లాగులు చాలాకాలం నించి రాస్తున్నారు. మంచి వెన్నెల వేళ, గాలి సంకెళ్ళు అనే నవలలు రాశారు. అడపాదడపా కథలు కూడా రాస్తూంటారు.

సునీతా రత్నాకరం గారు ఇండియన్ ఇన్స్టిట్యూట్ అఫ్ మానేజ్మెంట్ లక్నో లో పీహెచ్డీ చేశారు. ప్రస్తుతం జిందాల్ గ్లోబల్ యూనివర్సిటీ లో అసోసియేట్ ప్రొఫెసర్ గా పని చేస్తున్నారు. మంచి చదువరి .

నవలను కొనడానికి కింది లింక్ ను ఉపయోగించండి -

https://www.logili.com/home/aaaa/p-7488847-98242849968-cat.html

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ఇప్పుడు మనతో ఈ ఎపిసోడ్ లో ఛాయ డైరెక్టర్ అరుణాంక్ లత, సాహిత్యోత్సవాల ఆవశ్యకత గురించి, ఈ ఉత్సవం విశేషాల గురించి చేస్తున్న ఏర్పాట్ల గురించి మాట్లాడతారు.

ఛాయా లిటరరీ ఫెస్టివల్‌లో ప్రవేశం అందరికీ ఉచితం. ఇప్పటిదాకా ఐదువందల మందికి పైగా సందర్శకులు ఆన్లైన్ రిజిస్ట్రేషన్ చేసుకున్నారు. ఆన్లైన్ రిజిస్ట్రేషన్ చేసుకునేందుకు లింక్, ఛాయా ఆర్గనైజర్ల నంబర్లు ఇదే ఎపిసోడ్ షో నోట్స్‌లో  ఇస్తున్నాం. 

ఇదిగాక ఉత్సవానికి తోడ్పాటుగా విరాళాలు మీరందించాలనుకుంటే షో నోట్స్ లో ఇచ్చిన మొబైల్ నంబరుకు వాట్సాప్ మెసేజ్ చెయ్యొచ్చు .

మరిన్ని వివరాల కోసం ఫెస్టివల్ వెబ్సైటు http://chaayaliteraturefestival.com/ ను సందర్శించండి.  

రిజిస్ట్రేషన్ లింక్  -  https://chaayaliteraturefestival.com/register

ఛాయా మొబైల్ నంబర్ - 98480 23384

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Jason is an Instructional Professor at the university of Chicago teaching Hindi and Translation.  

He is also the co-director for The SALT Project which supports and promotes English-language translations of literature written in the languages of South Asia. 

Jason has book-length translations from Hindi include Uday Prakash’s The Girl with the Golden Parasol, The Walls of Delhi, and, co translated Manzoor Ahtesham’s The Tale of the Missing Man. 

His work has been shortlisted for the DSC Prize in South Asian Literature, longlisted for the National Translation Award, and he has been awarded the Global Humanities Translation Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a PEN/Heim Translation Grant. 

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'నువ్వు లేని అద్దం' తెలుగు సాహిత్యంలో వచ్చిన మంచి నవలల్లో ఒకటిగా ఎన్నదగింది.

https://shorturl.at/G0muX

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The Writer is highly regarded as one of the most creative and Prolific writers from India. He writes mostly in Tamil and also in Malayalam. 

His output includes Ten novels, ten volumes of short stories/plays, thirteen literary criticisms, five biographies of writers, six introductions to Indian and Western literature, three volumes on Hindu and Christian philosophy and numerous other translations and collections. He has also written scripts for Malayalam and Tamil movies. 

His writing is heavily influenced by the works of humanitarian thinkers Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Drawing on the strength of his life experiences and extensive travel around India, Jeyamohan re-examines and interprets the essence of India’s rich literary and classical traditions.

Tella Enugu Amazon link :

https://shorturl.at/tQZr0

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Satish Chapparike is a bilingual writer, accomplished journalist, and the founder-director of the Book Brahma Literature Festival—a premier literary event that celebrates the richness and diversity of Indian languages and voices. As a festival director, he is widely recognized for curating inclusive, multilingual spaces that bring together writers, readers, Publishers, Translator s and cultural thinkers from across the country.

Hailing from coastal Karnataka and globally trained as a Chevening Scholar at the University of Westminster, Satish seamlessly blends rural rootedness with global perspective in both his literary work and curatorial practice.

His is an acclaimed Kannada writer and the winner of the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award. His latest novel, Ghandruk, has made a notable impact in the Kannada literary world and is now published in Telugu and Malayalam, with Tamil and Marathi translations slated for release in September 2025.

A seasoned journalist, Satish has worked with leading publications and channels such as Prajavani, TV9 Kannada, and The Sunday Indian. 

Satish is the founder of Book Brahma Digital Media, a leading Kannada literary platform that supports books, authors, and publishers. His work—as a writer, editor, and festival curator—reflects a deep commitment to language equity, cultural dialogue, and literary innovation.

In this episode he spoke about the Vision of Book Brahma Foundation, Learnings from the previous edition and Highlights of the upcoming edition. 

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సుప్రసిద్ధ తమిళ రచయిత జయమోహన్ 'వెల్లై యానై ' తెలుగు అనువాదం తెల్ల ఏనుగు ఛాయా పబ్లిషర్స్ ద్వారా ఈ నెల పదవ తారీఖున బెంగుళూరులో జరిగే బుక్ బ్రహ్మ ఉత్సవంలో విడుదల అవుతుంది .

పుస్తకం ప్రీ ఆర్డర్ చేసుకోడానికి కింద ఇచ్చిన లింక్ ను వాడండి .

https://chaayabooks.com/product/tella-enugu/

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Deepa is a writer and an award-winning literary translator working in Kannada and English. Her cultural criticism, essays, columns and journalism have been published extensively in India and internationally, including in The Paris Review, Himal Southasian, ArtReview, MOMUS, The Guardian, MOLD, Hyperallergic, The Caravan, The Hindu and Literary Hub.

Her published translations from Kannada include works by Kota Shivarama Karanth and Kodagina Gouramma. She is the recipient of an EnglishPEN Award for her translation of Banu Mushtaq’s short stories. The collection titled ‘Heart Lamp’ .

Harshaneeyam would like to thank the international Booker for making this conversation possible.

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Chaidhanya has a Master’s in English Literature and writes about literature, aesthetics, and philosophy. Her essays, published in Neeli magazine, introduce overlooked women thinkers with depth and insight. .

Kirupalakshmi K has an MBA and a background in marketing, but literature has always been her real passion. An avid reader and a budding writer, she has written short stories, essays and spoken about literature in various spaces. 

Their Publishing house Manasa was founded to nurture and amplify women-centric literary works, through translation. Manasa primarily focussing on the richness of women’s storytelling across India. Chaidhanya and Kirupalakshmi say that Manasa is rooted in a deep appreciation for the aesthetic and philosophical dimensions of life. 

To Know more about Manasa Publications and the Manasa Lit.Prize please click on the link given in the show notes -

https://www.manasapublications.com/manasalitprize

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She is a judge for the International Booker Prize 2026.  Hughes is the translator of more than 20 novels. She has been shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, and the Valle Inclán Prize, and in 2021 she was awarded the Queen Sofía Translation Prize. She has also worked with the Stephen Spender Trust to promote translation in schools and is the co-editor of the anthology Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe, published in 2020 in collaboration with Hay Festival. 

We thank International Booker for arranging this interview.  

Here she is talking about her Journey  into translation. 

To buy the book -

https://tinyurl.com/sophievincenzo

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Mozhi Prize was instituted in the same year with a mission to discover and inspire new talent in translation. With the desire to remain accessible to hitherto unpublished translators, the Prize awards outstanding translations of short fiction written in Indian languages, into English. 

Suchitra Ramachandran, Co-Founder of Mozhi,  writes fiction in Tamil and translates between Tamil and English. Her work has appeared in journals including Asymptote, South Parade and Narrative Magazine.  ‘The Abyss’, a translation of Tamil writer Jeyamohan’s novel ‘Ezhaam Ulagam‘, her first full-length translated work was shortlisted for the ALTA First Translation Prize in 2024 and was published by Juggernaut Books. 

Link to by the Anthology -

https://lnk.ink/mozhi

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Victoria Cribb grew up in England. She completed a B.A at the University of Cambridge in 1987, an M.A. in Scandinavian Studies at University College London in 1990, and a B.Phil. in Icelandic as a Foreign Language at the University of Iceland in 1994. 

Between 1984 and 2002, she spent much of her time travelling, studying and working in Iceland, including several years as an editor at an Icelandic publishing company.

She became a full-time translator after moving back to the UK in 2002. She has translated some 50 books by Icelandic authors including Sjón and Arnaldur Indriðason. Her English translations of Icelandic crime novels have been nominated for numerous prizes in the UK, winning the 2015 Petrona Prize and the 2021 Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Dagger, while her translations of Sjón’s novels have been long-listed three times for the US Best Translated Book Award (Fiction), and twice for the PEN America Translation Prize, as well as being short-listed for the UK’s 2012 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the 2013 International Dublin Literary Award. In 2017 she received the Orðstír honorary translation award from the President of Iceland in recognition of her contribution to the translation of Icelandic literature. 

The article that was mentioned in the podcast about Icelandic Writer Sjon is from the book - 'Critical Approaches to Sjón: North of the Sun', and it's part of the Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature' series.

Here She is talking about the beginnings of her Translation Journey -

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Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet, translator, and critic. The Guardian has described him as "arguably the world's most influential translator of German into English"

Hofmann was born in Freiburg into a family with a literary tradition. His father was the German novelist Gert Hofmann. Hofmann's family first moved to Bristol in 1961, and later to Edinburgh. He was educated at Winchester College, and then studied English Literatureat Magdalene College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in 1979. For the next four years, he pursued postgraduate study at the University of Regensburg and Trinity College, Cambridge.

In 1983, Hofmann started working as a freelance writer, translator, and literary critic. He taught at the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, the New School, and Barnard College. He has been teaching poetry and translation workshops at the University of Florida since 1990.

Hofmann was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 1995 for the translation of his father's novel The Film Explainer. Among the other notable awards he received are the Arts Council Writer's Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Hofmann was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.

His translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's novel Kairos won them the International Booker Prize in 2024, the first occasion on which the prize was won by either a German writer or a male translator.

In this conversation he spoke about his family connection to Literature, being a literary critic and translator, Literary translation in the times of AI and the novel 'Kairos'.

Here he is talking about his Childhood surrounded by books.

Link for the Guardian Interview mentioned in the interview -

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/09/books-interview-michael-hofmann-anglo-german-poet-critic-translator

Link for the Guardian Interview mentioned in the interview -

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/09/books-interview-michael-hofmann-anglo-german-poet-critic-translator

Photo Credits: Alamy Agency

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Ros discussed the workshop's modalities, the guest speakers who have graced the sessions, and the future paths for the mentees who have attended.

Ros Schwartz is an award-winning translator from French. Over the past four decades, she has translated over 100 fiction and non-fiction titles. Alongside literary translation, Ros has served on the boards and committees of key literary and translation organisations including the UK Translators Association; the European Council of Literary Translators Associations (CEATL) the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) and English PEN's Writers in Translation

Programme. Currently co-director of Bristol Translates literary translation summer school, she works to develop literary translation as a profession by supporting young translators, initiatingmentoring schemes and summer schools, and giving workshops, and master classes at the

Universities of Durham, Middlesex, Westminster, East Anglia, Leicester, Glasgow, City University, the University of Warwick among others, including the Seagull Publishing School in Kolkata. Shehas given talks around the world, notably at the Jaipur Literature Festival.

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/sml/translation-interpreting-studies/bristol-translates/

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you can buy Solio using the Amazon link in the show notes.

Harshaneeyam is a podcast dedicated to exploring the art and craft of literary translation. We've hosted over 70 translators working across 60 languages, offering unique insights into their creative processes. Follow Harshaneeyam on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other platforms.  

Now, Let' 's hear Nancy talking about how she got into writing Poetry.

https://tinyurl.com/soliosamira

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ఎనిమిదేళ్ళక్రితం ప్రారంభమైన ఈ ప్రచురణ సంస్థ 2020 వ సంవత్సరం నించీ వేగాన్ని పుంజుకుంది . తెలుగు పుస్తకాలు , అనువాదాలు అన్నీ కలిపి దాదాపు ఎనభైకి పైగా పుస్తకాలను ప్రచురించింది . దాదాపు ప్రతి పుస్తకం ఏడువందల కాపీల పైన పాఠకుల చేతుల్లోకి చేరింది . ఏడుగురు యువ రచయితలను పరిచయం చేస్తే అందరి పుస్తకాలు వెయ్యికి పైగా అమ్మగలిగారు . అమెరికన్ రచయిత అయాన్ రాండ్ రాసిన ఫౌంటెన్ హెడ్ అనే ఎనిమిది వందల పేజీల నవల ఇప్పటిదాకా ఎనిమిది రీప్రింట్లు వేశారు . సుప్రసిద్ధ రచయిత మల్లాది వెంకట కృష్ణ మూర్తి గారి పుస్తకాలను, ఇంగ్లీష్ రచయిత విక్రమ్ సంపత్ గారి పుస్తకాలను వరుసగా పాఠకులకు అందిస్తున్నారు . సత్తిబాబు గారు , పావని గారు జంటగా పని చేస్తూ అతి తక్కువ కాలంలో తెలుగు ప్రచురణ రంగంలో తమకంటూ ఒక ప్రత్యేకమైన స్థానాన్ని సంపాదించుకున్నారు .

డిసెంబర్ 19 నించీ మొదలయ్యే హైదరాబాద్ ఎక్సిబిషన్లో గోదావరి ప్రచురణల పుస్తకాలు దొరికే స్టాల్ నంబర్లు 246, 247.

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He is a writer and a translatorfrom Danish to English. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in   Lithub, The Millions, Electric Literature, The Writer’s Chronicle, Washington Post, and elsewhere. 

The Book of Losman (SFWP) is his debut novel.

"Daniel Losman, an American translator living a solitary life in Copenhagen, grapples with loneliness after his girlfriend's departure. His only solace comes from his three-year-old son, whom he fears may inherit his Tourette Syndrome, a neurological disorder characterized by involuntary movements and sounds. When he learns of a groundbreaking drug trial promising to address the root of his condition by accessing childhood memories, Losman, despite his initial skepticism, finds himself drawn in. The unexpected consequences of his participation form the heart of this compelling novel."

-

You can buy 'the book of Losman' and the books by Danish Writer Simon Frueland using the link given in the show notes.

To buy the book - https://tinyurl.com/semmelnb

To buy 'Milk and other stories' of Simon Frueland -

https://tinyurl.com/simonfmilk

To Buy 'The Wold adn Varvara ' of Simon Frueland

https://tinyurl.com/varvarasimon

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'గన్స్ అండ్ మాన్సూన్స్' పుస్తకం కొనడానికి -

https://tinyurl.com/mahibejawada

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https://tinyurl.com/Damionphil

Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, and a writer in English. He has translated about sixty books, including ten by this year's Nobel Prize winner, Jon Fosse, and won numerous translation awards, including Guggenheim and Cullman Center fellowships; the biggest German-to-English translation prize in America, for Uwe Johnson's four-volume ANNIVERSARIES; and the biggest such prize in England, twice, for books by Hans Keilson and Saša Stanišić. His own writing includes poetry, fiction, reviews, and two nonfiction books:

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Ross Benjamin is a translator of German-language literature living in Nyack, New York. His translations include Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion, , Joseph Roth’s Job, Thomas Pletzinger’s Funeral for a Dog, and Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left and Tyll. His translation of Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker International Prize. He was awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship. His translation of Franz Kafka’s complete Diaries was published by Schocken Books in 2022.  

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Alex Zucker is a renowned translator of Czech literature into English. He has translated works by acclaimed Czech authors such as Jáchym Topol, and Petra Hůlová.

Boo k Tour Details -

https://www.blpress.org/books/life-after-kafka/

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

ఆదివారం అక్టోబర్ ఆరో తేదీన కథ-2023 ఆవిష్కరణ సభ ఖమ్మంలో జరగనుంది .

ఈ సందర్భంగా చేసిన ఇంటర్వ్యూ లో నవీన్ గారు, కథ సంకలనంలో కథల సేకరణ , ఎంపిక, ఎడిటింగ్ గురించి, కథ - 2023 ప్రత్యేకత గురించి మాట్లాడారు .

కథ సంకలనాలను చదవడానికి కథానిలయం లింక్ -

https://shorturl.at/OKx6M

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

In this episode, He spoke about Romanian Literary scene, His entry into Translations, Writers he translated, Moldovan Literture and Oneirism in Romanian Literature.

Books Translated by Alistari Ian Blyth -

https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/2883992.Alistair_Ian_Blyth

On Oneirism as a literary technique -

https://tinyurl.com/oneirismromanian

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

'నెమ్మి నీలం ' కొనడానికి -

https://chaayabooks.com/product/nemmi-neelam/

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Harshaneeyam invited him to speak about his new book - Kafka: Selected Stories, Reading Kafka over the years and the Uniqueness of Kafka as a writer.

To Buy the book, please use the link in the show notes.

-https://shorturl.at/0CQrL

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

రిషి తాను రాయడం పుస్తకం ప్రచురించడం, తాను రాయబోయే పుస్తకం వీటి గురించి తన ఆలోచనలను మనతో పంచుకున్నాడు .

రిషి రాసిన పుస్తకం కొనడానికి షో నోట్స్ లో ఉన్న లింక్ ఉపయోగించండి -

https://www.bribooks.com/bookstore/the-better-me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq4JlmLo8HE&list=PLwIprC-WfGHR-o53M4essEW94D3KVP027&index=4

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

వృత్తిరీత్యా అవినేని భాస్కర్ ఎలక్ట్రానిక్స్ రంగంలో పనిచేస్తారు. ప్రస్తుతం బెంగుళూరులో ఉంటున్నారు.

భాస్కర్ ఒకప్పటి చెంగల్పట్టు జిల్లా, ఇప్పటి తిరువళ్ళూర్ జిల్లా లోని పళ్ళిపట్టు తాలూకా, కుమారరాజుపేట గ్రామంలో 1979న జన్మించారు.

నెమ్మి నీలం పుస్తకం కొనడానికి షో నోట్స్' లో వున్న వాట్సాప్ నంబరును కానీ వెబ్ లింక్ ని కానీ ఉపయోగించండి.

+917989546568

https://chaayabooks.com/

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

He was born and raised in Bengaluru, India, and has a keen interest in languages and linguistics. He can speak over six languages in addition to his mother tongue Kannada. He is trained in Karnatic Classical Music and performs regularly on various prestigious forums. He has translated Caroline Wahl's best-selling debut novel ‘22 Bahnen’ from German to Kannada, available as ‘Nanna Tangi Ida’.

In this episode, he spoke about Learning German, his translation journey and his Publisher Chanda Pustaka. Chanda Pustaka is founded by Vasudhendra, a very popular writer of Fiction in Kannada. Chanda Pustaka focuses on publishing LIterature in Kannada and Literary translations into Kannada.

You can buy the book 'Nanna Tangi Ida' using the link in the Show Notes.

Please follow and review Harshaneeyam on Apple and Spotify podcasting apps.

Amazon - https://www.amazon.in/dp/819672487X

Harsh Raghuram's Linktree - https://linktr.ee/harsharaghuram (contains my social media handles and also my YouTube and Soundcloud links)

Goethe Institut's Digital Translation Academy - https://www.goethe.de/ins/in/en/sta/mum/ap23/dia.html

Amazon DE (German book) - https://amzn.eu/d/aaNVbjl

Photo Credit - Ramya Iyer

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

A well-known name in Hindi literature, Nirmal Verma is known mainly for his fictional works. Born on April 3, 1929, he obtained an M.A. in history from Delhi University. He studied Czech at the Oriental Institute in Prague and has been a Fellow of the International Institute for Asian Studies. Nirmal Verma is a recipient of India's highest literary award, the Jnanpith, and his short stories Kavve aur kala pani won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1985.

Vineet Gill is a writer and works as a senior editor at Penguin Random House, India. Earlier he worked for The Sunday Guardian and The Times of India. His essays, often literary-critical and occasionally personal, have appeared in various Indian and international publications. He is an Engineer by Education. He is the author of Here and Hereafter: Nirmal Verma's Life in Literature, published by Penguin in September 2022.

Links are provided in the show notes to buy the book and also to the article Nirmal Verma on Borges the great Argentine Writer. This article is translated by Vineet Gill.

Amazon Link for the book -

https://tinyurl.com/vineetnirmal

Nirmal Verma on Borges Translated by Vineet Gill -

https://www.literaryactivism.com/i-am-lost-somewhere-borges-in-london/

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Today’s Guest is Kareem Abdulrahman. Kareem Abdulrahman is a translator and Kurdish affairs analyst. From 2006 to 2014, he worked as a Kurdish media and political analyst for the BBC, where translation was part of his job. In 2013, he was awarded a place in the British Centre for Literary Translation’s prestigious mentorship programme. He translated prominent Iraqi Kurdish novelist Bachtyar Ali's I Stared at the Night of the City into English (UK; Periscope; 2016), making it the first Kurdish novel to be translated into English. He is also the Head of Editorial at Insight Iraq, a political analysis service focusing on Iraq and Kurdish affairs. He lives in London. His recent translation, ‘The Last Pomegranate Tree’, also by Bachtyar Ali, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

'The Last Pomegranate Tree' is published by Archipelago Books.

In this conversation, he spoke about Kurdistan, Its Literature, Author Bhachtyar Ali, and translations of Ali’s Work into English. 

To buy the book -

https://www.amazon.in/Last-Pomegranate-Ali-Bachtyar/dp/1953861407

https://archipelagobooks.org/book/the-last-pomegranate-tree-2/

To know more about the Author -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachtyar_Ali

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

In this episode, she spoke about her views on translations, the author Yoko Tawada and her translation of Tawada's novel 'Spontaneous Acts' released in July 2024.

'Spontaneous Acts' written by Tawada in Berlin during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, pays homage to Paul Celan, a longstanding influence on her work. Arguably the most important German-language poet of the post-World War II era, Celan is known for the diamond-hard density of his lyrical lines, estranging words from their inherited meanings, and thereby opening up new avenues of association and interpretation.

You can read Yoko Tawada's article on Paul Celan's Poems written in 2013, via the link in the show notes.

https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/celan-reads-japanese/

To buy the book 'Spontaneous Acts' - a link is provided in the show notes.

https://tinyurl.com/susanyoko

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Carolin Duttlinger a Professor and tutor in German at Wadham College, Oxford. She teaches German literature, film and culture from the eighteenth century to the present, as well as translation. A particular focus of Carolin’s research is the writer Franz Kafka.

She is co-director of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre, which hosts conferences, and workshops and works closely with the Bodleian Library, where the majority of Kafka’s manuscripts are kept.

Carolin edited 'Franz Kafka in Context' a compilation of thirty-five short, accessible essays, where leading international scholars explore Kafka’s personal and working life, his reception of art and culture, his engagement with political and social issues, and his ongoing reception and influence.

Her books include Kafka and Photography and The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka among others. She writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.

You may Please use the link given in the show notes to buy the books mentioned .

Please follow and review the Harshaneeyam Podcast on Apple and Spotify Apps.

To buy the titles -

https://tinyurl.com/duttlinger

About Oxford Kafka Research Center -

https://www.kafka-research.ox.ac.uk/About Bodleian Library at Oxford -

https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/home

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Kafka’s Last Trial begins with Kafka’s last instruction to his closest friend, Max Brod: to destroy all his remaining papers upon his death. But when the moment arrived in 1924, Brod could not bring himself to burn the unpublished works of the man he considered a literary genius—even a saint. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka’s writing, rescuing his legacy from obscurity and physical destruction.

By the time of Brod’s death in Tel Aviv in 1968, Kafka’s major works had been published, transforming the once little-known writer into a pillar of literary modernism. Yet Brod left a wealth of still unpublished papers to his secretary Esther Hoffe, who sold some, held on to the rest, and then passed the bulk of them on to her daughters, who in turn refused to release them. An international legal battle erupted to determine who could claim ownership of Kafka’s work: Hoffe's Family, Israel, where Kafka dreamed of living but never entered, or Germany as Kafka wrote exclusively in German.

Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts—brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political—that determined the fate of Kafka’s manuscripts.

Benjamin Balint is the author of Bruno Schulz' S Biography and Kafka’s Last Trial,. He was awarded the 2020 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and is the coauthor of Jerusalem: City of the Book. A library fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, he regularly writes on culture for The Wall Street Journal, the Jewish Review of Books, and other publications.

You may Please use the link given in the show notes to buy the books mentioned .

Please follow and review the Harshaneeyam Podcast on Apple and Spotify Apps.

To buy 'Kafka's Last Trial' -

https://tinyurl.com/kafkastrial

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*Contact us - harshaneeyam@gmail.com

***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

వృత్తిరీత్యా ఆంగ్ల అధ్యాపకులు.

మన సమాజంలో, మన వ్యక్తిత్వాలలో వుండే వైచిత్రిని , అనేక రకాలైన సంఘర్షణలని అతి సుతారమైన తనదైన శైలిలో , అత్యంత సహజంగా చిత్రీకరించడమే ఆయన రచనలలో వుండే ప్రత్యేకత.

ఒక సకారాకాత్మకమైన మార్పు , కథ చదివే ప్రతి వ్యక్తిలో, తద్వారా మన సమాజంలో తీసుక రావాలని ఆశించే రచయిత.

అత్యంత ప్రతిష్టాత్మకమైన కేంద్ర సాహిత్య అకాడమీ అవార్డుని 2022 వ సంవత్సరంలో అందుకున్నారు.

ఈ సంభాషణలో ఆయన తన కొత్త నవల 'దాయాదుల తోట' గురించి మాట్లాడారు. దాయాదుల తోట అజు పబ్లికేషన్స్ వాళ్ళు మనకందిస్తున్నారు.

నవలని షో నోట్స్ లోని లింక్ ద్వారా కొనుగోలు చెయ్యవచ్చు.

https://tinyurl.com/dayadulathota

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Michelle Woods is a Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz. She is the authoer of Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka (2014), Censoring Translation: Censorship, Theatre and the Politics of Translation (2012), and Translating Milan Kundera (2006), the editor of Authorizing Translation (2017), and co-editor of Teaching Literature in Translation (2022). She is writing a non-fiction book about the female translators of Anna Karenina, called Reading Anna. She is co-editor of the book series for Bloomsbury: Literatures, Cultures, Translation. Her translations have appeared in Granta and Words Without Borders, and she loves teaching as much dark and funny Central European literature as possible. 

To buy the book ' Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka' you may please use the link given in the show notes.

https://tinyurl.com/2x95ubhr

Please review and follow Harshaneeyam Podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasting apps.

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Bhaskar Avineni is an acclaimed translator from Tamil to Telugu and it is his second Publication. Aram Stories were translated into English as ‘Stories of the True’ by Priyamvada Ramkumar shortlisted for the ALTA Prize in 2023.

Writer Jeyamohan is highly regarded as one of the most creative and Prolific writers from India. He writes mostly in Tamil and also in Malayalam. 

His output includes nine novels, ten volumes of short stories/plays, thirteen literary criticisms, five biographies of writers, six introductions to Indian and Western literature, three volumes on Hindu and Christian philosophy and numerous other translations and collections. He has also written scripts for Malayalam and Tamil movies. 

His writing is heavily influenced by the works of humanitarian thinkers Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Drawing on the strength of his life experiences and extensive travel around India, Jeyamohan re-examines and interprets the essence of India’s rich literary and classical traditions.

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*Contact us – harshaneeyam@gmail.com

***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

* For your Valuable feedback on this Episode - Please click the link below.

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

రచయిత ఉణుదుర్తి సుధాకర్ గారి స్వస్థలం విశాఖపట్నం. సాహిత్య అభిలాషకు కారణం కుటుంబ వాతావరణం. స్కూలు చదువు శ్రీకాకుళం. ఉన్నత విద్య యూరోప్లో. వృత్తి రీత్యా మెరైన్ ఇంజనీర్. వీరి మొదటి నవల 'యారాడకొండ' కూడా ఆటా బహుమతిని పొందింది. తూరుపు గాలులు, చలిచీమల కవాతు వీరి కథాసంపుటాలు. వీరి కథల ఇంగ్లీష్ అనువాదం 'ఈస్ట్ విండ్' క్రిందటి ఏడాది విడుదలైంది.

తెలుగు కన్నడ రాష్ట్రాల్లో 35 సంవత్సరాలు సంస్కృతం – తెలుగు పాఠాలు చెప్పి రిటైర్ అయిన ఎ.కె. ప్రభాకర్ ‘తెలుగులో మాండలిక కథాసాహిత్యం’ పై పరిశోధన చేసి అదే పేరుతో ప్రచురించారు.స్త్రీ వాద కథలు , నిషేధ గీతాలు , పాపినేని శివశంకర్ కథలు, తాడిగిరి పోతరాజు కథలు, నంబూరి పరిపూర్ణ సాహిత్యం - జీవితం - వ్యక్తిత్వం, వంటి పుస్తకాలకి సంపాదకత్వ బాధ్యతలు వహించారు.' వేమన దారిలో’ పేరున ఎంపిక చేసిన వేమన పద్యాలకు వ్యాఖ్యానం చేసారు. ‘సమకాలీనం’ పేరుతో కథా విమర్శ పై వ్యాససంపుటి వెలువరించారు. 

https://tinyurl.com/4bd63huw

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Shelley Frisch taught German literature at Bucknell University, Columbia University, and Haverford College, where she chaired the German Department, before turning to translation full-time in the 1990s. Her translations, which include biographies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Marlene Dietrich/Leni Riefenstahl (dual biography), and Franz Kafka, have been awarded numerous translation prizes. Among her recent translations are a volume of Billy Wilder’s early journalism, an overview of Early German Romanticism, an annotated collection of Kafka’s aphorisms, a Holocaust memoir, and a study of the origins of Critical Theory; she is currently translating a biography of Hannah Arendt. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey. 

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Christopher Moseley has been the General Editor of the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger since 2008 and is now a member of the editorial team of its successor, the World Atlas of Languages. From 2007 to 2011, he was a Teaching Fellow in Latvian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College, London.

Originally from Australia, he came to Britain to study Scandinavian languages in 1974, but since then, his main interests have slipped eastwards to Finland and the Baltic countries. While working as a journalist and translator specialising in Baltic affairs at BBC Monitoring, Caversham, he completed a M.Phil., also at SSEES, on the dying Livonian language of Latvia – a close relative of Estonian. After 19 years’ service at the BBC, he became a freelance translator and editor in 2005. He is the author of Colloquial Estonian and co-author of Colloquial Latvian for Routledge. He has also co-edited the Routledge Atlas of the World’s Languages and edited the same publisher’s Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages and most recently the third edition of the Atlas of the world’s languages in danger for UNESCO. His most recent work is a revision of George Campbell’s Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets (2012). He translates into English from Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Finnish, Danish and Swedish.  

To buy 'The Man Who Spoke Snakish' -

https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Spoke-Snakish/dp/0802124127

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Chad W. Post is a powerhouse for promoting international literature. He leads Open Letter Books, publishing global voices. He is the managing editor of Three Percent, a blog and review site promoting literature in translation. He is home to the Translation Database (now housed at Publishers Weekly), the Best Translated Book Awards, and the Three Percent and Two Month Review podcasts. He is also the author of The Three Percent Problem: Rants and Responses on Publishing, Translation, and the Future of Reading.

He received the 2018 Words Without Borders Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature.

Chad spoke about his love for books, Stint at Dalkey Archive, Open Letter books and Trends in 'Not for Profit' Publishing.

https://www.openletterbooks.org/

https://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/category/three-percent-podcast/

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Rawley Grau has translated numerous works from Slovenian, including novels by Dušan Šarotar, Mojca Kumerdej, Gabriela Babnik, Vlado Žabot, and Sebastijan Pregelj. Five of his translations were longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, and his translations of Šarotar’s Panorama and Billiards at the Hotel Dobray were shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. He has also translated Ivan Cankar’s play Depravity in St. Florian Valley, as well as poetry by Miljana Cunta, Miklavž Komelj, Janez Ramoveš, and Tomaž Šalamun, among others. In 2021, he received the Lavrin Diploma for excellence in translation from the Association of Slovenian Literary Translators. Translations from other languages include a book of poems and letters by the Russian poet Yevgeny Baratynsky, which received the AATSEEL prize for Best Scholarly Translation, and, most recently, a volume of poems by the Macedonian poet Aco Šopov, which he co-translated with Christina E. Kramer. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, he has lived in Ljubljana for the past two decades.   

He spoke about relocating to Slovenia from the States, his work in Slovene Translation and Co-Translation.

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Ellen Elias-Bursac translates fiction and non-fiction from the Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian. In 2006, the novel Götz and Meyer by David Albahari, in her Serbian translation, was given the National Translation Award, and she received the Mary Zirin Prize from the Association of Women in Slavic Studies in 2015. She has also written and contributed to books and articles on translation studies and South Slavic language instruction.  Her monumental work, recording the trial Proceedings at ICTY, is titled - 'Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal: Working in a Tug-of-War, spending more than a decade of her life'. She is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.

To read more about ICTY - https://www.icty.org/

To Buy Ellen's Translations - https://shorturl.at/GCBHM

Her Teaching at Harvard -

https://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/about/people/ellen-elias-bursac

'Death of Yugoslavia', A BBC Documentary depicting the violent Yugoslav Conflict in the 1980s -

https://shorturl.at/ixUwT

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For more information on Will Firth -

www.willfirth.de.

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తన రచనాజీవితం గురించి, ఇష్టమైన కవుల గురించి, 'మార్జినోళ్ళు' పుస్తకం లోని కథల గురించి శ్రీనివాస్ గౌడ్ ఈ ఎపిసోడ్లో మనతో మాట్లాడారు.

సెల్ : 9949429449

మెయిల్ : srinivasgoudpoet@gmail.com

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Amaia is a writer, singer, and literary translator who specialises in Basque literature. She is the most prolific translator of Basque literature to date, as well as a pioneer in the field, and has received multiple awards for her work; among them, a Wingate Scholarship, the OMI Writers Translation Lab award, a Mellon Fellowship for Arts and Scholarship, and an artist-in-residence award at the Cervantes Institute in Chicago. She has published and performed on both sides of the Atlantic: in Ireland and Great Britain, where she carried out her university education, and in the US, where she lived until 2020. She now splits her time between the US and the Basque Country, where she spends much time freediving and recording the sounds of the Kantauri sea.

To know more -

https://www.amaiagabantxo.com/

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She holds an MA in Creative Writing: Writing the City from the University of Westminster and is pursuing a PhD at the University of Brighton. Her research focuses on how poetry can empower Belarusian women to share their experiences of gender-based violence and patriarchy.

Hanna’s poetic work is a powerful testament to the experiences of girls and young women in a patriarchal authoritarian country. Her published works, including the collections “Страх вышыні” [Fear of Heights], “Мы вернемся” [We’ll Return], and “Вызвалі або бяжы” [Set Me Free or Run], as well as the bilingual collections Recycled and Ribwort and the non-fiction book "Калі я выйду на волю" [When I'm Out of Here], resonate with readers, offering a voice to those who have been silenced.

Her work has been translated into Polish, Ukrainian, Swedish, Norwegian, German, Czech, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Danish and Russian.

A member of PEN Belarus and an honorary member of English PEN, she is the Freedom of Speech 2020 Prize laureate from the Norwegian Authors’ Union.

For more on Hanna Komer -

https://www.hannakomar.com/en

To know more about other Important Belarusian Writers and Poets -

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https://eemaata.com/em/issues/202406/34506.html

కాథొలిక్ చర్చి సంప్రదాయం ప్రకారం, ఈస్టర్ పండుగ వచ్చే ముందు నలభై రోజుల్ని ‘లెంటు మాసం’ పేరుతో పిలుస్తారు. ఈ సందర్భంగా చర్చిలో ఉత్సవాలు జరుగుతాయి. వ్రతం పాటించాలనుకునేవాళ్ళు ఉపవాసం చేస్తూ ప్రార్థనలు చేస్తారు. ఇళ్ళల్లో ప్రత్యేకమైన వంటలు చేస్తారు. ఈ కథ రష్యన్ రచయిత్రి టెఫీ, తాను ఎనిమిదేళ్ళ పాపగా ఉన్నప్పుడు జరిగిన సంఘటన గురించి రాసింది.

నాదెజ్దా తెఫీ (అసలు పేరు నాదెజ్దా లోక్వితస్కయా) సెయింట్ పీటర్స్‌బర్గ్‌లో 1872లో జన్మించారు. ఆమె రాసిన కథలు, 1919 వేసవిలో యుక్రెయిన్ నించి ఇస్తాన్‌బుల్‌కు ఆమె బోటులో చేసిన తన చివరి విషాదకరమైన ప్రయాణం గురించి హాస్యస్ఫోరకంగా రాసిన ‘ఫ్రమ్ మాస్కో టు ది బ్లాక్ సీ’ సుప్రసిద్ధమైనవి. రష్యాలో విప్లవం ముందు రోజుల్లో తెఫీ అత్యంత ప్రాచుర్యం పొందిన రచయిత్రి. ఆమెను ప్రసిద్ధ రచయిత చెఖోవ్‌తో పోలుస్తారు. ఆమె పేరు మీద రష్యాలో సెంట్లూ, కాండిళ్ళు అమ్మేవాళ్ళట. ఆమె చనిపోయిన ఒక ఆరు దశాబ్దాలు ఆమెను దాదాపుగా అందరూ మర్చిపోయారు. దీనికి రచయిత్రుల పట్ల వుండే వివక్ష కొంత కారణం అయితే, కొంత కారణం ఆమె రచనల్లోని హాస్యం మీద మాత్రమే విమర్శకులు దృష్టి సారించి, వాటిలో వుండే భావోద్వేగపు లోతుల్నీ, అవగాహననూ పట్టించుకోకపోవటం. ఇంకొంత – పాశ్చాత్య విమర్శకులు, సోవియెట్ విమర్శకులు కూడా ప్రవాస రష్యన్ సాహిత్యాన్ని చిన్నచూపు చూడటం. ఆమె గొప్పతనాన్ని గుర్తించి, రచనలన్నింటినీ గత కొన్ని దశాబ్దాలుగా ఆంగ్లంలోకి అనువదిస్తూ వస్తున్నవారు సుప్రసిద్ధ రష్యన్ అనువాదకుల జంట రాబర్ట్ చాండ్లర్, ఎలిజబెత్ చాండ్లర్.

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Robert first began learning Russian when he was 15. At 20, he spent a year as a British Council Exchange scholar in Voronezh, the city where Andrey Platonov was born and where Osip Mandelstam was exiled. It was there that he first read these two writers, who have remained precious to him throughout his life.

He has also translated Sappho, Teffi, Alexander Pushkin, Vasily Grossman, the Uzbek novelist Hamid Ismailov and the greatly undervalued poet Lev Ozerov; like Grossman, Ozerov was a Russophone Jew, born in Ukraine. He has edited and co-translated three anthologies for Penguin Classics: of Russian poetry, Russian short stories and Russian poetry. He has also run translation workshops in London and taught for an annual summer school. He has worked as a mentor to younger translators. Before deciding to translate full-time, he worked for eight years as a teacher of the Alexander Technique - a valuable discipline concerning voice, breath and movement.”

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Brian Robert Moore is a literary translator originally from New York City. His published and forthcoming translations from Italian include Meeting in Positano by Goliarda Sapienza (Other Press), A Silence Shared by Lalla Romano (Pushkin Press), and You, Bleeding Childhood and Verdigris by Michele Mari (And Other Stories). His translations of shorter works have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Asymptote, Brick, the Nation, the Poetry Review, and elsewhere. His Translation of Michele Mari’s Story, ‘The Soccer Balls of Mr. Kurz,’ has won the O’Henry Prize for Short Story for the year 2023. He also won the 2021 PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature and was selected for a translation residency at the Casa delle Traduzioni in Rome. After receiving degrees from Brown University (BA in comparative literature and Italian studies) and Trinity College Dublin (MPhil in Irish writing), he worked for several years in Italian publishing, including as an editor of literary fiction in translation.

To Buy 'You-Bleeding Childhood' -

https://shorturl.at/0hjfk

Photo Credit: Daniel Horowitz

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https://tinyurl.com/4zbdhrwr

Harshaneeyam on Spotify App –https://harshaneeyam.captivate.fm/onspot

Harshaneeyam on Apple App – https://harshaneeyam.captivate.fm/onapple

*Contact us - harshaneeyam@gmail.com

***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

She spoke about Hebrew Literature, the Authors Guild and working with David Grossman, the famous Israeli Author in this episode.

Link to the wonderful Talk by Jessica Cohen about Translator as Editor -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44nzLroK0iU&t=1748s

* For your Valuable feedback on this Episode - Please click the link below.

https://tinyurl.com/4zbdhrwr

Harshaneeyam on Spotify App –https://harshaneeyam.captivate.fm/onspot

Harshaneeyam on Apple App – https://harshaneeyam.captivate.fm/onapple

*Contact us - harshaneeyam@gmail.com

***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

‘ఆ మధ్యాహ్నం, వసంత కాలపు ఆఖరిరోజుల్లో, ఒక అరుదైన సమయాన దుర్గపు బురుజు నుంచి ఘంటారావం మొదలైంది.’  

‘ఒక మధ్యాహ్నం, వసంతకాలం ఇంక ముగిసిపోతోందనగా, ఆ అసాధారణ సమయాన కోట బురుజు నుంచి ఘంటానాదం విన్పించింది.’



మా అమ్మమ్మ వాళ్ళింట్లోని లైబ్రరీలో, ఏ పుస్తకం చేతిలోకి తీసుకోవాలా అని ఆలోచిస్తూ ఒక రోజంతా అలా అలమరల ఎదురుగా నిలుచుండిపోయాను. ప్రతి వేసవి సెలవుల్లో నేను చదివే బుట్టెడు పాత బొమ్మల పుస్తకాలు గత నెలరోజుల్లో చదివేసాను. నేను ఏదో ఒక పుస్తకం చదవడం మొదలుపెట్టాలనే పట్టుదలతో ఆ రోజు నిద్ర లేచాను. నాకు ఊహ తెల్సినప్పటినించీ వెంటాడుతున్న పుస్తకాల పేర్లన్నీ వరుసగా చదువుకుంటూ వెడుతున్నాను – Littleman, what Now? , What Do you think of America?, And How Green was My valley, విచిత్రమైన పేర్లు… కొన్ని జడిపించి అయోమయానికి గురిచేసినవైతే… కొన్ని విపరీతంగా ఆకర్షించినవి. పేర్ల తర్వాత పేర్లు ; ఏది చేతిలోకి తీసుకోవాలో తెలీక బుర్ర గిర్రున తిరిగేస్తోంది. నా జీవితమంతా చదవబోయే పుస్తకం మీద ఆధారపడినట్టు అక్కడే ఊగిసలాడాను. చివరికి నేనాగిపోయింది అలసట వల్లే తప్ప ఒక స్థిరమైన నిర్ణయానికొచ్చికాదు. ఆఖరికి నా సమస్య మూడు పుస్తకాలకే  పరిమితం కావడానికి వాటి పేర్లు కూడా కారణం అయ్యుండొచ్చు. ఎక్కడో మూలన ఉన్నాయి – కాన్రాడ్ రాసిన ‘Arrow of Gold’, రాబర్ట్ లూయీ స్టీవెన్ సన్ రాసిన ‘ The Black Arrow’ కూపర్ రాసిన ‘White Arrow and Other Stories’. వాటి రచయితల గురించి నాకేమీ తెలీదు కానీ నేనైతే పూర్తిగా ఆ రంగుల మాయాజాలంలో పడిపోయాను. – అప్పటికే చాలా సార్లు చదివిన ‘వైట్ ఫాంగ్’ , ‘బ్లాక్ కోర్సయిర్’ లతో అల్లుకుపోయిన నా తీపి జ్ఞాపకాలు ‘యారో అఫ్ గోల్డ్’ ను ముందుగా వెనక్కి తోసాయి. చివరికి ఏదో దుష్టశక్తి నన్నావహించినట్టుగా, చీకటి రంగే గెలిచింది. (కొన్నిపేజీలు ముందుకు వెళ్ళినతర్వాత పుస్తకంలోని ముఖ్యమైన సన్నివేశం, వైట్ రోజ్ ఆఫ్ యార్క్ , రెడ్ రోజ్ అఫ్ లాంకాస్టర్ అనే రెండు పాత్రల మధ్యన అని తెలుసుకుని, మూడు రంగులు కదా అని చాలా సంతోషించాను)

బాగాఅలోచించి ‘The Black Arrow’ ను చేతిలోకి తీసుకున్నాను. ఆ పుస్తకాన్ని నేను ఆతృతగా చేతిలోకి తీసుకుని ఆనందంగా అతి జాగ్రత్తగా చదివాను. మూడురోజుల్లో పూర్తిచేసాను. పుస్తకం సృష్టించిన కాల్పనిక లోకంలో విహరించి వెంటనే బయటకు రాలేక, ఆ అద్భుత ప్రపంచపు జ్ఞాపకాలు పూర్తిగా వీడక, రోజూవారీ జీవితంలోని సామాన్య పరిస్థితులతో సమాధానపడలేక, నేను తికమకపడుతూంటే అకస్మాత్తుగా మా తాతయ్య మరుసటి రోజు సాయంకాలం ఏడు గంటలకు మా నాన్న వస్తున్నారన్న కబురందించారు. 

ఇప్పుడు ఈ కథలో విషాదం అర్థం కావాలంటే మా నాన్న భీకర స్వరూపం నాకెదురైనప్పుడు – ఒళ్ళు గగుర్పొడిచే భయాందోళనలు, వ్యక్తీకరించలేని ప్రేమానుభూతులు, ఎందుకో తెలీని వ్యతిరేకత, అపరాధ భావం, మనసు విప్పి మాట్లాడాలనే అమితమైన కోరిక, అయోమయం, మా నాన్నతో కలిసివున్నట్టు నాకొచ్చే కలలు, చివరికి ఏళ్ళ తరబడి అలవాటైన దూరం వల్ల నన్ను చుట్టేసే నిశ్శబ్దపు సంకెళ్ళు – వీటి మధ్య నేను ఉక్కిరిబిక్కిరి అవుతానని మీరు తెలుసుకోవాలి. అత్తగారింటి వాళ్ళను పూర్తి పరాయి మనుషులుగా నాన్న భావిస్తారని, వాళ్ళ ఇంటికొచ్చి నాతో ఏనాడూ ఒక పూట కూడా గడపలేదన్న విషయాలు తెలిసిన వాళ్ళకి, ఆయన వస్తున్నాడన్న సమాచారం నాలో అలివికాని సంతోషంతో పాటు అపరాధభావాన్ని ఎందుకు  కలిగించిందో అర్థం అవుతుంది. ఆయన ప్రశాంత వదనం ఓ పక్క పరిస్థితిని ఉధృతం చేస్తూంటే అంతటితో సరిపోనట్టు ఆయన అకస్మాత్తుగా నీకోసం ఒక బహుమతి తీసుకొచ్చానని చెప్పినప్పుడు ఏవనాలో తెలీలేదు. గుండెబరువై దిక్కుతోచలేదు: ఆయన వాత్సల్య ప్రదర్శన నన్నింకా ఇబ్బంది పెట్టింది. మా నాన్న సూటుకేసు తెరుస్తూంటే నోటమాట రాక నేనక్కడే నిలుచుండి పోయాను. ఆయనకు తిరిగి ఏమి ఇవ్వాలా అని ఆలోచిస్తూ, నా దగ్గరుండే పనికిమాలిన వస్తువుల చిట్టానంతా ఒకసారి బుర్రలో తిరగేసుకున్నాను; మాగ్నోలియా మొక్క, గ్లాసుడు గులకరాళ్లు, కొత్తచొక్కాతో వచ్చిన అట్టపెట్టె … ఈ బీద పదార్థాలన్నిటికీ వెల కట్టలేని విలువనాపాదించి, మా మధ్య వున్న అరమరికలను శాశ్వతంగా దూరం చేసే ప్రతీకలుగా వాటిని భావించి, ఒక్కసారిగా మా మధ్య అన్ని అపార్థాలు సమసిపోయిన అనుభూతిని పొందాను. 

పడుకునే ముందర ఆ బహుమతిని ఆయన నా చేతికిచ్చాడు. అదో పుస్తకం. పేరు చూడగానే ఏం చెయ్యాలో అర్థం కాలేదు. ఒక్కసారిగా రాబోయే ఇబ్బంది పసిగట్టాను. నమ్మశక్యంగా లేకపోయినా, అది నాలుగు రోజులక్రింద నేను ఆస్వాదిస్తూ చదివిన ‘ Black Arrow’ నవల. ‘దారుణం!’ – అదే నాకు తట్టిన మొదటి పదం; ఘోరం, బాధాకరం కూడా. ఆలోచిస్తూంటే నాకనిపించింది – ‘దీనికి దురదృష్టమో మా నాన్నో కారణం కాదు… ఇదంతా నా వల్లే జరిగింది.’ ( నాన్న ఆ పుస్తకాన్ని వస్తూ వస్తూ నార్తర్న్ రైల్వే స్టేషన్ ప్లాట్ఫారం మీదే కొన్నాడన్న విషయం గుట్టుగా తెలుసుకున్న తర్వాత కూడా నా స్థితి మెరుగుపడలేదు; అప్పటికే నా మనసులో ‘బహుమతి’ అన్న పదం తన అర్థాన్ని విస్తరించుకుని చెరిగిపోని చేదు గుర్తుగా ముద్రించుకుపోయింది.)

అదీ పరిస్థితి. క్రిస్మస్కో నా పుట్టినరోజుకో సంబంధం లేకుండా, తన ప్రేమను వ్యక్తం చేయడానికి మా నాన్న బాహాటంగా ఇలాటి పనికి పూనుకోవడం ఎంత అసాధారణంగా ఉందంటే అది నన్ను తట్టుకోలేని ఇబ్బందికి గురిచేసింది; బహుమతి వల్ల వచ్చిన అసౌకర్యంతో పాటూ ఇంకో ఆలోచన కూడా మొదలైంది. నాకిచ్చిన పుస్తకానికి ఒక ఖరీదు అంటూ ఉండటం ( నా మీద ఒకరు డబ్బులు ఖర్చు చేయడం నన్ను ఎంతో సిగ్గుపడేలా చేస్తోంది.) నాకు సంతోషం కలిగించాలనీ, అందులోనున్న మానవతా విలువలు నాకు ఒంటపట్టాలని, ఇదికాక మా నాన్న పుస్తకాల షాపులో (వాడికి నచ్చుతుందా, వాడిలాటి పుస్తకాలేనా చదివేది?) నా కోసం… కేవలం నాకోసం కొంత సమయం ఖర్చుచేయడాన్ని  ఊహించుకుంటే నాకు విచిత్రంగా ఉంది. ఇది ఎవ్వరి ఊహకూ అందనంత సంతోషాన్నిచ్చే విషయమే కానీ, ముందే ఆ పుస్తకాన్ని చదివేసి ఆ ఆనందాన్ని దూరంచేసుకున్నానని అర్థం అయ్యాక, ‘మరో సారి చదువుదాంలే!’ అన్న ఆలోచన వచ్చినా ‘ఎన్ని మార్లు చదివినా, మరిన్ని రోజులాగి చదివినా, అది నాలో పుట్టే బలమైన కోరిక వల్ల జరగాలి తప్ప, ఏవీ జరగనట్టుగా అదే పుస్తకం తీసి చదవడం, పుస్తకాన్నీ, ఇచ్చిన వ్యక్తినీ మోసగించడమే అవుతుంది’ అనుకుంటూ ఆగిపోయాను. నా మీదున్న ప్రేమను ముద్రించిన అక్షరాల ద్వారా మీరందించారు కానీ ఆ అక్షరాలను అంతకు ముందే మీకు తెలీకుండా స్పృశించాను. తెలీక నేను చేసిన తప్పు మీ ప్రేమకు నన్ను దూరం చేసింది. పుస్తకం చేతికందిస్తున్నప్పుడు దాంతోపాటు చూసిన ఆయన చూపు, ఆ తీయనైన చూపులో నిద్రాణమై దాగి వున్న సంతృప్తిని నేను అనుభవించాను. ఆ చూపు ఒక్కటే చాలు నన్ను కాల్చి వెయ్యడానికి. చేసిన తప్పుతో పాటూ ఆ తర్వాత నా మౌనం ఆ అనుభవాన్ని మరింత చేదు చేసింది. నోరు తెరవకుండా నోటికి శాశ్వతంగా తాళం పడేలా శిక్షను విధించుకున్నాను. లేని ఉత్సాహం చూపిస్తూ కృతజ్ఞతలు తెలిపి, అంతటితో ఆగకుండా తొందరగా చదవాలన్నట్టుగా నటించాను కదా! ఎప్పటికైనా ఆయనకు నిజం చెప్పేంత ధైర్యం ఎక్కణ్ణించోస్తుంది? ఆయన బహుమతి ఇచ్చిన ఆ భయంకర ఘడియ మొదలు, నేను గడిపిన ప్రతి క్షణం నా అబద్ధపు ప్రపంచాన్ని విస్తరిస్తోంది; అదే రోజు రాత్రి బెడ్ లైటు వెలుగులో చదవడానికి, మా నాన్న ‘యూనివర్సాలి సైన్టిఫికా బోరింగెయిరి’ చేతపడితే నేను నా శాపగ్రస్త నవలను తీసుకుని కళ్ళను అక్షరాల వెనక పరుగు పెట్టిస్తున్నట్టు నటిస్తూ ఉండగా – ‘మా అనుబంధాన్ని సరిచేసుకోవడం అసాధ్యం’ అన్న వాస్తవం స్పష్టంగా కళ్ళెదుట నిలిచింది. ఆ భయానక రాత్రి గడుస్తున్న కొద్దీ ఎదురుగా కనపడుతోన్న అక్షరాల ముద్రలు క్రమంగా వాటి రూపాన్ని కోల్పోతున్నా, కారవాగ్గియో గీచిన ఛాయాచిత్రంలా కన్పడుతోన్న మా నాన్న నీడ వైపు చూడాల్సొస్తుందన్న భయంతో తల పైకెత్తలేకపోతున్నాను. వేదనను, అపరాధభావననూ శక్తి మేరకు అనుభవిస్తూ ఒక్కో పేజీ చదివి తిప్పడానికి సరిగ్గా ఎంత సమయం అవసరంవుతుందో లెక్కకట్టి పక్క పేజీకి వెడుతున్నాను. సరిగ్గా లైటు ఆపబోయే సమయంలో మా నాన్న ‘ అయితే నీకు ఈ పుస్తకం నచ్చినట్టేనా?” అని ప్రశ్నించినప్పుడు ఊరికే ‘నచ్చింది’ అని చెప్పాలో, ‘ చాలా నచ్చింది’ అని చెప్పాలో, అసలేది చెప్తే నేను అబద్ధాన్ని తక్కువ చేయగలనో అర్థం కాక చివరికి ఊ !” అని నీలిగి – తడబడుతూఇచ్చిన సమాధానం వల్ల నాన్నకు ఎక్కడ అనుమానం వస్తుందో, ఎక్కడ ఆయన వీడికి ఈ పుస్తకం నచ్చక మొహమాటపడుతున్నాడని భావిస్తాడో అని అనుకుంటూ నరక యాతన పడడం నాకు గుర్తుంది. 

 ఆ తర్వాతి రోజుల్లో అదే పుస్తకం కొత్త కాపీ మళ్ళీ చదువుతున్నానని తాతయ్య మా నాన్న ముందు తొందరపడి అనేస్తాడేమో అన్న అనుమానంతో ఆయన కళ్ళపడకుండా జాగ్రత్త పడాలన్న ఆందోళనతో ఆ బాగోతాన్ని అలాగే సాగించాను. ‘కొత్త కాపీ ’… మా నాన్న వెళ్ళి పోయిన కొన్ని రోజులు గడిచినతర్వాత కానీ  నా విముక్తికి ఆ పదం బీజం వేస్తుందన్న ఆలోచన నాకు రాకుండా క్రూరమైన విధి నాకు అడ్డుపడింది. ద్రాక్ష పందిరి క్రింద నిల్చుని భయానకమైన అసంతృప్తితో నాన్నకు వీడుకోలు పలికేటప్పుడు, ప్రతిసారీ నాకిష్టమైన వ్యక్తి వదిలి వెడుతున్నప్పటి లాగానే, ఆ మనిషి తిరిగిరాని లోకాలకు వెళ్ళిపోతున్నట్టు, ఇంక చెయ్యగలిగింది ఏమీ లేనట్టు, ఏదైనా చేయడానికి అసలు సమయం మించిపోయినట్టు, బయటకి చెప్పని మాటలు శాశ్వతంగా నాలోనే మిగిలిపోతాయన్నట్టు అనిపించడం నాకింకా గురుతుంది.  ఎంతో కాలం నించీ పరిచయం వున్న ప్రదేశాలన్నీ ఆయన ప్రతిబింబంతో నిండిపోయి ఆయన దూరం అయిన కొన్నిరోజుల్లోనే ఆ ప్రతిబింబం నీడలా మారిపోయి ఆ ప్రదేశాలనంతా ఆవరించి  అచేతనంగా, అసంపూర్తిగా మార్చింది. ఇంత జరుగుతున్నా ఒక ఆలోచన మటుకు నన్ను వదిలిపెట్టడం లేదు, ప్రపంచంలో అన్ని రకాల పుస్తకాలుంటే …. నాకున్న ఆతృతకొద్దీ పుస్తకాల అలమరా దగ్గరికి పరిగెత్తాను ; ఉత్తమస్థాయి లైబ్రరీ నా ముందు లేకపోయినా,లోకంలో వున్న అన్ని పుస్తకాల సంఖ్యతో బేరీజు వేస్తె ఆ అలమర్లలో వుండే పుస్తకాల శాతం అతితక్కువైనా, తాతయ్య దగ్గరుండే లైబ్రరీ పెద్దదే. ఊపిరి బిగపట్టుకుని పుస్తకాలను లెక్కపెట్టాను. ఒక అలమరలో వున్న పుస్తకాలను లెక్కపెట్టి అక్కడున్న అలమరల సంఖ్యతో హెచ్చవేస్తే వేస్తే దాదాపుగా ‘వెయ్యి’ లెక్క తేలింది. అంటే నన్ను నవ్వులపాలు చేసి నన్ను ఈ దురదృష్టపు స్థితికి నెట్టివేయడానికి ఉన్న అవకాశం వెయ్యిలో ఒకటి. కాదు కాదు – పక్కనే బల్ల మీద బయట పెట్టిన పుస్తకాలు ఇంకో యాభై వున్నాయి. ఈ రెండిటినీ హెచ్చవేస్తే, యాభై వేలల్లో ఒకటి – ఊహూ మనం లెక్కల జోలికి వెళ్ళడం అంత గొప్ప ఆలోచన కాదు; యాభయి వేలంటే … ఇన్ఫినిటీ ని ఊహించడంకంటే కష్టంగా ఉంది…   

ఆ నిస్సహాయత వల్లనే కాబోలు అకస్మాత్తుగా ఒక జ్ఞానదీపం వెలిగి పైకి సరళంగా కనపడే ఆ సంక్లిష్టమైన పదం నాకు స్ఫురించింది – ‘వేరే ఎడిషన్’.  వెంటనే నన్ను చుట్టుముట్టిన విరక్తిని అధిగమించి, నేను ఇంతకు ముందు చదివిన ‘బ్లాక్ ఆరో’ ను...]]>మూలం : మికేలి మరి ‘ఇటాలియన్’ లో రాసి, బ్రైన్ రాబర్ట్ మూర్ ఇంగ్లీష్ లోకి అనువదించిన ‘The Black Arrow’

‘ఆ మధ్యాహ్నం, వసంత కాలపు ఆఖరిరోజుల్లో, ఒక అరుదైన సమయాన దుర్గపు బురుజు నుంచి ఘంటారావం మొదలైంది.’  

‘ఒక మధ్యాహ్నం, వసంతకాలం ఇంక ముగిసిపోతోందనగా, ఆ అసాధారణ సమయాన కోట బురుజు నుంచి ఘంటానాదం విన్పించింది.’



మా అమ్మమ్మ వాళ్ళింట్లోని లైబ్రరీలో, ఏ పుస్తకం చేతిలోకి తీసుకోవాలా అని ఆలోచిస్తూ ఒక రోజంతా అలా అలమరల ఎదురుగా నిలుచుండిపోయాను. ప్రతి వేసవి సెలవుల్లో నేను చదివే బుట్టెడు పాత బొమ్మల పుస్తకాలు గత నెలరోజుల్లో చదివేసాను. నేను ఏదో ఒక పుస్తకం చదవడం మొదలుపెట్టాలనే పట్టుదలతో ఆ రోజు నిద్ర లేచాను. నాకు ఊహ తెల్సినప్పటినించీ వెంటాడుతున్న పుస్తకాల పేర్లన్నీ వరుసగా చదువుకుంటూ వెడుతున్నాను – Littleman, what Now? , What Do you think of America?, And How Green was My valley, విచిత్రమైన పేర్లు… కొన్ని జడిపించి అయోమయానికి గురిచేసినవైతే… కొన్ని విపరీతంగా ఆకర్షించినవి. పేర్ల తర్వాత పేర్లు ; ఏది చేతిలోకి తీసుకోవాలో తెలీక బుర్ర గిర్రున తిరిగేస్తోంది. నా జీవితమంతా చదవబోయే పుస్తకం మీద ఆధారపడినట్టు అక్కడే ఊగిసలాడాను. చివరికి నేనాగిపోయింది అలసట వల్లే తప్ప ఒక స్థిరమైన నిర్ణయానికొచ్చికాదు. ఆఖరికి నా సమస్య మూడు పుస్తకాలకే  పరిమితం కావడానికి వాటి పేర్లు కూడా కారణం అయ్యుండొచ్చు. ఎక్కడో మూలన ఉన్నాయి – కాన్రాడ్ రాసిన ‘Arrow of Gold’, రాబర్ట్ లూయీ స్టీవెన్ సన్ రాసిన ‘ The Black Arrow’ కూపర్ రాసిన ‘White Arrow and Other Stories’. వాటి రచయితల గురించి నాకేమీ తెలీదు కానీ నేనైతే పూర్తిగా ఆ రంగుల మాయాజాలంలో పడిపోయాను. – అప్పటికే చాలా సార్లు చదివిన ‘వైట్ ఫాంగ్’ , ‘బ్లాక్ కోర్సయిర్’ లతో అల్లుకుపోయిన నా తీపి జ్ఞాపకాలు ‘యారో అఫ్ గోల్డ్’ ను ముందుగా వెనక్కి తోసాయి. చివరికి ఏదో దుష్టశక్తి నన్నావహించినట్టుగా, చీకటి రంగే గెలిచింది. (కొన్నిపేజీలు ముందుకు వెళ్ళినతర్వాత పుస్తకంలోని ముఖ్యమైన సన్నివేశం, వైట్ రోజ్ ఆఫ్ యార్క్ , రెడ్ రోజ్ అఫ్ లాంకాస్టర్ అనే రెండు పాత్రల మధ్యన అని తెలుసుకుని, మూడు రంగులు కదా అని చాలా సంతోషించాను)

బాగాఅలోచించి ‘The Black Arrow’ ను చేతిలోకి తీసుకున్నాను. ఆ పుస్తకాన్ని నేను ఆతృతగా చేతిలోకి తీసుకుని ఆనందంగా అతి జాగ్రత్తగా చదివాను. మూడురోజుల్లో పూర్తిచేసాను. పుస్తకం సృష్టించిన కాల్పనిక లోకంలో విహరించి వెంటనే బయటకు రాలేక, ఆ అద్భుత ప్రపంచపు జ్ఞాపకాలు పూర్తిగా వీడక, రోజూవారీ జీవితంలోని సామాన్య పరిస్థితులతో సమాధానపడలేక, నేను తికమకపడుతూంటే అకస్మాత్తుగా మా తాతయ్య మరుసటి రోజు సాయంకాలం ఏడు గంటలకు మా నాన్న వస్తున్నారన్న కబురందించారు. 

ఇప్పుడు ఈ కథలో విషాదం అర్థం కావాలంటే మా నాన్న భీకర స్వరూపం నాకెదురైనప్పుడు – ఒళ్ళు గగుర్పొడిచే భయాందోళనలు, వ్యక్తీకరించలేని ప్రేమానుభూతులు, ఎందుకో తెలీని వ్యతిరేకత, అపరాధ భావం, మనసు విప్పి మాట్లాడాలనే అమితమైన కోరిక, అయోమయం, మా నాన్నతో కలిసివున్నట్టు నాకొచ్చే కలలు, చివరికి ఏళ్ళ తరబడి అలవాటైన దూరం వల్ల నన్ను చుట్టేసే నిశ్శబ్దపు సంకెళ్ళు – వీటి మధ్య నేను ఉక్కిరిబిక్కిరి అవుతానని మీరు తెలుసుకోవాలి. అత్తగారింటి వాళ్ళను పూర్తి పరాయి మనుషులుగా నాన్న భావిస్తారని, వాళ్ళ ఇంటికొచ్చి నాతో ఏనాడూ ఒక పూట కూడా గడపలేదన్న విషయాలు తెలిసిన వాళ్ళకి, ఆయన వస్తున్నాడన్న సమాచారం నాలో అలివికాని సంతోషంతో పాటు అపరాధభావాన్ని ఎందుకు  కలిగించిందో అర్థం అవుతుంది. ఆయన ప్రశాంత వదనం ఓ పక్క పరిస్థితిని ఉధృతం చేస్తూంటే అంతటితో సరిపోనట్టు ఆయన అకస్మాత్తుగా నీకోసం ఒక బహుమతి తీసుకొచ్చానని చెప్పినప్పుడు ఏవనాలో తెలీలేదు. గుండెబరువై దిక్కుతోచలేదు: ఆయన వాత్సల్య ప్రదర్శన నన్నింకా ఇబ్బంది పెట్టింది. మా నాన్న సూటుకేసు తెరుస్తూంటే నోటమాట రాక నేనక్కడే నిలుచుండి పోయాను. ఆయనకు తిరిగి ఏమి ఇవ్వాలా అని ఆలోచిస్తూ, నా దగ్గరుండే పనికిమాలిన వస్తువుల చిట్టానంతా ఒకసారి బుర్రలో తిరగేసుకున్నాను; మాగ్నోలియా మొక్క, గ్లాసుడు గులకరాళ్లు, కొత్తచొక్కాతో వచ్చిన అట్టపెట్టె … ఈ బీద పదార్థాలన్నిటికీ వెల కట్టలేని విలువనాపాదించి, మా మధ్య వున్న అరమరికలను శాశ్వతంగా దూరం చేసే ప్రతీకలుగా వాటిని భావించి, ఒక్కసారిగా మా మధ్య అన్ని అపార్థాలు సమసిపోయిన అనుభూతిని పొందాను. 

పడుకునే ముందర ఆ బహుమతిని ఆయన నా చేతికిచ్చాడు. అదో పుస్తకం. పేరు చూడగానే ఏం చెయ్యాలో అర్థం కాలేదు. ఒక్కసారిగా రాబోయే ఇబ్బంది పసిగట్టాను. నమ్మశక్యంగా లేకపోయినా, అది నాలుగు రోజులక్రింద నేను ఆస్వాదిస్తూ చదివిన ‘ Black Arrow’ నవల. ‘దారుణం!’ – అదే నాకు తట్టిన మొదటి పదం; ఘోరం, బాధాకరం కూడా. ఆలోచిస్తూంటే నాకనిపించింది – ‘దీనికి దురదృష్టమో మా నాన్నో కారణం కాదు… ఇదంతా నా వల్లే జరిగింది.’ ( నాన్న ఆ పుస్తకాన్ని వస్తూ వస్తూ నార్తర్న్ రైల్వే స్టేషన్ ప్లాట్ఫారం మీదే కొన్నాడన్న విషయం గుట్టుగా తెలుసుకున్న తర్వాత కూడా నా స్థితి మెరుగుపడలేదు; అప్పటికే నా మనసులో ‘బహుమతి’ అన్న పదం తన అర్థాన్ని విస్తరించుకుని చెరిగిపోని చేదు గుర్తుగా ముద్రించుకుపోయింది.)

అదీ పరిస్థితి. క్రిస్మస్కో నా పుట్టినరోజుకో సంబంధం లేకుండా, తన ప్రేమను వ్యక్తం చేయడానికి మా నాన్న బాహాటంగా ఇలాటి పనికి పూనుకోవడం ఎంత అసాధారణంగా ఉందంటే అది నన్ను తట్టుకోలేని ఇబ్బందికి గురిచేసింది; బహుమతి వల్ల వచ్చిన అసౌకర్యంతో పాటూ ఇంకో ఆలోచన కూడా మొదలైంది. నాకిచ్చిన పుస్తకానికి ఒక ఖరీదు అంటూ ఉండటం ( నా మీద ఒకరు డబ్బులు ఖర్చు చేయడం నన్ను ఎంతో సిగ్గుపడేలా చేస్తోంది.) నాకు సంతోషం కలిగించాలనీ, అందులోనున్న మానవతా విలువలు నాకు ఒంటపట్టాలని, ఇదికాక మా నాన్న పుస్తకాల షాపులో (వాడికి నచ్చుతుందా, వాడిలాటి పుస్తకాలేనా చదివేది?) నా కోసం… కేవలం నాకోసం కొంత సమయం ఖర్చుచేయడాన్ని  ఊహించుకుంటే నాకు విచిత్రంగా ఉంది. ఇది ఎవ్వరి ఊహకూ అందనంత సంతోషాన్నిచ్చే విషయమే కానీ, ముందే ఆ పుస్తకాన్ని చదివేసి ఆ ఆనందాన్ని దూరంచేసుకున్నానని అర్థం అయ్యాక, ‘మరో సారి చదువుదాంలే!’ అన్న ఆలోచన వచ్చినా ‘ఎన్ని మార్లు చదివినా, మరిన్ని రోజులాగి చదివినా, అది నాలో పుట్టే బలమైన కోరిక వల్ల జరగాలి తప్ప, ఏవీ జరగనట్టుగా అదే పుస్తకం తీసి చదవడం, పుస్తకాన్నీ, ఇచ్చిన వ్యక్తినీ మోసగించడమే అవుతుంది’ అనుకుంటూ ఆగిపోయాను. నా మీదున్న ప్రేమను ముద్రించిన అక్షరాల ద్వారా మీరందించారు కానీ ఆ అక్షరాలను అంతకు ముందే మీకు తెలీకుండా స్పృశించాను. తెలీక నేను చేసిన తప్పు మీ ప్రేమకు నన్ను దూరం చేసింది. పుస్తకం చేతికందిస్తున్నప్పుడు దాంతోపాటు చూసిన ఆయన చూపు, ఆ తీయనైన చూపులో నిద్రాణమై దాగి వున్న సంతృప్తిని నేను అనుభవించాను. ఆ చూపు ఒక్కటే చాలు నన్ను కాల్చి వెయ్యడానికి. చేసిన తప్పుతో పాటూ ఆ తర్వాత నా మౌనం ఆ అనుభవాన్ని మరింత చేదు చేసింది. నోరు తెరవకుండా నోటికి శాశ్వతంగా తాళం పడేలా శిక్షను విధించుకున్నాను. లేని ఉత్సాహం చూపిస్తూ కృతజ్ఞతలు తెలిపి, అంతటితో ఆగకుండా తొందరగా చదవాలన్నట్టుగా నటించాను కదా! ఎప్పటికైనా ఆయనకు నిజం చెప్పేంత ధైర్యం ఎక్కణ్ణించోస్తుంది? ఆయన బహుమతి ఇచ్చిన ఆ భయంకర ఘడియ మొదలు, నేను గడిపిన ప్రతి క్షణం నా అబద్ధపు ప్రపంచాన్ని విస్తరిస్తోంది; అదే రోజు రాత్రి బెడ్ లైటు వెలుగులో చదవడానికి, మా నాన్న ‘యూనివర్సాలి సైన్టిఫికా బోరింగెయిరి’ చేతపడితే నేను నా శాపగ్రస్త నవలను తీసుకుని కళ్ళను అక్షరాల వెనక పరుగు పెట్టిస్తున్నట్టు నటిస్తూ ఉండగా – ‘మా అనుబంధాన్ని సరిచేసుకోవడం అసాధ్యం’ అన్న వాస్తవం స్పష్టంగా కళ్ళెదుట నిలిచింది. ఆ భయానక రాత్రి గడుస్తున్న కొద్దీ ఎదురుగా కనపడుతోన్న అక్షరాల ముద్రలు క్రమంగా వాటి రూపాన్ని కోల్పోతున్నా, కారవాగ్గియో గీచిన ఛాయాచిత్రంలా కన్పడుతోన్న మా నాన్న నీడ వైపు చూడాల్సొస్తుందన్న భయంతో తల పైకెత్తలేకపోతున్నాను. వేదనను, అపరాధభావననూ శక్తి మేరకు అనుభవిస్తూ ఒక్కో పేజీ చదివి తిప్పడానికి సరిగ్గా ఎంత సమయం అవసరంవుతుందో లెక్కకట్టి పక్క పేజీకి వెడుతున్నాను. సరిగ్గా లైటు ఆపబోయే సమయంలో మా నాన్న ‘ అయితే నీకు ఈ పుస్తకం నచ్చినట్టేనా?” అని ప్రశ్నించినప్పుడు ఊరికే ‘నచ్చింది’ అని చెప్పాలో, ‘ చాలా నచ్చింది’ అని చెప్పాలో, అసలేది చెప్తే నేను అబద్ధాన్ని తక్కువ చేయగలనో అర్థం కాక చివరికి ఊ !” అని నీలిగి – తడబడుతూఇచ్చిన సమాధానం వల్ల నాన్నకు ఎక్కడ అనుమానం వస్తుందో, ఎక్కడ ఆయన వీడికి ఈ పుస్తకం నచ్చక మొహమాటపడుతున్నాడని భావిస్తాడో అని అనుకుంటూ నరక యాతన పడడం నాకు గుర్తుంది. 

 ఆ తర్వాతి రోజుల్లో అదే పుస్తకం కొత్త కాపీ మళ్ళీ చదువుతున్నానని తాతయ్య మా నాన్న ముందు తొందరపడి అనేస్తాడేమో అన్న అనుమానంతో ఆయన కళ్ళపడకుండా జాగ్రత్త పడాలన్న ఆందోళనతో ఆ బాగోతాన్ని అలాగే సాగించాను. ‘కొత్త కాపీ ’… మా నాన్న వెళ్ళి పోయిన కొన్ని రోజులు గడిచినతర్వాత కానీ  నా విముక్తికి ఆ పదం బీజం వేస్తుందన్న ఆలోచన నాకు రాకుండా క్రూరమైన విధి నాకు అడ్డుపడింది. ద్రాక్ష పందిరి క్రింద నిల్చుని భయానకమైన అసంతృప్తితో నాన్నకు వీడుకోలు పలికేటప్పుడు, ప్రతిసారీ నాకిష్టమైన వ్యక్తి వదిలి వెడుతున్నప్పటి లాగానే, ఆ మనిషి తిరిగిరాని లోకాలకు వెళ్ళిపోతున్నట్టు, ఇంక చెయ్యగలిగింది ఏమీ లేనట్టు, ఏదైనా చేయడానికి అసలు సమయం మించిపోయినట్టు, బయటకి చెప్పని మాటలు శాశ్వతంగా నాలోనే మిగిలిపోతాయన్నట్టు అనిపించడం నాకింకా గురుతుంది.  ఎంతో కాలం నించీ పరిచయం వున్న ప్రదేశాలన్నీ ఆయన ప్రతిబింబంతో నిండిపోయి ఆయన దూరం అయిన కొన్నిరోజుల్లోనే ఆ ప్రతిబింబం నీడలా మారిపోయి ఆ ప్రదేశాలనంతా ఆవరించి  అచేతనంగా, అసంపూర్తిగా మార్చింది. ఇంత జరుగుతున్నా ఒక ఆలోచన మటుకు నన్ను వదిలిపెట్టడం లేదు, ప్రపంచంలో అన్ని రకాల పుస్తకాలుంటే …. నాకున్న ఆతృతకొద్దీ పుస్తకాల అలమరా దగ్గరికి పరిగెత్తాను ; ఉత్తమస్థాయి లైబ్రరీ నా ముందు లేకపోయినా,లోకంలో వున్న అన్ని పుస్తకాల సంఖ్యతో బేరీజు వేస్తె ఆ అలమర్లలో వుండే పుస్తకాల శాతం అతితక్కువైనా, తాతయ్య దగ్గరుండే లైబ్రరీ పెద్దదే. ఊపిరి బిగపట్టుకుని పుస్తకాలను లెక్కపెట్టాను. ఒక అలమరలో వున్న పుస్తకాలను లెక్కపెట్టి అక్కడున్న అలమరల సంఖ్యతో హెచ్చవేస్తే వేస్తే దాదాపుగా ‘వెయ్యి’ లెక్క తేలింది. అంటే నన్ను నవ్వులపాలు చేసి నన్ను ఈ దురదృష్టపు స్థితికి నెట్టివేయడానికి ఉన్న అవకాశం వెయ్యిలో ఒకటి. కాదు కాదు – పక్కనే బల్ల మీద బయట పెట్టిన పుస్తకాలు ఇంకో యాభై వున్నాయి. ఈ రెండిటినీ హెచ్చవేస్తే, యాభై వేలల్లో ఒకటి – ఊహూ మనం లెక్కల జోలికి వెళ్ళడం అంత గొప్ప ఆలోచన కాదు; యాభయి వేలంటే … ఇన్ఫినిటీ ని ఊహించడంకంటే కష్టంగా ఉంది…   

ఆ నిస్సహాయత వల్లనే కాబోలు అకస్మాత్తుగా ఒక జ్ఞానదీపం వెలిగి పైకి సరళంగా కనపడే ఆ సంక్లిష్టమైన పదం నాకు స్ఫురించింది – ‘వేరే ఎడిషన్’.  వెంటనే నన్ను చుట్టుముట్టిన విరక్తిని అధిగమించి, నేను ఇంతకు ముందు చదివిన ‘బ్లాక్ ఆరో’ ను తీస్కొని కింది అంతస్థులో వున్న నా గదికి చేరుకున్నాను. పక్కనే బల్ల మీద మా నాన్న ఇచ్చిన కొత్త కాపీ వుంది. రెండిట్నీ ఒక దగ్గరకు తెచ్చి జాగ్రత్తగా పరీక్షించాను. రెండూ ఒకే మాదిరిగా వున్నాయి. అయితే ఒక పుస్తకం కవరు మామూలుగా ఉంటే, రెండో దాని కవరు మెరుస్తోంది. దానిమీద ఒక రంగుల బొమ్మ… రెండు గుర్రాలతో ఒక బగ్గీ; ఏదో సినిమా పోస్టర్ లా వుంది. 

మొదటి పుస్తకం లోపల ఇలా రాసుందని  నాకు ఇప్పటికీ  గుర్తుంది. ‘మిలాన్ మదెల్లా 1924’ 

రెండో పుస్తకం తెరిస్తే మాసిపోయిన చిన్న చిన్న అక్షరాల్లో  ‘1965 – డెల్ అల్బెరో ఎడిషన్ – ట్యూరిన్’  అని రాసుంది.. అదే  పేజీలో  కింద అర్థం పర్థం  లేకుండా   ‘’ఎడిటింగ్ – అల్బెర్టో మిత్తోనే’ అని కనపడింది. 

ఆ వయసులో నాకు ‘ఎడిటింగ్’ అంటే ఎలా తెలుస్తుంది. కానీ ఆ వివరం కొట్టిపారేసేదేవీ కాదు అని నాకనిపించింది. ఈ రెండు పుస్తకాలు నిజంగా వేరే వేరే ఎడిషన్లకు చెందినవైతే, చాలా తేడాలు ఉండాలేమో కదా. మొదటి పుస్తకంలోకి మళ్ళీ వెళ్ళి చూస్తే; ‘అనువాదం – గిగ్లియోలా ఒలివేరో’’ అనిరాసుంది. 

‘అనువాదం’ అనే పదం నన్ను అక్కడికక్కడ ఆపి ఆలోచనలో పడేసింది. ‘స్టీవెన్సన్’ ఇటాలియన్ పేరు మటుకు కాదు, కాబట్టి నవల వేరే ఏదో భాషలో రాసుంటారు. అంటే నేను చదివింది… నా ఒళ్ళంతా పులకరించిపోయింది. కొండంత ఆశతో పుస్తకాలు రెండూ ఒకటికాదని ఎలాగోలా నన్ను నేను భ్రమింపచేసుకోవాలని తీవ్రంగా పైపై తేడాలకోసం వెతుకుతూ ఉంటే, ఈ పుస్తకాలనీ పూర్తిగా వేరు చేసి దూరం పెంచగల మంత్రం స్ఫురించింది; ఈ రెండూ ఒకటే కాదు అని చెప్పడానికి, వీటిల్లో వేరుగా రాయబడ్డ ఒక్క పదం దొరికినా చాలు. అప్పుడు ముల్లోకాలు కల్సి నన్ను పెడుతున్న ఈ ముప్పుతిప్పల నుంచి బయటపడడానికి నేను నాన్న ఇచ్చిన పుస్తకాన్ని, ఒక కొత్త పుస్తకంలా అంతా చదువుతాను. 

మా నాన్న ఇచ్చిన పుస్తకంలో ఎవరు అనువదించిందీ రాసిలేదు – అంటే పుస్తకం సవరించిన మిత్తోనే కానీ ఆయనతో పని చేసిన ఇంకెవరైనా కానీ అనువదించి ఉండాలి. ఎవరైతేనేం! ఆ వ్యక్తి పట్ల అంతుతెలీని కృతజ్ఞతా భావంతో నా హృదయం నిండిపోయింది. కానీ అలా కాకుండా ఒలివేరో చేసిన అనువాదమే మళ్ళీ ప్రచురింపబడి ఉంటే? ఈ ఊహ రాగానే ఒళ్ళంతా చల్లబడి పోయింది. పుస్తకం వైపు చూడ్డానికి కూడా ధైర్యం కోల్పోయి, వెంటనే గది వదిలి వెళ్ళిపోయాను. భోజనం చేసిన తర్వాత మళ్ళీ వెనక్కొచ్చాను. ఒక పిచ్చి సంకల్పంతో, మంచంమీద గోడకానుకుని కూర్చుని, రెండు పుస్తకాలనూ ఒళ్ళో పెట్టుకున్నాను, మాదెల్లా ఎడమ వైపు, డెల్ అల్బెరో కుడి వైపు. ఊపిరి ఆడడం లేదు. ఒకే సారి రెండిట్లో ఐదో పేజీ తెరిచాను; నిరాశాజనకంగా రెండిట్లోనూ సరిగ్గా ఐదో పేజీలోనే కథ మొదలయ్యింది. ఇప్పుడు తేలిపోతుంది. ఎడమవైపు ‘ఆ మధ్యాహ్నాన ‘ అని కుడివైపు ‘ ఒక మధ్యాహ్నాన ‘ అని చదివాను. ఇంకేం పర్లేదు. ‘ఒక మధ్యాహ్నం’, ‘ఆ మధ్యాహ్నం’ రెండూ ఒకటే కాదు. ఆ మధ్యాహ్నం అంటే, ఆ మధ్యాహ్నానికి ఒక ప్రత్యేకతను ఆపాదించడం. కానీ ఒక మధ్యాహ్నం అంటే… అది మధ్యాహ్నం పూట మాత్రమే – ‘రాత్రో, పొద్దునో కాదు’ అని చెప్పడం. ఈ రెండు పుస్తకాల్లో మా నాన్న ఇచ్చిన పుస్తకం మొదటి వాక్యంలోనే తేడా చూపించడం మొదలుపెట్టింది. ‘ఒక వసంతకాలం ఆఖరి రోజుల్లో’ అంటే ఎన్నో వచ్చి పోయిన వసంతాలలో ఒక వసంతం ముగుస్తూండగా అని – ఇక్కడ గడిచిపోయిన సమయం గురించి రచయిత చెప్తున్నట్టు. వసంతకాలం ముగుస్తూండగా అంటే, నాలుగు ఋతువుల్లో ఒక ఋతువైన వసంత ఋతువులో అని ప్రత్యేకంగా ప్రస్తావిస్తున్నట్టు. ఒకచోట ‘కాలం’ గురించి మాట్లాడుతుంటే ఇంకో చోట ‘ ప్రకృతి ’ గురించి చెప్పినట్టు. ఇది తట్టగానే, నాకెంత ఆనందం కలిగిందంటే, పిచ్చోడిలా రెండు పుస్తకాలనూ , ఒక సారటూ ఒక సారిటూ తలను తిప్పుతూ కాలం – ప్రకృతి , కాలం – ప్రకృతి అని బయటికి పదే పదే అనడం మొదలుపెట్టాను. అవును – ఈ రెండూ, అనువాదకులు సృష్టించిన రెండు వేర్వేరు ప్రపంచాలు. ఇంకా చెప్పాలంటే ఎడమ వైపు ‘వసంతం ఆఖరి రోజులు’ అనడం- ఒక వేదనను సూచిస్తూంటే , కుడివైపు వున్న పుస్తకం ఏదో వివరం ఇచ్చినట్టు ‘వసంతం ఇంక ముగుస్తోంది’ అంటోంది. అసలు ఈ రుతువులు అంతాలు ఈ గోలంతా అవసరమా, నేనేవన్నా నిజంగా పట్టించుకోవాల్సిన విషయాన్ని పట్టించుకోకుండా వ్యవహరిస్తున్నానా! అన్న అనుమానం వచ్చింది. వెంటనే నేను అక్కడితో ఆగి కొంత ఆలోచించాను. దాని వల్ల నాకర్థం అయ్యింది ఏమిటంటే నేనింకా లోతుల్లోకి వెళ్లి యాతన భరించడం తప్పదని. ‘ఆఖరు’ అన్న పదం వాడడాన్ని ఏదో ఇబ్బందినీ బాధను సూచిస్తున్నట్టుగా, చివరి రోజులు అనడంలో, విషయం ముగింపుకు వచ్చినట్టుగా, లేదా పూర్ణత్వం సంతరించే అర్థంలో వాడినట్టుగా అనిపించింది నాకు: మొదటి పుస్తకంలో కథంతా విషాదంతో కలగలసి ఉన్నట్టు, రెండో కథలో సాహసయాత్ర గురించి రాసినట్టు తోచింది. ఇంకా ముందుకు వెళ్తే – అటువైపు పాత్రలన్నీ గంభీరంగా, అంతర్ముఖులుగా ఉన్నట్టు, (నిజానికి మొదటి పుస్తకం చదివినప్పుడు అలాటి భావన కలిగినట్టు నాకు గుర్తు లేదు), ఇటు వైపు పాత్రలన్నీ ఉల్లాస భరితమైన యోధులతో నిండున్నట్టు. నా ఆలోచనలు పాత్రలతో ఆగకుండా, అనువాదకులపైకి గూడా పాకాయి. ఒలివేరో ఒక బక్కపలచటి, దయాళువైన మనిషిలా , అల్బెర్టో మిత్తోని ఒక ఉడుకు రక్తం కలిగిన, ఉద్రేకమైన వ్యక్తిలా (సీసాలోంచి పెద్ద గ్లాసు లోకి వంచుకుని మద్యం తాగుతూ , అనువాదం చేస్తూ, అప్పుడప్పుడూ పాత్రలను తిట్టేస్తూ, బల్ల మీద పిడికిలితో గుద్దుతూ… ) ఉంటారనిపించింది.  

కానీ ఈ దయగల మహా తల్లి ఒలివేరో ‘దుర్గం’ లాంటి పదం కూడా వాడిందే. 

‘ఆ మధ్యాహ్నం, వసంత కాలపు ఆఖరిరోజుల్లో, ఒక అరుదైన సమయాన దుర్గపు బురుజు మీదినుంచి ఘంటారావం మొదలైంది.’  

మిత్తోనే వాడిన ‘కోట’ అన్న పదం కంటే దుర్గం అన్న ఈ పదం కచ్చితంగా యుద్ధవాతావరణాన్ని సూచిస్తోంది. 

‘ఒక మధ్యాహ్నం, వసంతకాలం ఇంక ముగిసిపోతోందనగా, ఆ అసాధారణ సమయాన కోట బురుజు నుంచి ఘంటానాదం విన్పించింది.’

కోట అంటే యుద్ధాలు మాత్రమే కాదు , మల్లయుద్ధ పోటీలు, నృత్యాలు, విందులు జరిగే స్థలం కూడా. దుర్గం అనగానే, దాంట్లో ఆయుధాగారాలుండి, ఎత్తైన బురుజుల చుట్టూ ఫిరంగుల మోహరించినట్టు భావన కలిగితే, కోట అంటే విశాలంగా లోపల అనేక సభాభవనాలు, ఉద్యానవనాలతో ఉంటుంది. (మిలాన్లోని స్ఫోర్జా కోటలో ఉన్నట్టు); ఒకటేమో ఎవరికీ అందని పర్వతపు శిఖరం మీద, రెండోది మైదానంలో. దుర్గం చిక్కని నలుపు రంగులో ఉంటే , కోట ఎర్రమట్టి రంగులో ఉన్నట్టు… అలా విజయవంతమైన విశ్లేషణతో వచ్చిన ఆత్మ విశ్వాసంతో ఇంకా ముందుకెళ్ళి అవే పదాలను పిప్పి పిప్పి చేసే అవకాశమున్నాకూడా, అక్కడితో ఆపి ముందుకెళ్ళాను:

‘ఆ మధ్యాహ్నం, వసంత కాలపు ఆఖరిరోజుల్లో, ఒక అరుదైన సమయాన దుర్గపు బురుజు మీదినుంచి ఘంటారావం మొదలైంది.’  

‘ఒక మధ్యాహ్నం, వసంతకాలం ఇంక ముగిసిపోతోందనగా, ఆ అసాధారణ సమయాన కోట బురుజు నుంచి ఘంటానాదం విన్పించింది.’

1924 లో వచ్చిన పుస్తకం ప్రకారం గంటలు అలానే ఆగకుండా మోగుతూ ఉంటే, 1965 లో వచ్చిన పుస్తకం ప్రకారం గంట ఒక్కసారే మోగింది. ఒకటేమో గణగణమంటూ ఆందోళనతో మోగించినట్టుంటే, రెండోది నిమ్మళంగా, సాధికారంగా. మొదటి వ్యక్తి దుస్థితిలో ఉన్న సన్యాసి అయితే, రెండో వ్యక్తి బలాఢ్యుడైన సైనికుడిలా. దిక్కుతెలియని ఆశ్రమవాసి సహాయం కోసం చేసిన ఆక్రందన ఒకటయితే, రెండోది శిక్ష అమలుచేసే ముందు వేసే దండోరాలా. అసలు ‘ఘంటారావం మొదలైంది’ అంటే గంటలు కొడుతూ పోయారని కాకుండా, గంటల శబ్దం చుట్టూ వున్న ఖాళీ స్థలంలో ప్రతిధ్వనించి ఉండొచ్చు. శబ్దం మీద రచయిత దృష్టి పెట్ట కుండా, ఆ శబ్దం శ్రోత మీద సృష్టించిన అనుభూతి గురించి చెప్పాలని ఆ పదం వాడి ఉండొచ్చు. అయినా నిజం చెప్పాలంటే, ఈ ఘంటానాదం అనే పదప్రయోగం కొంచెం నాటకీయంగానే వుంది. ఏది ఎటున్నా, రెండు అనువాదాల్లోనూ, ఈ వాక్యం కొంత మార్మికతను సూచిస్తూ ఆగిపోయింది. 

‘ఆ మధ్యాహ్నం, వసంత కాలపు ఆఖరిరోజుల్లో, ఒక అరుదైన సమయాన దుర్గపు బురుజు మీదినుంచి ఘంటారావం మొదలైంది.’  

‘ఒక మధ్యాహ్నం, వసంతకాలం ఇంక ముగిసిపోతోందనగా, ఆ అసాధారణ సమయాన కోట బురుజు నుంచి ఘంటానాదం విన్పించింది.’

.

ఈ అరుదైన సమయం / అసాధారణ సమయం పదాలు – ‘మామూలు సమయం కాదు’ అనే అర్థంలో కాకుండా వేరేలా వాడారేమో అని గమనిస్తే, ‘అరుదైన’ అన్న విశేషణం అందంగా, కుదురైన పదంలా అనిపిస్తే, ‘అసాధారణం’ అన్న పదం ఏదో అద్భుతం లోక పదజాలంలా,ఏ ఇరవైఐదో గంటలోకో తీసుకెళ్తున్నట్టు.  

 కానీ ఈ పోల్చిచూడడంలో ఉద్దేశ్యం, పాత అనువాదం కంటే కొత్త అనువాదం బాగుంది అని నిర్థారించుకోవడానికి కాదు, ( మొదటి వాక్యాన్ని తరిచి చూసిన తర్వాత అసలు అలా చెప్పడం నావల్ల సాధ్యం కాదు కూడా) – వాటిల్లో వున్న తేడా, అంతరార్థం తెలుసుకుని రెండో పుస్తకాన్ని మొత్తం కొత్త పుస్తకంలాగా, అసలు అదే మాతృక లాగా భావించి చదువుకోగలగాలి. ఈ రకంగా చదివితే మాత్రమే నాన్న బహుమతికి నేను పూర్తి సార్థకతను చేకూర్చినట్టు; పుస్తకాన్ని నిస్పాక్షికంగా, సంపూర్తిగా చదివి నేను నా కోరిక తీర్చుకోగలను. నేను గమనించిన తేడా అంతా బుర్ర ఉపయోగించి శ్రమించినందుకు నేను పొందిన బహుమతి. అదే విషయం పూర్తిగా నిర్థారించుకోవడానికి ఆ రోజు పొద్దునంతా కేటాయించి, మొదటి పేజీ అంతా విశ్లేషిస్తూ కూలంకషంగా చదివాను: దాని తర్వాత ఏమాత్రం ఆగకుండా, మాదెల్లా పుస్తకాన్ని అలమరాలో వెనక్కి పెట్టేసి, నాన్న తెచ్చిన డెల్ అల్బెరో పుస్తకం చేతిలోకి తీసుకున్నాను. పుస్తకం ముందేసుకుని మొట్టమొదటి సారి చదువుతున్నట్టుగా, మున్ముందు ఎదురవబోయే విశేషణాలు, క్రియావిశేషణాలు, సమాసాలు వీటన్నిటి గురించి ఊహిస్తూ ఆసక్తిగా చదివాను. చదువుతున్నన్ని రోజులూ, దేశ పర్యటనకు వెళ్ళిన యువరాజు ప్రతిరోజూ వార్తాహరుల ద్వారా రాజుగారికి జాబురాసి పంపించిన చందాన, నేను నాన్నకు ప్రతిపూటా ఏదో ఒక ఆత్మీయ సందేశం పంపిస్తున్నట్టుగా అనిపించింది. ఇంకొన్ని పేజీలలో పుస్తకం పూర్తవుతుంది అనగా, నాన్నకు ఏదో ఒక మిషతో ఫోన్ చేసి ‘పుస్తకం ఇంకా ఇంకా నచ్చిందని, మొదటిసారే సరిగ్గా కృతజ్ఞతలు చెప్పి ఉండాల్సిందని, పుస్తకం మొదటి పేరాలో వున్న ఇరవై ఐదో గంట గురించి, ఘంటానాదం గురించి చెబుతూ ఆయన ఈ పుస్తకాన్ని చదివాడా?, నచ్చే నాకు కొన్నాడా? లాంటి సందేహాలన్నీ తీర్చుకోవాలని అనుకున్నాను. 

కానీ అదంతా నాలోనే దాచుకున్నాను.

——-

‘ఒక రోజు మధ్యాహ్నం, వసంతకాలపు అంతిమ ఘడియల్లో, వేళ కాని వేళలో బురుజు మీది గంట శబ్దం వినిపించింది.’ 

Author – Michele Mari ( From the Short story Compilation – ‘You Bleeding Childhood’)

Italian to English Translation by Brian Robert Moore 

* Thank you, Einaudi Press, Michele Mari and Brian Robert Moore. 

* For your Valuable feedback on this Episode - Please click the link below.

https://tinyurl.com/4zbdhrwr

Harshaneeyam on Spotify App...]]>aea9ae2f-bee7-44ec-bdd0-8e0e4e70bd2cSat, 25 May 2024 14:51:00 +053022:07falsefull31491493Life in Translation - Peter Bush (Catalan)The guest for this Episode is Peter Bush. Born in Lincolnshire, UK, He has translated works from Catalan, French, Spanish and Portuguese to English. He spoke about his Translations in Catalan, Prominent authors in Catalan, Translation as an academic Discipline, and his Experience at the British Center for Literary Translation (BCLT).

Bush has been active not only as a translator but also in developing literary translation as an academic discipline by working in the academic world, serving in key literary translation organisations, serving on the editorial boards of literary translation publications, and organising international events and projects.

He was Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) at the University of East Anglia and Professor of Literary Translation at the School of English and American Studies. Bush has held key positions in important literary translation organisations: Literary Translation Committee, International Translators Federation  American Literary Translators Association and Committee for Literary Translation in Higher Education.

Harshaneeyam: Your first book-length translation was in 1986. So tell us about what prompted you to get into translation. 

Peter Bush: I was working in a school in London called Holland Park School, which was a very multilingual school, and I had an advanced class of Spanish, and we'd been reading a book called Campos de Níjar by Juan Goytisolo, and my class comprised students whose grandparents came from Spain or North Africa, and I thought it would interest them because it was written in 1959, and about the poverty their grandparents had been trying to escape from, as well as the Franco dictatorship. They weren't interested! They didn't really respond to the text. So I thought it would be a good idea to do a critical edition with an introduction. And I contacted Juan Goytisolo and he agreed that I could do it. I did it. He liked it. When his autobiography was published in Spain I read it and liked it and thought translating might be a new challenge for me. The suggestion actually came from a fellow teacher, John Lyons, who translates, also from Spanish, but mainly poetry. He's the translator of Ernesto Cardenal.

I started to extend the idea to publishers. Goytisolo told his agent that he wanted me to translate it. And eventually I got a phone call from a publisher, Stephen Pickles at Quartet Books, asking me whether I wanted to translate it. And I said yes. And he asked me to do a 50-page sample because I hadn't published any literary translations. So I did the 50-page sample. And I waited and waited, but didn't get any kind of reply, I thought he must have put it in the rubbish bin. I phoned him one day and said, what about it? He said, oh no, the translation’s fine, we'll be sending you a contract. So that's how it started. Although I signed the contract with Quartet Books, the volume was initially contracted by North Point Press in San Francisco. They did the editing, so my first experience of literary translation was being edited by North American editors. That gave it another interesting twist. This was the initial prompt to get into translation. But if I go back to my childhood, there are various experiences that might have set me up to become a translator. I was born into a rural working-class family, my mother and father spoke non-standard English, which is what I spoke. My first mother tongue, if you like, was non-standard English. And when I went to primary school, I was surprised when my teacher said: ‘You don't speak proper English.’ And then I got a scholarship to go to grammar school, I was the first one in the family to go to grammar school. And the situation was worse there really, because obviously I was surrounded by children who didn't have non-standard English, they spoke, they'd only ever spoken standard English.

Harshaneeyam: How did you get into French and Portuguese translation? 

Peter Bush: One of the things that happened at school is that I had all these issues over English, non-standard and standard, and I had a complex about it… what I got into was Latin, which we started learning in the first year, and I was really good at Latin. And in the school, if you were in the ‘A’ form, that was the top. If you were in the C form, that was the bottom. I was in B and was booted up to A because I was good at Latin and there I enjoyed French. And then I was given the opportunity of doing Spanish or physics and chemistry. I'm not sure why, but I didn't like physics and chemistry, so I thought, I'm good at French and Latin, I'll do Spanish. I had excellent teachers, which meant within the English system that by the age of 16 I was reading French and Spanish literature in the original, say a Balzac novel or Lorca’s poetry. Portuguese was different. When I was at Oxford university in the late 60s, I became involved in a radical socialist group. We had a newspaper, and I worked as a journalist on this daily newspaper. Because I had languages, I ended up being like a foreign correspondent. I read the newspapers and wrote articles on the situation in Spain and Latin America. I also started to read Portuguese and learn Portuguese in order to write articles on the situation in Portugal, where, of course, there was the Salazar dictatorship.

Then after my translation of the autobiography of Goytisolo came out, my publisher, Stephen Pickles, at Quartet Books was very generous. He liked the translation and asked: What else would you like to translate? Why don't you come up with some Latin American authors? We haven't got very much on our list that's Latin American. So I recommended Juan Carlos Onetti, the Uruguayan writer, five, or six novels, and I ended up translating five. So it was really a lucky break in the sense that I got with Quartet Books, that had this wonderful series called Encounters, where they published writers like Thomas Bernhardt.

There was a Spanish author I was interested: Antonio Muñoz Molina. And he had a noir novel Beltenebros. Quartet Books weren't interested in it when I first took it to them. So I took it to Bloomsbury. And Liz Calder, one of the founders of the Bloomsbury Publishing House, asked me to go and have a cup of tea with her at Bloomsbury in Soho Square in London to talk about it. I went and had that cup of tea with her and she clearly wasn't interested in Beltenebros. She had this book by Chico Buarque the Brazilian singer who'd written his first novel. And she said: Why don't you translate this? I thought: I know some Portuguese, but I’m not sure about translating a whole novel, so I said: Let me take it home and read it. Which is what I did, and I enjoyed the novel. And Liz said, translate 40 pages, because there's already an English translation that’s been rejected by Chico Buarque and his publisher in São Paolo, Companhia das Letras, Luis Schwarcz, and also Rubem Fonseca, who had better English than Chico, and was another advisor. Because Chico saw this novel like a baby, it was his first novel, and he was keen to be known as a writer as well as an important singer.

So I did the 40 pages, sent it off, and fortunately Liz and Co liked it. I'd made a few mistakes, but they thought that I'd caught the music of the style and the atmosphere in the novel. So I revisited my Portuguese, which was Peninsular, not Brazilian Portuguese. I got a book and some tapes, and started to build up my knowledge of Brazilian Portuguese. That's how I came to publish a translation of Chico Buarque. Then I did a novel from Portugal. 

 I wrote my first translation when I was 40. But I was a young translator in the sense that I knew nothing about the publishing scene and soon discovered that what you had to be in England and in the United States for that matter was proactive. If you don't take ideas to publishers, if you don't badger, if you don't go to the London Book Fair, if you don't get involved in the whole scene, then you're going to find it very difficult to get contracts. 

Harshaneeyam: The first book that you translated, you said it was edited in North America. What kind of editing was it? 

Peter Bush: There were two volumes of the autobiography and I had a different editor for each volume. The text is a mixture of chronological narrative and stream of consciousness. Goytisolo is a complex writer. There isn’t a lot of colloquialism or dialogue in it. But I do remember there were one or two things to do with sex, and they thought what I had written was too British. I ended up having this discussion over the phone with an editor I didn't know about some quite intimate sexual details. But in the end, we didn't have to come to a mid-Atlantic decision, we found colloquial phrases that worked naturally for both of us.. 

Harshaneeyam: What was your first contact with the Catalan language? 

Peter Bush: I did my first degree in Cambridge in the mid-sixties. My best friend Brian Nield and I listened to music together. And he started reading to me Catalan poets, Jacint Verdaguer and Carlos Riba. So that was my first contact with Catalan literature. At the same time there was a group of Cambridge historians who were very keen on Catalan history and organized a series of lectures on the contemporary history of Catalonia, which I went to. Also, I]]>The guest for this Episode is Peter Bush. Born in Lincolnshire, UK, He has translated works from Catalan, French, Spanish and Portuguese to English. He spoke about his Translations in Catalan, Prominent authors in Catalan, Translation as an academic Discipline, and his Experience at the British Center for Literary Translation (BCLT).

Bush has been active not only as a translator but also in developing literary translation as an academic discipline by working in the academic world, serving in key literary translation organisations, serving on the editorial boards of literary translation publications, and organising international events and projects.

He was Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) at the University of East Anglia and Professor of Literary Translation at the School of English and American Studies. Bush has held key positions in important literary translation organisations: Literary Translation Committee, International Translators Federation  American Literary Translators Association and Committee for Literary Translation in Higher Education.

Harshaneeyam: Your first book-length translation was in 1986. So tell us about what prompted you to get into translation. 

Peter Bush: I was working in a school in London called Holland Park School, which was a very multilingual school, and I had an advanced class of Spanish, and we'd been reading a book called Campos de Níjar by Juan Goytisolo, and my class comprised students whose grandparents came from Spain or North Africa, and I thought it would interest them because it was written in 1959, and about the poverty their grandparents had been trying to escape from, as well as the Franco dictatorship. They weren't interested! They didn't really respond to the text. So I thought it would be a good idea to do a critical edition with an introduction. And I contacted Juan Goytisolo and he agreed that I could do it. I did it. He liked it. When his autobiography was published in Spain I read it and liked it and thought translating might be a new challenge for me. The suggestion actually came from a fellow teacher, John Lyons, who translates, also from Spanish, but mainly poetry. He's the translator of Ernesto Cardenal.

I started to extend the idea to publishers. Goytisolo told his agent that he wanted me to translate it. And eventually I got a phone call from a publisher, Stephen Pickles at Quartet Books, asking me whether I wanted to translate it. And I said yes. And he asked me to do a 50-page sample because I hadn't published any literary translations. So I did the 50-page sample. And I waited and waited, but didn't get any kind of reply, I thought he must have put it in the rubbish bin. I phoned him one day and said, what about it? He said, oh no, the translation’s fine, we'll be sending you a contract. So that's how it started. Although I signed the contract with Quartet Books, the volume was initially contracted by North Point Press in San Francisco. They did the editing, so my first experience of literary translation was being edited by North American editors. That gave it another interesting twist. This was the initial prompt to get into translation. But if I go back to my childhood, there are various experiences that might have set me up to become a translator. I was born into a rural working-class family, my mother and father spoke non-standard English, which is what I spoke. My first mother tongue, if you like, was non-standard English. And when I went to primary school, I was surprised when my teacher said: ‘You don't speak proper English.’ And then I got a scholarship to go to grammar school, I was the first one in the family to go to grammar school. And the situation was worse there really, because obviously I was surrounded by children who didn't have non-standard English, they spoke, they'd only ever spoken standard English.

Harshaneeyam: How did you get into French and Portuguese translation? 

Peter Bush: One of the things that happened at school is that I had all these issues over English, non-standard and standard, and I had a complex about it… what I got into was Latin, which we started learning in the first year, and I was really good at Latin. And in the school, if you were in the ‘A’ form, that was the top. If you were in the C form, that was the bottom. I was in B and was booted up to A because I was good at Latin and there I enjoyed French. And then I was given the opportunity of doing Spanish or physics and chemistry. I'm not sure why, but I didn't like physics and chemistry, so I thought, I'm good at French and Latin, I'll do Spanish. I had excellent teachers, which meant within the English system that by the age of 16 I was reading French and Spanish literature in the original, say a Balzac novel or Lorca’s poetry. Portuguese was different. When I was at Oxford university in the late 60s, I became involved in a radical socialist group. We had a newspaper, and I worked as a journalist on this daily newspaper. Because I had languages, I ended up being like a foreign correspondent. I read the newspapers and wrote articles on the situation in Spain and Latin America. I also started to read Portuguese and learn Portuguese in order to write articles on the situation in Portugal, where, of course, there was the Salazar dictatorship.

Then after my translation of the autobiography of Goytisolo came out, my publisher, Stephen Pickles, at Quartet Books was very generous. He liked the translation and asked: What else would you like to translate? Why don't you come up with some Latin American authors? We haven't got very much on our list that's Latin American. So I recommended Juan Carlos Onetti, the Uruguayan writer, five, or six novels, and I ended up translating five. So it was really a lucky break in the sense that I got with Quartet Books, that had this wonderful series called Encounters, where they published writers like Thomas Bernhardt.

There was a Spanish author I was interested: Antonio Muñoz Molina. And he had a noir novel Beltenebros. Quartet Books weren't interested in it when I first took it to them. So I took it to Bloomsbury. And Liz Calder, one of the founders of the Bloomsbury Publishing House, asked me to go and have a cup of tea with her at Bloomsbury in Soho Square in London to talk about it. I went and had that cup of tea with her and she clearly wasn't interested in Beltenebros. She had this book by Chico Buarque the Brazilian singer who'd written his first novel. And she said: Why don't you translate this? I thought: I know some Portuguese, but I’m not sure about translating a whole novel, so I said: Let me take it home and read it. Which is what I did, and I enjoyed the novel. And Liz said, translate 40 pages, because there's already an English translation that’s been rejected by Chico Buarque and his publisher in São Paolo, Companhia das Letras, Luis Schwarcz, and also Rubem Fonseca, who had better English than Chico, and was another advisor. Because Chico saw this novel like a baby, it was his first novel, and he was keen to be known as a writer as well as an important singer.

So I did the 40 pages, sent it off, and fortunately Liz and Co liked it. I'd made a few mistakes, but they thought that I'd caught the music of the style and the atmosphere in the novel. So I revisited my Portuguese, which was Peninsular, not Brazilian Portuguese. I got a book and some tapes, and started to build up my knowledge of Brazilian Portuguese. That's how I came to publish a translation of Chico Buarque. Then I did a novel from Portugal. 

 I wrote my first translation when I was 40. But I was a young translator in the sense that I knew nothing about the publishing scene and soon discovered that what you had to be in England and in the United States for that matter was proactive. If you don't take ideas to publishers, if you don't badger, if you don't go to the London Book Fair, if you don't get involved in the whole scene, then you're going to find it very difficult to get contracts. 

Harshaneeyam: The first book that you translated, you said it was edited in North America. What kind of editing was it? 

Peter Bush: There were two volumes of the autobiography and I had a different editor for each volume. The text is a mixture of chronological narrative and stream of consciousness. Goytisolo is a complex writer. There isn’t a lot of colloquialism or dialogue in it. But I do remember there were one or two things to do with sex, and they thought what I had written was too British. I ended up having this discussion over the phone with an editor I didn't know about some quite intimate sexual details. But in the end, we didn't have to come to a mid-Atlantic decision, we found colloquial phrases that worked naturally for both of us.. 

Harshaneeyam: What was your first contact with the Catalan language? 

Peter Bush: I did my first degree in Cambridge in the mid-sixties. My best friend Brian Nield and I listened to music together. And he started reading to me Catalan poets, Jacint Verdaguer and Carlos Riba. So that was my first contact with Catalan literature. At the same time there was a group of Cambridge historians who were very keen on Catalan history and organized a series of lectures on the contemporary history of Catalonia, which I went to. Also, I studied Medieval Spanish. And as part of Medieval Spanish, one couldn't avoid Catalonia, because Catalonia in the Middle Ages was an extremely important kingdom. Because Spain didn't exist as such in the Middle Ages, it was a series of small kingdoms. And the Catalonia was in the 11th and 12th centuries, the most important kingdom in the Mediterranean. It even colonized Rhodes. Maritime law for the Mediterranean was written by Catalans in the Middle Ages.

So I had numerous links to Catalan way back in the 1960s. And then at the end of the 70s, I had an opportunity to go to Spain to live for a year. I wanted to go to Barcelona to live for a year and that was when I seriously started to learn Catalan. But unfortunately I didn't get to go to Barcelona. I went to Murcia in the southeast of Spain. However when I was director of the British Centre for Literary Translation at the end of the 90s, I was an active participant in the European network of literary translation national centers and I started to collaborate with Teresa Solana, the director of the Spanish National Centre. We organized joint translation summer schools in Tarazona and Norwich. Then our kind of collaboration at an intellectual, literary level became something else, and we were going to have a child. We had to decide whether we were going to live in Norwich or in Barcelona, we decided to give up our full-time posts as directors of national centers to become freelancers in Barcelona. A bold, if not rash step!

I started living in Barcelona, and I used to go back to the London Book Fair to maintain my contact with the publishing scene in the UK. I would meet up with Simon Smith from Peter Owen, and pitch ideas to him, but without success. Ater I'd been in Barcelona for a couple of years, I got this email from Simon, in which he said they’d just signed the contract for the rights to Quim Monzó’s La Magnitud de la Tragèdia, (The Enormity of the Tragedy) and he asked me if I would like to translate it I discussed with Teresa and I thought, yeah, why not have a go? And my first translation from Catalan was this novel. What I didn't realize at the time was, how important a writer Quim Monzó is. He is one of the leading Catalan prose writers from the 1980s onwards, and he's still writing. Nor did I realize that Catalonia was going to be the country invited to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2007, which meant that throughout the world publishers were taking an interest in Catalan literature, and I think this was part of the reason why Peter Owen got interested as well. So that's how I started translating Catalan literature. 

Harshaneeyam: You have translated Spanish and Catalan. How similar are they, language-wise? What are the major differences that you have to look for? 

Peter Bush: All of the languages that I translate are Romance languages. They all have similarities, but they're all very different and unique in their own right. So Catalan is as different from Spanish as Spanish is from French and French is from Portuguese. So in terms of translation, I don’t think it's the intrinsic qualities of the languages that are the issue. The issue is my relationship with, and my knowledge of, these respective languages, which is at different levels. and comes at different times in my developing career. I've translated relatively little from French, but my knowledge of French goes back to when I started learning it at the age of 11, and I studied French when I was at Cambridge. I've never studied Catalan or Portuguese academically. In a sense, translating from those languages brings many elements beyond the normal research a literary translator has to pursue with every project.

It was a kind of a voyage of discovery and exploration of literary cultures I wasn't at all familiar with. And especially with Catalan. It was a kind of revelation, if I can use that word. Because here I was, I consider myself to be a specialist in Hispanic literature and culture and Latin American culture, but I'd never read. Catalan literature. And I didn't know these extraordinary works that existed in Catalan. Of course, you have to consider the backdrop to all this, which is the history of Catalonia. I mentioned the importance of the Catalan language and culture and politics in the Middle Ages. After Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews in 1492, they started to move against the Spanish Muslims (Muslims came to Spain from the 8th century) and expelled the last Moriscos in 1612. After that the Spanish central government worked to take away from Catalonia and the Basque Country the rights that they'd had from the Middle Ages and before. That led to a situation where the Catalan language was no longer recognized by the state, and in fact it was the desire of the central state to eliminate the language and the culture, but they never succeeded. However, they did succeed in eliminating the existence of meaningful published written culture in Catalan from the 17th century. In the 19th century, by which time Barcelona had become the “Manchester” of Spain, and Catalonia was the center of the Spanish textile industry, there was a parallel growth of the Catalan bourgeoisie and the Catalan working class. As part of that expansion of power, there was a move to resurrect Catalan in a cultural sense. So there's something called the Renaixença and people began to write and publish in Catalan again. 

Harshaneeyam: Now, please tell us about some of the important Catalan authors that you translated and their contribution. 

Peter Bush: I should mention three writers who wrote novels about the Spanish Civil War. I'm not sure what the situation is in India, but in the United Kingdom, and the States, when people think of the Spanish Civil War, their literary reference points are George Orwell and his Homage to Catalonia. George Orwell went to fight in the Spanish Civil War and wrote this book when he came back to the UK. Then there is Ernest Hemingway, who wrote a novel called For Whom the Bell Tolls, partly based on his experience of the civil war, and other works with a Spanish content. So people read Hemingway and Orwell and they see the Spanish Civil War through their perspective. I think it is important that works written in Spanish or Catalan by people who experienced the war in Spanish or Catalan, are translated. Some work has been translated from Spanish, but very little from Catalan. I have translated Uncertain Glory, Forty Lost Years and In Diamond Square.

I translated Uncertain Glory by Joan Sales, one of the finest novels written about the Spanish Civil War, or about war, and Sales was a Catholic and Republican. The Spanish Civil War was started in July, 1936, by a fascist insurrection, a group in the army rose up against the democratically elected Republican government and began the civil war. People tend to think of the war as being Liberalism or Bolshevism against Catholicism, but it's not so simple. Joan Sales was one among numerous Catholics on the side of the Republic and his novel is interesting from that perspective. It is also that because he was an army officer and sent to the front in rural Aragon, where he was put in charge of an anarchist battalion. Here was a Catholic Republican commanding a bunch of anarchist soldiers! The novel is set in the countryside but also in Barcelona. One gets descriptions of the hardships of life for people fighting at the front, and struggling to survive on the home front. Uncertain Glory is a novel that has been published in India so it is readily available there. 

Juan Sales had to go into exile in 1939. He went to the Dominican Republic but ended up in Mexico. He came back in 1948 when the dictatorship was still in power; the Francoist dictatorship lasted until 1975, so it was a long period of dictatorship. And he went back in 1948, and started writing his novel of the civil war. Strangely enough, it was published in 1956 in Catalan, under the dictatorship. The Francoist censors said the book should never be published: ‘It's pornographic, it's anti-church, it's obscene.’ Because he was a Catholic and had connections with the Bishop of Barcelona who gave it the nil obstat; it was okay to publish it. So the bishop trumped the dictator, and Uncertain Glory was published in 1956 in censored form. Much later when the French translation was being done, Joan Sales worked with the French translator, Bernard Lafargue, and what they did was restore what had been cut, but at the same time Sales actually added a lot to the novel. So the French translation was really the first full version to be published of Uncertain Glory. He even added to it after that and when there was a subsequent Catalan edition, he published this full version that had come out in French. And that is the version I translated. But Sales was also important because he set up a publishing house called Club Editor, and published the next book about the civil war that I will talk about, which is In Diamond Square, which is set in Barcelona, and written by Mercè Rodoreda: the civil war from the point of view of a working-class woman, Natàlia, who starts off in life in a pastry shop selling cakes and bread.

Natàlia gets bowled over by this young man, Quimet or Jo, who is a cabinet-maker maker, in the Gracia district of Barcelona and they marry and he nicknames her Colometa or Pidgey and they have two children. But he gets caught up in anarchist politics and goes off to the front and is killed. And she's left there with two children, struggling to survive. And he had bought lots of pigeons. He was a pigeon fancier and had this dream of making loads of money by...]]>92f694cd-ac5c-4a9d-8d23-b93f7db8e75eWed, 15 May 2024 20:19:00 +053055:01falsefull31481483Alex Zucker about Czech Writer Jachym Topol and Translation contracts (Czech)In this episode, Senior translator Alex Zucker spoke about his work, Translation contracts and the Czech Author Jachym Topol.

Alex Zucker has translated novels by the Czech authors Magdaléna Platzová, Jáchym Topol, Bianca Bellová, Petra Hůlová, J. R. Pick, Tomáš Zmeškal, Josef Jedlička, Heda Margolius Kovály, Patrik Ouředník, and Miloslava Holubová. He has also Englished stories, plays, subtitles, young adult and children’s books, song lyrics, reportages, essays, poems, philosophy, art history, and an opera.

Apart from translating, he organises, on a volunteer basis, with the National Writers Union and the New York City chapter of SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice).

Conversation: 

Harshaneeyam: Welcome, Alex, to Harshaneeyam.

Alex Zucker: Hi, Anil. I am so glad to be here. Thank you for having me. 

Harshaneeyam: Before we move on to your literary journey, translations and all, I follow you on Twitter, and I see that you are very vocal about the current situation in Gaza. I also read that you worked for a human rights organisation earlier.

Alex Zucker: Yes, of course. For about five years, I was the communications officer for a genocide prevention organisation called the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation, AIPR. Now, as a communications officer, I was always a little bit disturbed at our name, because actually we had nothing to do with peace and reconciliation. We were working in genocide prevention. But they’ve since changed their name, by the way. But [that was] after I left. This was a small organisation, about five staff people based in New York City, doing education and training for mid-level government officers in genocide prevention. The idea of the organisation was that, all too often in history, there are government leaders whose countries are engaging in atrocities that are not quite maybe yet at genocide, or [actually] genocide, and of course there can be resistance from outside the government, [but] unless the government decides to stop it, it’s not going to stop. So the idea of [AIPR] was if they could get to these mid-level government officials, those people would rise up [through the ranks] and become the leaders of their country, and they would be people committed to preventing genocide. I want to say also that by prevention, what we meant was not military intervention. That’s stopping, maybe, a genocide in progress, but preventing meaning that it never happens in the first place. Also, keeping in mind that genocide, as people have been pointing out in relation to the situation in Gaza, but as in any genocide, it doesn’t necessarily involve killing, right? It can be preventing births within a group, any kind of creation of conditions that make it impossible for a group to survive. The key is that the intention is to destroy the group as such. So it has to be focused on a group of people, not just individuals. Having worked in that organisation for five years, I read a lot about genocide historically. I also was following very closely many genocides that were happening in the world at that time. For instance, in Myanmar, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is happening again now, in Sudan, that was happening the first time back then. I think the reason that I feel compelled to speak up about Gaza is because the genocide is being perpetrated by a state, Israel, that gets a huge amount of support from the government that I pay taxes to. To me, that’s a very straightforward moral and ethical equation. 95 per cent of the aid that the U.S. sends to Israel is military, right? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now the second time, two years ago, and probably committing genocide there as well, but none of my money goes to Russia, so I don’t feel responsible [for that]. I mean, it’s not that I don’t care about what’s happening to Ukrainians, but as a human being, if I’m looking at what I’m responsible for, what my money goes to is a very elementary piece in that. I know that some people don’t like to think that way, and they like to think in a more abstract sense of morals and ethics; everybody has a right to decide how they want to act themselves. But this is what makes sense to me. Besides tweeting, though, I should say that I am engaged also in other ways. I’ve taken part now, several times, in civil disobedience, both in Washington, DC, and here in New York, as well as uplifting, on Twitter, more disruptive direct actions that are either too far away for me to take part in or that I myself don’t feel physically capable of. I’ve also been calling, and will continue to call, as I have for months now, my representatives in Congress, to demand that they support a permanent ceasefire and stop sending military aid to Israel, and will continue to donate both to individual Palestinians, who are trying to get out of Gaza, and to organizations that are supporting the Palestinians in Gaza who either can’t get out, or for various reasons don’t want to. So I’m engaging in what organizers call a diversity of tactics, and I do so not only because of my responsibility as a taxpayer, but also because I’ve found, from my experience over the years, that to be blunt I just can’t live with myself unless I act in accordance with my values. 

Harshaneeyam: I have a follow-up question for that. 

Alex Zucker: Sure. 

Harshaneeyam: See, if there is a writer, he has the freedom and flexibility to express his opinions through his writing. What should a translator do? 

Alex Zucker: Yeah, I find that more difficult. Part of the reason, a big part of the reason that I’m involved in organising is because I don’t feel that my translating work can sufficiently express my values in that way. A writer of course can write whatever they want, right? You sit down, pick up a piece of paper, write, pick up your laptop and type, and it’s from you directly. As a translator, I can choose who not to translate, in the sense that if something is offered to me I can turn it down. And of course I can decide not to pitch or propose any number of authors. But I don’t have total control over who I do translate. And especially as somebody who is trying to make a living as a translator, it’s not a hobby, or a side hustle, or any of those other things. There are jobs that I take simply because I need to keep making money. Now, again, if something was objectionable to me on moral grounds, I can turn it down, and I have turned things down. I don’t take everything that’s offered to me. Sometimes I turn things down because I don’t have time, right? I feel like it would be much more difficult, as a professional literary translator, to translate only things that I felt expressed my politics and beliefs.

Here’s another thing I’ve thought a lot about, and I think that if you’re a translator working for any length of time, you have to reckon with this, which is that there are authors I translate who I’ve been translating now for decades. We’ll talk about some of them, I’m sure. For instance, Jáchym Topol or Petra Hůlová. Guess what? We evolve. My politics are not the same now as they were in the mid-1990s. And neither are theirs. There are things we agreed on then that we don’t agree on now. And there were things we disagreed on then that we do agree on now.

And also the Czech Republic is a country with a very different history from the U.S., and I don’t have any Czech heritage. I don’t translate Czech literature because I’m trying to represent the Czech state or Czech culture. It’s not a nationalistic project for me. If I were to translate only novels that I agreed with 100 percent in every aspect, I would be translating very little. Now I know there are other translators who do translate only things they 100 percent agree with. They may have the good fortune of either not having to work all the time, or maybe it’s just that the authors in that society happen to, there are more of them who are aligned with their politics. I would also say that I’ve noticed that younger Czech writers tend to have politics closer to mine, and there are some that I’ve been trying to pitch, but that’s a reality. Being a translator is not the same as being a writer. 

Harshaneeyam:  You were a student of zoology.

Alex Zucker: As an undergraduate, yes. I have a bachelor’s in zoology. 

Harshaneeyam: So how did you move into full-time translation? 

Alex Zucker: I studied zoology as an undergraduate at UMass Amherst. The reason I did that was that when I was a kid, when I was little, my idol was Jacques Cousteau. I grew up watching The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and reading books with photographs of all these undersea, you know, sea creatures. And I was just really enthralled by it. And I had a mask and snorkel, and we would go to the–I grew up in Michigan, but we used to go to Cape Cod in Massachusetts in the summer, and I would swim around with my mask on. And that kind of fantasy of mine, or yeah, was something that lasted, so that began when I was maybe six, seven, eight. I went to college when I was 18. And so I was studying zoology, but what happened was that I had a professor. So, I was approaching the end of college and trying to decide what to do. I knew that I had to continue if I wanted to be a marine biologist. You can’t do anything with a bachelor’s degree. The problem was getting into a PhD program in whatever it would be. You have to say not only which school you want to apply to but also which department, not only which department but which professor. So you have to choose I want to study under this professor in this department in this school, and I want to look at, I don’t...]]>In this episode, Senior translator Alex Zucker spoke about his work, Translation contracts and the Czech Author Jachym Topol.

Alex Zucker has translated novels by the Czech authors Magdaléna Platzová, Jáchym Topol, Bianca Bellová, Petra Hůlová, J. R. Pick, Tomáš Zmeškal, Josef Jedlička, Heda Margolius Kovály, Patrik Ouředník, and Miloslava Holubová. He has also Englished stories, plays, subtitles, young adult and children’s books, song lyrics, reportages, essays, poems, philosophy, art history, and an opera.

Apart from translating, he organises, on a volunteer basis, with the National Writers Union and the New York City chapter of SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice).

Conversation: 

Harshaneeyam: Welcome, Alex, to Harshaneeyam.

Alex Zucker: Hi, Anil. I am so glad to be here. Thank you for having me. 

Harshaneeyam: Before we move on to your literary journey, translations and all, I follow you on Twitter, and I see that you are very vocal about the current situation in Gaza. I also read that you worked for a human rights organisation earlier.

Alex Zucker: Yes, of course. For about five years, I was the communications officer for a genocide prevention organisation called the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation, AIPR. Now, as a communications officer, I was always a little bit disturbed at our name, because actually we had nothing to do with peace and reconciliation. We were working in genocide prevention. But they’ve since changed their name, by the way. But [that was] after I left. This was a small organisation, about five staff people based in New York City, doing education and training for mid-level government officers in genocide prevention. The idea of the organisation was that, all too often in history, there are government leaders whose countries are engaging in atrocities that are not quite maybe yet at genocide, or [actually] genocide, and of course there can be resistance from outside the government, [but] unless the government decides to stop it, it’s not going to stop. So the idea of [AIPR] was if they could get to these mid-level government officials, those people would rise up [through the ranks] and become the leaders of their country, and they would be people committed to preventing genocide. I want to say also that by prevention, what we meant was not military intervention. That’s stopping, maybe, a genocide in progress, but preventing meaning that it never happens in the first place. Also, keeping in mind that genocide, as people have been pointing out in relation to the situation in Gaza, but as in any genocide, it doesn’t necessarily involve killing, right? It can be preventing births within a group, any kind of creation of conditions that make it impossible for a group to survive. The key is that the intention is to destroy the group as such. So it has to be focused on a group of people, not just individuals. Having worked in that organisation for five years, I read a lot about genocide historically. I also was following very closely many genocides that were happening in the world at that time. For instance, in Myanmar, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is happening again now, in Sudan, that was happening the first time back then. I think the reason that I feel compelled to speak up about Gaza is because the genocide is being perpetrated by a state, Israel, that gets a huge amount of support from the government that I pay taxes to. To me, that’s a very straightforward moral and ethical equation. 95 per cent of the aid that the U.S. sends to Israel is military, right? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now the second time, two years ago, and probably committing genocide there as well, but none of my money goes to Russia, so I don’t feel responsible [for that]. I mean, it’s not that I don’t care about what’s happening to Ukrainians, but as a human being, if I’m looking at what I’m responsible for, what my money goes to is a very elementary piece in that. I know that some people don’t like to think that way, and they like to think in a more abstract sense of morals and ethics; everybody has a right to decide how they want to act themselves. But this is what makes sense to me. Besides tweeting, though, I should say that I am engaged also in other ways. I’ve taken part now, several times, in civil disobedience, both in Washington, DC, and here in New York, as well as uplifting, on Twitter, more disruptive direct actions that are either too far away for me to take part in or that I myself don’t feel physically capable of. I’ve also been calling, and will continue to call, as I have for months now, my representatives in Congress, to demand that they support a permanent ceasefire and stop sending military aid to Israel, and will continue to donate both to individual Palestinians, who are trying to get out of Gaza, and to organizations that are supporting the Palestinians in Gaza who either can’t get out, or for various reasons don’t want to. So I’m engaging in what organizers call a diversity of tactics, and I do so not only because of my responsibility as a taxpayer, but also because I’ve found, from my experience over the years, that to be blunt I just can’t live with myself unless I act in accordance with my values. 

Harshaneeyam: I have a follow-up question for that. 

Alex Zucker: Sure. 

Harshaneeyam: See, if there is a writer, he has the freedom and flexibility to express his opinions through his writing. What should a translator do? 

Alex Zucker: Yeah, I find that more difficult. Part of the reason, a big part of the reason that I’m involved in organising is because I don’t feel that my translating work can sufficiently express my values in that way. A writer of course can write whatever they want, right? You sit down, pick up a piece of paper, write, pick up your laptop and type, and it’s from you directly. As a translator, I can choose who not to translate, in the sense that if something is offered to me I can turn it down. And of course I can decide not to pitch or propose any number of authors. But I don’t have total control over who I do translate. And especially as somebody who is trying to make a living as a translator, it’s not a hobby, or a side hustle, or any of those other things. There are jobs that I take simply because I need to keep making money. Now, again, if something was objectionable to me on moral grounds, I can turn it down, and I have turned things down. I don’t take everything that’s offered to me. Sometimes I turn things down because I don’t have time, right? I feel like it would be much more difficult, as a professional literary translator, to translate only things that I felt expressed my politics and beliefs.

Here’s another thing I’ve thought a lot about, and I think that if you’re a translator working for any length of time, you have to reckon with this, which is that there are authors I translate who I’ve been translating now for decades. We’ll talk about some of them, I’m sure. For instance, Jáchym Topol or Petra Hůlová. Guess what? We evolve. My politics are not the same now as they were in the mid-1990s. And neither are theirs. There are things we agreed on then that we don’t agree on now. And there were things we disagreed on then that we do agree on now.

And also the Czech Republic is a country with a very different history from the U.S., and I don’t have any Czech heritage. I don’t translate Czech literature because I’m trying to represent the Czech state or Czech culture. It’s not a nationalistic project for me. If I were to translate only novels that I agreed with 100 percent in every aspect, I would be translating very little. Now I know there are other translators who do translate only things they 100 percent agree with. They may have the good fortune of either not having to work all the time, or maybe it’s just that the authors in that society happen to, there are more of them who are aligned with their politics. I would also say that I’ve noticed that younger Czech writers tend to have politics closer to mine, and there are some that I’ve been trying to pitch, but that’s a reality. Being a translator is not the same as being a writer. 

Harshaneeyam:  You were a student of zoology.

Alex Zucker: As an undergraduate, yes. I have a bachelor’s in zoology. 

Harshaneeyam: So how did you move into full-time translation? 

Alex Zucker: I studied zoology as an undergraduate at UMass Amherst. The reason I did that was that when I was a kid, when I was little, my idol was Jacques Cousteau. I grew up watching The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and reading books with photographs of all these undersea, you know, sea creatures. And I was just really enthralled by it. And I had a mask and snorkel, and we would go to the–I grew up in Michigan, but we used to go to Cape Cod in Massachusetts in the summer, and I would swim around with my mask on. And that kind of fantasy of mine, or yeah, was something that lasted, so that began when I was maybe six, seven, eight. I went to college when I was 18. And so I was studying zoology, but what happened was that I had a professor. So, I was approaching the end of college and trying to decide what to do. I knew that I had to continue if I wanted to be a marine biologist. You can’t do anything with a bachelor’s degree. The problem was getting into a PhD program in whatever it would be. You have to say not only which school you want to apply to but also which department, not only which department but which professor. So you have to choose I want to study under this professor in this department in this school, and I want to look at, I don’t know, the evolution of the anterior dorsal fin in this species and I want to do this for the next six years. At the age of 20 or 21, I wasn’t prepared to narrow down that much, basically. I didn’t feel I knew enough to do that. I had a professor who was a good advisor. He told me if you can imagine life without a PhD, then you don’t need one. I don’t know if you can call it advice, but that was his statement. So I thought about it, and I thought, Yeah, I can easily imagine life without a PhD. I hadn’t had one before, so I knew I didn’t want to go on and apply for a PhD, but then what do I do? So that was sort of a derailment for me. So I graduated from college … The other thing was that I had been studying French. My mother was born in France, so I’m a one-and-a-half-generation USian. My father was born in New York City. His father was from what is now Poland, and his mother was from what is now Austria. My mom’s parents were both from France, and she was also born in France. She spoke French with her parents, so I grew up hearing French. She did not speak it with me and my sisters because I found out when I was older that she thought it would alienate my father, although she never actually asked him. So I lost the chance to be bilingual, which is a shame, but I started studying it in high school and took some in college, even though that wasn’t my major. And I decided when I figured out I didn’t want to go into, get a PhD, that I would go to France for a while and try to get my French to a point where I was fully fluent and then see. I’m 20, 21 years old, I don’t know what I’m doing here. So I took this intensive course in French in Paris and was fluent in French. Probably in a way that I could never be in Czech, because I was younger then and French is easier than Czech for an English speaker. Then I came back to the States. That was the summer after I graduated college.

I came back to the States. I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, because my older sister was there. One of my close friends from college was there. I started looking for jobs where you could use French, and all the jobs that I found were at banks, and I didn’t want to work at a bank, so there I was, lost again. What am I going to do? And but what happened was that just after and before that stay in Paris, where I studied French, I had travelled around Europe with an old girlfriend of mine from college, and we went to Czechoslovakia for the first time. That was in ’87. And the reason we went to Czechoslovakia was when I was in college, she read a book by Milan Kundera, and she was a political science major. She had read this book in one of her courses, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and we were both readers. She loaned it to me, and I read it and liked it. And I would say that, pretty much based on that novel, we decided to go visit Czechoslovakia in 1987, when it was still communist. So I was there for a week with her in the spring of 87. It was April. It was like Easter. And then I went back, so after this. I went to an intensive French course in Paris and signed up to do an international youth work camp. So there was this organisation called the Council on International Educational Exchange, which among other things, issued Eurail passes to students, but they also had these programs, like this international youth work camp, which was designed to promote mutual understanding across the Iron Curtain, something like that. And they had these camps in the East Bloc, where you could go and people from the west met people from the east. And I wanted to go to Poland, because my father’s father had been born in what is now Poland, but I applied late, and so I didn’t get my first choice; I got my fifth choice in Czechoslovakia. So I ended up going to Czechoslovakia. That was when I started reading more about Czechoslovakia. And I cannot tell you today, I just don’t remember how, but I got interested in human rights, because human rights back then was not that big a thing.

Human Rights Watch didn’t exist yet. There was Helsinki Watch, which just focused on the Soviet Union. There was Amnesty International. I don’t remember any other groups existing at the time. Somehow, Anil, I got it into my head that I wanted to work in human rights. I wish I could tell you how I decided that. Have you ever looked back at any of the decisions you made in your early 20s and say, How did I make that decision? I have no idea. And I started looking for how I could do that, and again, this is before the internet, remember, so doing research was different, you know. You would go to the library and ask some person at a desk: “I want to try to get a job in human rights. What would I do to do that? Where would I find information on what to do to prepare? And they would say, there were books on career guidance or whatever. So I found a book that said that people who go into human rights usually have a master’s degree or a law degree. So I was like, well, I don’t want a law degree, so I guess I’ll see if I can get a master’s degree, and I started looking into the master’s programs. So there was this thing called International Affairs. The only school in the United States at that time–so now we’re in 1987–that had a master’s program in international affairs and somebody at the university who taught Czech, was Columbia University. And they had this Institute on East Central Europe, and they had a person teaching Czech named Peter Kussi, K U S S I, who was actually Milan Kundera’s translator. Before Michael Henry Heim. So I applied there and I think I got in mainly on the strength of actually having been to Czechoslovakia. I mean I had good grades but they were in zoology. I actually had taken a short Czech course when I was living in Cambridge; Harvard had like a, what do you call it, like a night school. You didn’t have to apply; you just paid the money, and I took an introductory course in Czech already in, I guess that would have been spring 88 with Karen von Kunes, who still teaches, I think. She was actually on a Zoom call that I was on the other day, but we were both in the audience, so I couldn’t say hello. Anyway, so I was accepted, and what happened was I went to this school in fall of ’88 to do a two-year degree in international affairs, and Kussi was my Czech teacher, and he was a translator, and he would bring in, he was working on the Kundera novel Nesmrtelnost, Immortality, at that time.

So he brought in pieces of it, he had the printout of Milan Kundera’s, you know, primitive, back then, word processing, whatever, computer, this was the early days of computer. And we would talk about like a page or two at a time. And we would translate songs and poetry. He was a translator, so that was one of his main teaching tools. So even though I was planning to go into human rights, that was how I got into translating. So like I said, I knew French, but it had never occurred to me to translate French. I had never met a translator before. You have to know that translation exists to want to do it, you know? I always say I caught the translation bug from Kussi; I discovered it was something I enjoyed doing, I was pretty good at doing it, and what happened was, in the second year of my program, fall of ’89, there was this, you know, uprising in Eastern Europe, the so-called Velvet Revolution, and the main organisation I had been hoping to work for in human rights was, again, Helsinki Watch. And I went on an informational interview there in spring of 1990, and the person there, whose name was Ken Roth, who went on to become the CEO of Human Rights Watch, but back then he was just a regular lawyer at Helsinki Watch. He actually told me that they were shutting down their program in the East bloc because they didn’t think there would be a human rights problem anymore. Years later, I read an interview with him where he talked about the mistake they made and how they reopened their programs eight or nine months later, because of course human rights were still a problem, but that’s how closed communist society was, that human rights groups from outside didn’t know, or didn’t understand, for instance, the situation of Romani people in Czech society, because it was kept so under wraps by the communist regime that it was impossible for those people to know about it. So that’s just one example. Anyway, but for me it meant I couldn’t go into this area that I thought I was going to go into. Meanwhile, I know this is a long story, but meanwhile, between the two years of grad school, so summer of ’89, I went back to Czechoslovakia, right? So I had been there for a week and then a month in ’87, and then I went back in summer of ’89, so that’s my third time there now under communism. I was there for two months; I did two month-long language programs. But somebody I met through my time in Czechoslovakia in the summer of ’89 told me in spring of 1990 that the Czechoslovak News Agency, Československá tisková kancelář, technically Czechoslovak Press Agency, had a wire service in English that was translated from Czech–they translated the Czech, and Slovak, wire service into English–and they were looking for people to work in their English-language section. So I applied for that job in the summer of 1990, and I got it. They offered me, you know, whatever salary and a subsidised apartment to stay in. And I took that job and I moved there in fall of 1990. And that was my translation school. So I spent two years full-time, five days a week, translating Czech and Slovak wire service into English, but when I say translating, really we did a lot of rewriting and revising, because the way that Czech and Slovak journalists wrote news was for a domestic audience, and we needed to add things, we needed to rearrange things to make it a more appealing product for non-Czech subscribers to the news service.

Harshaneeyam: Your first book-length...]]>8aea8425-b0ae-4ac6-bba2-1b32ff18e8edSat, 11 May 2024 00:00:00 +053054:39falsefull31471473Tiffany Tsao on her Writing and Translations (Indonesian)The Guest for Today's Episode is Tiffany Tsao.

Tiffany Tsao is a writer and literary translator. She is the author of the novel The Majesties  and the Oddfits fantasy trilogy (so far, The Oddfits and The More Known World.)

She has translated five books from Indonesian into English. For her translation of Budi Darma’s People from Bloomington, she was awarded the 2023 PEN Translation Prize and the 2023 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize. Her translation of Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s 'Happy Stories, Mostly' was awarded the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses and longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.

Born in the United States and of Chinese-Indonesian descent, her family returned to Southeast Asia when she was 3. She spent her formative years in Singapore and Indonesia before moving to the US to study at a university. She has a B.A. in English literature from Wellesley College and a Ph.D. in English literature from UC Berkeley. She lives in Sydney, Australia.

You can buy her work using the links in the Show Notes.

You can follow Harshaneeyam Podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcast apps.

To buy 'Happy Stories Mostly' -

https://harshaneeyam.captivate.fm/happy

To buy 'People from Bloomington' -

https://harshaneeyam.captivate.fm/blooming

To Buy 'The Majesties' -

https://harshaneeyam.captivate.fm/majesties

* For your Valuable feedback on this Episode - Please click the link given below.

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*Contact us - harshaneeyam@gmail.com

***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

SALT—‘South Asian Languages in Translation’ is an initiative by the University of Chicago to bring South Asian literature in English Translation to the Anglophone world. Translators Daniel Hahn, Jason Grunebaum, Arunava Sinha, Daisy Rockwell, and Author VV Ganeshanandan are part of the team leading SALT.

SALT Travel Grant

About the SALT Project

Harshaneeyam: Welcome to Harshaneeyam Aananth.

Aananth Daksnamurthy: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. 

H: How did you develop an interest in literature? 

A: I was born and raised in a small town, Trichy, in Tamil Nadu. From childhood, I started reading pretty early. With all the supplements, usually, the newspaper supplements that come, these are Siruvar Malar, Siruvar Mani, the kid supplementary books I started reading, and mostly newspapers. That's how my literary journey started. I was not a very avid reader initially. I only engaged with news and media in general, but I followed the traditional route of higher education and went on to do engineering. I'm a mechanical engineer with a bachelor's degree and went on to do a postgrad diploma in liberal arts at Ashoka University as a young India fellow. This was partly due to some elective courses I took during my final semester, and I needed to explore more humanities. It gave me a lot of exposure, and two courses stood out.

I took one critical writing course, and I began to write. I became a very effective communicator both in writing and in oral communication. Then, I took another course, Culture and Communication, which was a sociology course. This course gave me a lens on caste, religion, sexuality, and gender. These two courses moulded me into a very different person from who I was initially. Then, I went on to work with ‘The Print’. YIF also gave me a thirst for reading, and I've just started reading a lot of nonfiction. That was a phase when I was reading a lot of nonfiction coming out of Ashoka, more public policy, economics, or history-related nonfiction. I used to go to Delhi Tamil Sangam's library and pick some of these Tamil books there. I initially started with Prabhanjan's short stories, a collection of short stories by the Tamil writer Prabhanjan. I've explored many authors, many genres within Tamil, and contemporary Tamil writing.

And yeah, I've read Jeyamohan. He's a great writer. I love his work. Nooru Naarkaaligal is one of my favourite works from Aram. I've heard so much of S Ra. S Ramakrishnan is another Tamil writer and Sahitya Akademi Award winner. In those days, his videos were podcasts. So, the YouTube videos were an hour or two long. He introduced, at least to this generation, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pushkin. So, a huge introduction to Russian literature came through S. Ramakrishnan. And that's when I remember I started reading much more fiction. Again, short stories were my favourite format. It's also easy to finish short stories and move on to another story, But translated fiction was very recent. I've started reading much more translated literature in the last two or three years. So, I started with some literature from neighbouring states, especially Kerala. I read some of the Malayalam works in Tamil first, and then I started reading in English. I started reading Mukundan's, N S Madhavan's, and M T. Vasudevan Nair's works. I started reading a lot of Korean literature in translation. I've read most of Anton Hur's work. I started with Love in the Big City, Sang Yang Park's Love in the Big City, and Bora Chung's Cursed Bunny. Then there is this beautiful chapbook series called Iyagi from Stranger Press, where they published eight Korean authors from eight Korean translators.

And one of my favourite formats is chapbooks and Korean short stories. Then I've been reading some East Asian literature, Yu Miri's Tokyo Ueno Station. I'm reading Confession, Martin Cohen's Confession, Danny, and Daniel Hans. So yeah, this has been my reading journey so far. I'm trying to be as wide as possible. I don't; I've not narrowed my reading down to a particular genre. I've also read part of my current program. I've read children's, young adult, middle-grade, romance, and thrillers. As a publisher or aspiring publisher, I want to experience all kinds of formats and genres.

So that's where I'm at in terms of reading. 

H: Your father is a very reputed translator of English and Tamil. Congratulations. Last week, he won the Kendra Sahitya Academy Award for Translation. 

A: Yeah. Thank you. 

H: Please convey my best wishes to him. 

A: Of course. 

H: As a mechanical engineer, I am jumping to liberal arts. It's a big leap. Your father is a literary person and a translator. Has it helped you since switching from engineering to Liberal Arts? Did he approve it? 

A: So, the early influence came from him. We used to go to literary events and local literary events together, even when I was a child. I've also seen him writing and translating, but I was always intrigued by translation or literature. I was in my world doing things as a kid, but I started reading trying to figure out what's happening in the publishing house, how a book is published, and what goes around in getting a book to the market.

Then, there were some gaps in the industry. So, it still needs to be more organised regarding the local Tamil publishing industry; Tamil has no full-time writers. I was wondering why. That was my first question: Why are no full-time writers in Tamil? When there are so many full-time writers in the West, or the English language, especially, it's financially not viable here because the authors here don't get and are not financially remunerated properly with advances and royalties.

In most cases, the current young generation of authors have a day job as an IT engineer or medical professional. That struck me quite a bit. So, I wanted to change and bring some intervention into the local industry. That is one, but even contemporary works from other languages reached Tamil very quickly, but it only happened the other way around. No Tamil works went to other languages, as much as there were inward translations. European and Latin American works frequently come into Tamil, and Russian literature has always been there. But Tamil only went to some of these places. Tamil literature never went outside. 

Tamil, even within India, never went to, let's say, East India or Northeast. That's where I figured, okay, as a publisher, only I can make such an intervention, and that's how I took this leap into the publishing industry. So, to answer your question, yes. Initially, my father. He Disapproved of it when I shifted to liberal arts. As a usual Indian parent, they said, you studied engineering. You had to become an engineer. I applied to all these fellowships, such as Teach for India and India Fellowship. That's how the journey started. 

I think confidence came in. I think after or during my YIF journey, they got to know, okay, he'll figure it out. He's probably taking another route, but I think he's proud of me now. Now that I'm here, I got this Fulbright and moved here for grad school at NYU. I am now pursuing this full-time job as a publisher. So I think he's proud. 

H: I believe you were writing too when you were at print. 

A: My day job was as a business analyst, so print was a news venture that began in 2017. So, I was part of the founding team. As you might know, Shekhar Gupta is one of the country's senior journalists. He is the founder of the print. When he began, he picked a bunch of us from Ashoka. I was helping him as a business analyst, working out of his office to build the print. So my work was finance operations and editorial product development, a lot of things together. Still, I also started writing on my interest, seeing that no one covered Tamil Nadu then. That's where I started with one opinion or a column. Then, I began writing news reports against short columns and features, et cetera. Notably, I started profiling some of the Tamil authors while I was working there.

I started doing that, at least for the Tamil literary space. Nobody outside Tamil Nadu knew these names again. So, I wanted to get these names outside Tamil Nadu. So I wrote about them. That's pretty much it when working with ‘Print’ writing, but I also continued writing. I was with them until the end of 2019 when I came to work with the Higher Education Institute in Chennai. I then worked with the government of Tamil Nadu in their industries department, heading their media team. I was still contributing parallelly. I was still writing for the print here and there. It's something I love doing, writing and seeing my byline. Yeah, that's been my writing journey. 

H:]]>Today’s guest is Aananth Daksnamurthy. He is speaking about his passion for reading and publishing and his upcoming trip to India and Srilaka to look for literature for publication as a part of the SALT initiative.  Aananth Daksnamurthy is a Fulbright scholar graduating with a master's in publishing from New York University. His first book, Acquisition, a Swedish novel titled The Details, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024. Ananth is also part of the SALT contingent, visiting India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh this year and scouting literature for publication in the USA and UK.

SALT—‘South Asian Languages in Translation’ is an initiative by the University of Chicago to bring South Asian literature in English Translation to the Anglophone world. Translators Daniel Hahn, Jason Grunebaum, Arunava Sinha, Daisy Rockwell, and Author VV Ganeshanandan are part of the team leading SALT.

SALT Travel Grant

About the SALT Project

Harshaneeyam: Welcome to Harshaneeyam Aananth.

Aananth Daksnamurthy: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. 

H: How did you develop an interest in literature? 

A: I was born and raised in a small town, Trichy, in Tamil Nadu. From childhood, I started reading pretty early. With all the supplements, usually, the newspaper supplements that come, these are Siruvar Malar, Siruvar Mani, the kid supplementary books I started reading, and mostly newspapers. That's how my literary journey started. I was not a very avid reader initially. I only engaged with news and media in general, but I followed the traditional route of higher education and went on to do engineering. I'm a mechanical engineer with a bachelor's degree and went on to do a postgrad diploma in liberal arts at Ashoka University as a young India fellow. This was partly due to some elective courses I took during my final semester, and I needed to explore more humanities. It gave me a lot of exposure, and two courses stood out.

I took one critical writing course, and I began to write. I became a very effective communicator both in writing and in oral communication. Then, I took another course, Culture and Communication, which was a sociology course. This course gave me a lens on caste, religion, sexuality, and gender. These two courses moulded me into a very different person from who I was initially. Then, I went on to work with ‘The Print’. YIF also gave me a thirst for reading, and I've just started reading a lot of nonfiction. That was a phase when I was reading a lot of nonfiction coming out of Ashoka, more public policy, economics, or history-related nonfiction. I used to go to Delhi Tamil Sangam's library and pick some of these Tamil books there. I initially started with Prabhanjan's short stories, a collection of short stories by the Tamil writer Prabhanjan. I've explored many authors, many genres within Tamil, and contemporary Tamil writing.

And yeah, I've read Jeyamohan. He's a great writer. I love his work. Nooru Naarkaaligal is one of my favourite works from Aram. I've heard so much of S Ra. S Ramakrishnan is another Tamil writer and Sahitya Akademi Award winner. In those days, his videos were podcasts. So, the YouTube videos were an hour or two long. He introduced, at least to this generation, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pushkin. So, a huge introduction to Russian literature came through S. Ramakrishnan. And that's when I remember I started reading much more fiction. Again, short stories were my favourite format. It's also easy to finish short stories and move on to another story, But translated fiction was very recent. I've started reading much more translated literature in the last two or three years. So, I started with some literature from neighbouring states, especially Kerala. I read some of the Malayalam works in Tamil first, and then I started reading in English. I started reading Mukundan's, N S Madhavan's, and M T. Vasudevan Nair's works. I started reading a lot of Korean literature in translation. I've read most of Anton Hur's work. I started with Love in the Big City, Sang Yang Park's Love in the Big City, and Bora Chung's Cursed Bunny. Then there is this beautiful chapbook series called Iyagi from Stranger Press, where they published eight Korean authors from eight Korean translators.

And one of my favourite formats is chapbooks and Korean short stories. Then I've been reading some East Asian literature, Yu Miri's Tokyo Ueno Station. I'm reading Confession, Martin Cohen's Confession, Danny, and Daniel Hans. So yeah, this has been my reading journey so far. I'm trying to be as wide as possible. I don't; I've not narrowed my reading down to a particular genre. I've also read part of my current program. I've read children's, young adult, middle-grade, romance, and thrillers. As a publisher or aspiring publisher, I want to experience all kinds of formats and genres.

So that's where I'm at in terms of reading. 

H: Your father is a very reputed translator of English and Tamil. Congratulations. Last week, he won the Kendra Sahitya Academy Award for Translation. 

A: Yeah. Thank you. 

H: Please convey my best wishes to him. 

A: Of course. 

H: As a mechanical engineer, I am jumping to liberal arts. It's a big leap. Your father is a literary person and a translator. Has it helped you since switching from engineering to Liberal Arts? Did he approve it? 

A: So, the early influence came from him. We used to go to literary events and local literary events together, even when I was a child. I've also seen him writing and translating, but I was always intrigued by translation or literature. I was in my world doing things as a kid, but I started reading trying to figure out what's happening in the publishing house, how a book is published, and what goes around in getting a book to the market.

Then, there were some gaps in the industry. So, it still needs to be more organised regarding the local Tamil publishing industry; Tamil has no full-time writers. I was wondering why. That was my first question: Why are no full-time writers in Tamil? When there are so many full-time writers in the West, or the English language, especially, it's financially not viable here because the authors here don't get and are not financially remunerated properly with advances and royalties.

In most cases, the current young generation of authors have a day job as an IT engineer or medical professional. That struck me quite a bit. So, I wanted to change and bring some intervention into the local industry. That is one, but even contemporary works from other languages reached Tamil very quickly, but it only happened the other way around. No Tamil works went to other languages, as much as there were inward translations. European and Latin American works frequently come into Tamil, and Russian literature has always been there. But Tamil only went to some of these places. Tamil literature never went outside. 

Tamil, even within India, never went to, let's say, East India or Northeast. That's where I figured, okay, as a publisher, only I can make such an intervention, and that's how I took this leap into the publishing industry. So, to answer your question, yes. Initially, my father. He Disapproved of it when I shifted to liberal arts. As a usual Indian parent, they said, you studied engineering. You had to become an engineer. I applied to all these fellowships, such as Teach for India and India Fellowship. That's how the journey started. 

I think confidence came in. I think after or during my YIF journey, they got to know, okay, he'll figure it out. He's probably taking another route, but I think he's proud of me now. Now that I'm here, I got this Fulbright and moved here for grad school at NYU. I am now pursuing this full-time job as a publisher. So I think he's proud. 

H: I believe you were writing too when you were at print. 

A: My day job was as a business analyst, so print was a news venture that began in 2017. So, I was part of the founding team. As you might know, Shekhar Gupta is one of the country's senior journalists. He is the founder of the print. When he began, he picked a bunch of us from Ashoka. I was helping him as a business analyst, working out of his office to build the print. So my work was finance operations and editorial product development, a lot of things together. Still, I also started writing on my interest, seeing that no one covered Tamil Nadu then. That's where I started with one opinion or a column. Then, I began writing news reports against short columns and features, et cetera. Notably, I started profiling some of the Tamil authors while I was working there.

I started doing that, at least for the Tamil literary space. Nobody outside Tamil Nadu knew these names again. So, I wanted to get these names outside Tamil Nadu. So I wrote about them. That's pretty much it when working with ‘Print’ writing, but I also continued writing. I was with them until the end of 2019 when I came to work with the Higher Education Institute in Chennai. I then worked with the government of Tamil Nadu in their industries department, heading their media team. I was still contributing parallelly. I was still writing for the print here and there. It's something I love doing, writing and seeing my byline. Yeah, that's been my writing journey. 

H: Currently, you're pursuing your master's at NYU, right? in publishing. Okay. What exactly is that in publishing? It is an alien term for me, a master's in publishing.

A: Okay. This is very interesting. So, I just found out a graduate course existed in publishing. While I was looking at some of the courses I wanted to pursue, a friend of mine, my batchmate, had taken this course. This course had two specialisations: magazine publishing and book publishing. She had done magazine publishing, and that's how I learned it. Okay, there is this course that exists. This was a time again, a Fulbright scholarship. So this is an exchange scholarship between India and the US.

S. So Fulbright Masters, Fulbright Nehru Masters Fellowship, is what it's called. They introduced a category called journalism and mass communication in 2021 while I was applying, so I thought, okay, this is the right time.  Let's give it a chance and apply under this category for the publishing program, and that's how it happened. I got through this program. The program is a holistic view of publishing a book in different formats. So we study the basics of book publishing, how to acquire a book, how to edit a book, how to market, and how to sell.

So we do have courses on marketing, publicity, and even finance. How do you do a PNL, a profit and loss statement for a book, etc.? It gives you or moulds you to enter any publishing vertical as a professional. We also study genres like children's publishing, academic publishing, romance, thriller, and some formats like podcasting and audiobooks. One exceptionally good thing about this course is meeting some big publishers within the classroom. So, most of my instructors are professionals, especially from the big four. So you get to meet them in the classroom. And that's how even the first book I acquired came from my classroom. That was one of my class assignments in the first term, and I went on to acquire ‘the details’. 

H: Congratulations. ‘The Details’, the first book you picked up, was long-listed for The Booker International. Please tell us about your engagement with Ulysses Press.  

A: So Ulysses is a small independent press in Brooklyn, and they publish a lot of pop culture, self-help, and non-fiction works. They do also have Some children's and YA imprints as well. Keith Rieger is the CEO of Ulysses. So, he's also an adjunct professor at NYU. He teaches a course in the publishing program. His family has an endowment with NYU. So, they have an internal scholarship, and I received it last spring. At that point, they offered an internship with Ulysses. So, somewhere last year, I interned with Ulysses, and when Keith asked, what do you want to do after this program? I said I wanted to start a publishing venture and bring South Asian literature into translation to the West or the global marketplace. He said, okay, let's get you started. Let's set it up. He asked me, what is the first book you want to acquire? And that's how I said, okay, the details. So The Details was one of the first books I read or worked on when I came here. One of my initial coursework assignments was an intro to book publishing, and my instructor was Tara. Parsons from Hapaviaya. So, she had just acquired that book for her publication. And we were working on that as part of our coursework. I loved that book. She also had other works to work on as part of the program coursework, but only a few of us selected this particular book because it was the only translated work. There were other works that were originally English, and this was the only translated work there. So, I picked this book and worked on it as part of my project. At that point, I decided to become a publisher when I acquired a book, and this would be my first book. And it so happened that I acquired this wonderful book when it all came along. And it's being translated. My father is translating now. It's a relay translation. We don't have a translator who can translate from Swedish to Tamil directly. So it's a relay translation. So I expect this to be published this fall in a couple of months; August or around August, September is the publication date.

H: But you said the Ulysses, they're basically into nonfiction?

A: Ulysses is currently acting as an accelerator for this imprint. So it's not fully integrated into, it's not outside imprint. Ulysses is an accelerator. But at some point, it might become a standalone publishing venture or an imprint. So that's what I'm aiming to do. So, at this point, it's currently under Ulysses. I'm taking some resources and working out, but it's been amazing. He's been mentoring me, and yeah, we also acquired another book recently. It's also a Swedish book, When the Cranes Fly South, by Lisa Risden. 

H: I hope your imprint becomes the Charco for South Asia, like what they're doing for Latin America. 

A: Yes, I'm amazed by some of these independent or small presses. Tilted Access is one, and Fitzcarraldo is another. They have been here for ten years. So, in ten years, they have done much more than the big four have done. I'm trying to take inspiration from many of these small presses that have come in recent years to win all major awards in the last ten years—five, six years of their operation. It's amazing. 

H: You are part of the contingent that is visiting India and Sri Lanka, South Asia, through the SALT initiative. 

A: Yes. 

H: What is it about? 

A: SALT is a recent initiative under UChicago. The acronym SALT stands for South Asian Literature in Translation. This body was founded by Jason, Danny, and Daniel Hahn. Danny, a more renowned translator, was my BCLT British Center for Literary Translation summer school instructor. I met Danny in New York just before BCLT. He had also come here to receive his Ottaway award. So, while we were talking, he mentioned SALT and its vision and what programs it has for publishers and translators,. They instituted a Publishers grant. And they have incredible people on the board, from Arunava, Daisy, and Jayshree Kalathil. This travel grant allows publishers from the West to do a self-directed study in India, Sri Lanka, or any South Asian country.

It's a travel grant where you come to scout for books or meet publishers and authors, do your groundwork, do ground research to know the market, and come back to commission sample translations and take them to English. So this is the process. I applied because I'm trying to work again, work this venture out as a part of Ulysses press, and take some of the world literature to Tamil.

My main motive is to translate Tamil or South Asian literature into English. And I'll be visiting. I was supposed to do this December, but things got delayed. So, I'll be visiting this May after my graduation. I intend to meet publishers, authors, translators, and the community in Tamil Nadu and the neighboring state of Kerala: Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and even Karnataka. So, I'll first concentrate on southern India and Sri Lanka and contact authors to find out what contemporary works interest me. I'm looking for contemporary works and young writers at the forefront of the literary scene.

H: So you will make the connections meeting publishers, writers, and all that, or has it been formalised? 

A:  All the selected folks make their own plans, and then they'll make their own trips. You make your own plans, schedules, and meetings. I am even thinking that if I get a chance, I will have a pitch session with translators or publishers to see if I can acquire any initial work. I wanted to come to the Chennai Book Fair, but things got delayed, and I think it was probably very hectic at that point. Harshaneeyam: You are also into translations. 

A: I'm translating from Tamil to English. I'm starting with a few short stories.

I did. I translated a Tamil author, Vijay Ravan, into one of his stories. This was long-listed for his Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2020. So, I translated it, but it never got published. It's a very long story, so, like most publications, it has a word limit of less than 5000.

H: Okay, Aananth. I wish you all the very best in your translations and publishing career. I hope to see you in India soon. 

A: Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. I've followed your podcast for some time now, and it's a pleasure being here.

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Romesh Gunesekera was born in Colombo and lives in London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is currently judging the 2024 International Booker Prize.

(00:00) Introduction to Ramesh Bhunasekara and His Literary Journey

(01:16) The Beginnings of a Reader Turned Writer

(07:38) The Evolution of a Writer: From Reader to International Author

(09:53) Diving Deep into 'Reef': A Booker Prize Journey

(16:12) The Art and Impact of Translation in Literature

(18:54) Inside the International Booker Prize 2024: A Judge's Perspective

(28:09) Reflecting on the Magic of Writing and Reading

33:58 Ramesh Bhunasekara's Current Literary EndeavorsHe is internationally acclaimed for fiction that explores the key themes of our times — political, ecological, and economic — through novels and stories of wide appeal. His fiction over the years includes Reef, shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1994, The Match. and Noontide Toll. His most recent novel, Suncatcher, returns to an earlier era in Sri Lanka and is a story of divided loyalties and endangered friendships in the turbulent 1960s.He has chaired the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Gratiaen Prize in Sri Lanka. .He has taught creative writing and run workshops around the world. He is also the co-author of the Writers’ & Artists’ Companion to Novel Writing.

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Stuart Allen Lives in Chesterfield near the Peak District in UK. He works for the NHS to support patients with learning disabilities in the community to avoid going into hospital. He started his blog 'Winston'sdad' 14 years ago.

Initially, the challenge was to read 52 books from 52 countries; having done that, the focus has predominantly been on books in translation. He has reviewed over 1300 books from 110-plus countries.

He has shadowed the old independent Foreign Fiction Prize and now the Booker International. Where they read and make their own shortlist and choose winner out of longlisted books.

He has also started the hashtag #translationthurs on twitter to promote books in translation.

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ఈ లింక్ లో కథను చదువుకోవచ్చు.

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• There is a mention of suicide in the story. User's Discretion is advised.

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In this episode, Marina Sofia talks about the novel in detail, having read both the German and the English versions.

Marina Sofia is a reputed translator and co-founder of Corylus Books, a publishing house that translates crime fiction. She is an avid reader and blogger.

Born in East Berlin, Jenny Erpenbeck the author of the novel, is the daughter of the physicist, philosopher and writer John Erpenbeck and the Arabic translator Doris Kilias. She won many awards and her work is translated into more than Thirty languages. Michael Hoffman is a German-born poet, Translator and critic. The 'Guardian has described him as "arguably the world's most influential translator of German into English."

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Fiammetta spoke about her childhood in Nairobi, her love for books, her multilingualism, and the significance of the International Booker Prize to the world of literary fiction.

Fiammetta Rocco was an editor for 25 years at The Economist, specialising in books and arts.

Her journalism has won awards on both sides of the Atlantic. Fiammetta has been the judge of numerous prizes for fiction and non-fiction and is also the administrator of the International Booker Prize. Of Franco-Italian origin, she grew up in Kenya and read Arabic at Oxford University. Her book, “The Miraculous Fever Tree”, about malaria and the discovery of quinine, was published in Britain and in America. She and her family live in London and Scotland.

https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/judges/fiammetta-rocco

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Sarah Timmer Harvey is a translator and writer currently based in Woodstock, New York. She holds an MFA from Columbia University in New York and a BA from Southern Cross University. Sarah’s translation of Jente Posthuma’s novel 'What I’d Rather Not Think About' was published by Scribe in 2023. Reconstruction, their translation of stories written by the Dutch-Surinamese writer Karin Amatmoekrim was published by Strangers Press in 2020 as part of their Verzet! series, and their translation of Thistle by Nadia de Vries will be published by The New Menard Press in 2024. Sarah’s translations of Dutch-language poetry and prose have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, Gulf Coast Journal, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere.

Born in Australia, Sarah lived and worked in the Netherlands for 14 years before moving to New York City in 2013.

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'The Details' was originally published in Swedish. Ia Genberg is the author.

Kira Josefsson is a writer, editor, and translator between Swedish and English. Her work has been Long-listed for the International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Bernard Shaw Prize. She lives in Queens, New York, and writes on US events and politics in the Swedish press.

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Boris Dralyuk is a poet, translator, and critic. He holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA and has taught at UCLA and the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He currently teaches in the English Department at the University of Tulsa.

He is the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry Books, 2022), co-editor with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015), and translator of Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Maxim Osipov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authors.

In 2020 he received the inaugural Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing from the Washington Monthly. In 2022, he received the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle for translating Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees. In 2024, he received a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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So far, John Hodgson has translated seven novels by Ismail Kadare.

John Hodgson’s origins are in Tyneside. He studied English at the Universities of Cambridge and Newcastle. In 1980, the British Council sent him to teach English at the University of Kosovo in Prishtina, where he learned Albanian, mainly from his students. After the fall of communism in Albania in 1991, he went to Tirana and lived there for five years. Following the Balkan wars, he worked as a translator and interpreter for the United Nations Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague, interpreting at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. He translated three books by Fatos Lubonja, most recently Like a Prisoner, a collection of short stories describing life in Enver Hoxha’s labour camps. He has written in Albanian a memoir of Kosovo in the 1980s, Eardhmja në të kaluarën (The Future in the Past), published in Prishtina in 2022.

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Johnny Lorenz, son of Brazilian immigrants to the United States, is a translator of Brazilian Literature, poet and literary critic. He holds a doctorate in English from the University of Texas at Austin and is a professor at Montclair State University. His translation of Clarice Lispector's A Breath of Life (New Directions) was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award, and his translation of Lispector's The Besieged City (New Directions) was listed as one of the Best Books of 2019 by Vanity Fair. His Crooked Plow (Verso) translation by Itamar Vieira Junior received support from the National Endowment for the Arts. His forthcoming translation of The Front (Sundial House) by Edimilson de Almeida Pereira received a Sundial Literary Translation Award. He has received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a Fulbright to support his work. His scholarly articles on writers such as Machado de Assis, Rubem Fonseca and Clarice Lispector have appeared in Luso-Brazilian Review, Latin American Literary Review and Modern Fiction Studies.  

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Noel Hernández González is  originally from Tenerife and have lived in the UK for the last 19 years. He has a degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain), a postgraduate diploma in journalism from the London School of Journalism and an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia.

He has co-translated, with Daniel Hahn, two novels by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón: The Night (Seven Stories Press 2022) and Simpatía (Seven Stories Press 2024). Both Novels are published by Seven Stories Press, an independent Publishing house based in the United States.

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Annie McDermott is the translator of a dozen books from Spanish and Portuguese, by such writers as Mario Levrero, Ariana Harwicz, Brenda Lozano, Fernanda Trías and Lídia Jorge. She was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán for her translation of Wars of the Interior by Joseph Zárate, her translation of Brickmakers by Selva Almada was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and her translation of Not a River, also by Selva Almada, is currently on the longlist for the International Booker Prize

She spoke about the novel 'Not a River', bringing the rural Argentine soundscape into English and about the writer Selva Almada. 'Not a River' is published by Indie Publishing house Charco Press which focusses exclusively on brining iLatin American Literature into English. Charco Press operates from the UK.

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Originally from Chicago, Leah Janeczko has lived in Milan since 1991. For over 25 years she’s been an Italian-to-English translator of fiction for all ages. Her recent translations include Glowrushes by Roberto Piumini, who has been nominated three times for the Hans Christian Andersen Award; Her other notable translations are -The Women at Hitler’s Table by Rosella Postorino, winner of the 2018 Campiello Prize; and Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo, which was longlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize. 

In this episode she spoke about the book 'Lost on Me' and its author Veronica Raimo.

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Sora Kim-Russell has translated works by Pyun Hye-young, Kim Un-su, Hwang Sok-yong, and Bae Suah, among others. Her translation of Pyun Hye-young’s The Hole won the 2017 Shirley Jackson Award for best novel. Her translation of At Dusk by Hwang Sok-yong was longlisted for the 2018 Booker International Prize.

Youngjae Josephine Bae won the 2019 LTI Korea Award for Aspiring Translators and the 2021 Korea Times Literature Translation Award. She is the translator of two non-fiction titles: Imaginary Athens (Routledge) and A Global History of Ginseng (Routledge). 

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Oonagh Stransky’s translations from the Italian include works by Montale, Dell’Oro, Pontiggia, Lucarelli, Spaziani, Saviano, and Pope Francis. Shorter translations have appeared in a number of literary reviews including The New England Review, Exchanges, the Massachusetts Review, the Southern Humanities Review, and The Literary Review. Her publications have received the Silver Dagger Award and, on two occasions, UK PEN Translates grants. Born in Paris, Oonagh grew up in Beirut, Jeddah, London, and Boston; she studied Comparative Literature at Mills College, UC Berkeley and the Università di Firenze; and she obtained a Master’s degree in Italian from Columbia University. She currently lives in Italy.Link to buy 'The House on Via Gemito' - https://bit.ly/4cpxXDE

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Webster has translated many short stories and essays for publication in anthologies and online media and, in September 2018, took part in the Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme organised by the National Centre for Writing, where she was mentored by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. 

In 2022, she published her first book-length translation, The Map by Barbara Sadurska, for which she was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize 2023. 

You can buy 'White Nights' using the link given in the show notes.

https://bit.ly/websterhonek

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He spoke about Experience of being a book seller and translator, Author Manuel Rivas, Translations from Galician Language and about Indie Publisher Archipelago books.

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Sawad Hussain is a translator from Arabic whose work in 2023 was shortlisted for The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation and longlisted for The Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing.

She is a judge for the Palestine Book Awards and the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation. She has run translation workshops under the auspices of Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes, the Yiddish Book Center, the British Library, and the National Centre for Writing. Her most recent translations include Edo’s Souls by Stella Gaitano and Djinn’s Apple by Djamila Morani. Her works-in-progress include Woman of the Rivers by Ishraga Mustafa and Behind the Sun by Bushra Al-Maqtari. 

More about her on - https://sawadhussain.com

To buy her translated work - https://amzn.to/3Tobe3u

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(01:33) Rose Schwartz's Early Love for French

(03:29) Living in France: Experiences and Learnings

(04:37)  Entry into Translation

(06:48) Challenges and Triumphs of First Book Translation

(12:48) The Art of Translation: Balancing Meaning and Music

(15:54) Engaging with Authors: Building Trust and Understanding

(18:05) The Role of Editing in Translation

(23:03) Reading for Pleasure vs. Translation

(23:58) Evaluating Translation: A Complex Process

(25:48) The Art of Mentoring in Translation

(27:54) Pitching Translations to Publishers

(32:03) The Impact of the Writers in Translation Program

(35:06) Exploring Personal Themes in Translation

(36:19) The Meaning of Translation

(37:00) Current Projects and Future Endeavors

(38:02) The Power of Co-Translation

(42:18) About the book -Translation as Transhumance

(47:28) Closing Remarks

The guest for this Episode is Ros Schwartz.

Ros Schwartz is an award-winning translator from French. Acclaimed for her new version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, published in 2010, she has over 100 fiction and non-fiction titles to her name. She is one of the team that has retranslated George Simenon’s Maigret novels for Penguin Classics. Her recent translations include Swiss-Cameroonian author Max Lobe’s A Long Way from Douala and Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside, a new translation of Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots and, in a very different vein, a manga version of Camus’ The Outsider.

Appointed a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009, in 2017, she was awarded the UK Institute of Translation and Interpreting ' s John Sykes Memorial Prize for Excellence.

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Kotryna Garanasvili is a writer, translator and interpreter working with English, Lithuanian, French, German, Russian, and Georgian. She is currently pursuing a PhD and teaching at the University of East Anglia and serves as a member of the BCLT Research Group. Her research, focusing dialect translation, is funded by CHASE Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is the winner of the Emerging Translator Mentorship at the National Centre for Writing and has been awarded traineeships at the EU Council and the European Parliament. Her most recent translation, Little Apples of Eden, is coming out with Norwich-based Kurumuru Books in 2024.

More about her here: https://kotrynagaranasvili.wordpress.com 

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(00:12) Introduction and Background of Dr. David Bellows

(01:06) Journey into Translation

(02:29) Advantages of Being an Academician

(03:31) Writing Biographies: Jacques Vistati and Georges Perec

(06:02)The Art of Translation: Challenges and Insights

(21:53) The Role of Copyright in Modern Culture

(23:27) Broadening the Canon: Exploring Lesser Known Languages

(26:11) Reflections on a Lifetime of Translation

(27:32) Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Link for the Transcription :

https://harshaneeyam.in/2024/02/16/bellos/

David won the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005 for his translation of works by Albanian author Ismail Kadare.

He was educated at Oxford and teaches French and Comparative Literature at Princeton, where he also directs the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication. He has written biographies of Georges Perec and Jacques Tati that have been translated into many languages and an introduction to translation studies, Is That A Fish in Your Ear? He has translated numerous authors from French (Perec, Vargas, Kadare, Simenon, Antelme, Fournel) and offers a new understanding of the extraordinary life and work of Romain Gary in Romain Gary A Tall Story. His latest book is a study of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece, Les Misérables.

His latest Publication is about the History of Copyright.

Use the following link to buy the book - "Is that a fish in your ear'

https://bit.ly/3I23TQw

Photo Credits:

https://ptic.princeton.edu/news-announcements/david-bellos-fish-your-ear-book-about-translation

https://complit.princeton.edu/people/david-bellos

https://www.historiamag.com/historia-interviews-david-bellos/

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లక్ష్మణ శాస్త్రి గారు  అనువదించిన ఫ్రెంచ్ రచయిత ‘మొపాసా’ కథలు కూడా  ‘వెన్నెల స్నానం’  పేరుతో పుస్తక రూపంలో త్వరలో  అందుబాటులోకి రానున్నాయి. 

ఆయన ఈ సంభాషణలో భాగంగా తన అనువాదాల  గురించీ,సుప్రసిద్ధ హిందుస్తానీ గాయని  గౌహర్ జహాన్ గురించీ మాట్లాడారు. 

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మైక్రో కథలు పుస్తకం కోసం సంప్రదించండి:

గూండ్ల వెంకటనారాయణ - 7032553063

వెల: 150 + 30 (పోస్టల్ ఛార్జీలు)

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Izidora Angel is a Bulgarian-born writer and literary translator in Chicago. She is the author of three book-length translations. Her work on Yordanka Beleva’s collection, Keder, received a 2023 NEA translation fellowship; her work on She Who Remains by Rene Karabash was awarded the 2023 Gulf Coast Translation Prize.

Izidora's essays, interviews, and translations have been featured in Astra Magazine, Words Without Borders, Electric Literature, Firmament, Two Lines Journal, Chicago Reader, and elsewhere, and her translation of the short story Family Portrait of the Black Earth by Yordanka Beleva is forthcoming in Deep Vellum’s inaugural anthology, Best Literature in Translation 2024. Izidora's writing has been supported by English PEN, Art Omi, Bread Loaf, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, which awarded her a writing fellowship in 2023 for her in-progress memoir.

Third Coast Translator's Collective website -

https://tctranslatorscollective.org/

Rona Jaffe Foundation:

https://www.ronajaffefoundation.org/

Elizabeth Kostova Foundation:

https://ekf-writing-center.org/

Art Omi:

https://artomi.org/

Bread Loaf:

https://www.middlebury.edu/writers-conferences/writers-conference/apply/financial-aid

English Pen:

https://www.englishpen.org/* For your Valuable feedback on this Episode - Please click the link below.

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పుస్తకం హైదరాబాద్ బుక్ ఫెయిర్ లో అజు స్టాల్లో లేదా అమెజాన్ లో ఫిబ్రవరి పదవ తారీఖు నించీ లభిస్తుంది. 

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ఈ ఎపిసోడ్ లో తెలుగు కలెక్టివ్ లో తన అనుభవాల  గురించి,  చేపట్టబోయే కార్యక్రమాల గురించి ఆదిత్య మనతో మాట్లాడారు. 

షో నోట్స్ లో తెలుగు కలెక్టివ్ ఇంస్టాగ్రామ్, ఫేస్బుక్ అకౌంట్ వివరాలు వున్నాయి. 

ఇంస్టాగ్రామ్ : https://www.instagram.com/telugu_collective?igsh=MTlheHFqcmJ6bmtrMQ==

ఫేస్ బుక్ : https://www.facebook.com/adityaannavajjhala?mibextid=ZbWKwL

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ఈ కథ కేరళలోని అయ్యంకాళి అనే గొప్ప దళితనాయకుడి విమోచనం గురించి చెప్తుంది. 1863లో వెంగనూరు గ్రామంలో జన్మించిన ఆయన నిరక్షరాస్యుడు. నారాయణగురు ద్వారా ప్రభావితుడై అంటరానితనానికి, కులం పేరుతో జరిగే దౌర్జన్యాలకూ వ్యతిరేకంగా పోరాడాడు. 1905లో స్వామి సదానంద అంటరానితనం రూపుమాపడానికి చేస్తున్న ప్రచారంతో ప్రభావితుడై, పులైయ్యర్ల మహాసభను స్థాపించాడు. సమరతంత్ర మల్లవిద్యా ప్రావీణుడు, వర్మకళ వైద్యుడూ అయిన అయ్యంకాళి శిష్యగణాన్ని కూడగట్టి అయ్యంకాళి సేనను తయారు చేసి, హింసను తన పోరాట మార్గంగా ఎంచుకున్నాడు. జనవరి, 1937వ సంవత్సరంలో అయ్యంకాళి గాంధీజీని స్వయంగా కలిశాడు. అయ్యంకాళికి గౌరవసూచకంగా వెంగనూరులో గాంధీ ఒక పెద్ద సభను నిర్వహించారు. కానీ మొదటి సమావేశం వాళ్ళిద్దరి మధ్య అంతకు పదిహేను ఏళ్ళ ముందరే జరిగినట్టు చెప్తారు. ఆ సమావేశంలో ఏం జరిగి ఉండవచ్చో అని ఊహించి, రాసిన కథ ఇది. అయ్యంకాళి జూన్ పద్దెనిమిది, 1941లో మరణించారు. ఈ కథ 1999వ సంవత్సరంలో జయమోహన్ రాసిన ‘పిన్ తొడరుమ్ ని‌‌ళలిన్ కురళ్’ – వెంటాడే నీడ యొక్క గొంతు – అనే నవలలోని ఒక భాగం.)

కథ చదవడానికి -

https://bit.ly/488enbr

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In 1987 Kishore established The Seagull Foundation for the Arts and set up The Seagull School of Publishing in 2012.

Kishore is a photographer who has extensively documented female impersonators from Manipuri, Bengali and Punjabi theatre practices. Kishore exhibited his work at Chatterjee & Lal in Bombay in the exhibition Greenroom of the Goddess.

Kishore is the recipient of the Goethe Medal, and was awarded the 2021 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature.

Kishore has had his poems published with Scroll.in, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, RIC Journal, Poetry at Sangam, Sylph Editions, amongst others.

Transcription:

Harshaneeyam: Welcome to our podcast. So nice of you to agree and come over to our podcast. Thank you very much.

Naveen Kishore: Thank you for having me.

H: You were interested in theatre initially during your school days and college days. How did it lead to publishing?

N: The theatre actually happened at school, everybody does theatre in school, so that was okay, but then I think it was in college that I really tasted blood, as it were, as far as theatre is concerned. But I remember there was a theatre group called the Red Curtain, which was essentially made up of young people from different colleges who had left school, started a theatre group as the school leavers. They started to do amateur theatre, but with great quality, aesthetic, style, production values. When I joined them, I was a backstage person. My first theatre experience was a play called Wait Until Dark, where I used to sit behind a refrigerator with a small cassette recorder. And every time the blind leading lady opened the fridge, I would have to put on the duct to create the sound of the machine and synchronize it with her shutting it. And at one point in this thriller, which was also a good film, this blind woman is trying to smash all the bulbs because she is going to be attacked by these two people. And I have to synchronize the swinging of her sort of stick to the bulbs and simulate a crash in a waste-paper basket with old bulbs and metal brass. This was my first beginning.

H: Sounds too complicated.

N: It was good fun. You were assisting backstage and then, immediately, you were plunged into the deep end. The next play was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard. The Red Curtain was a very democratic set up, so they said: You design the sets and light. I knew nothing about it, but the British Council Library was very useful, so I used to go and study lighting-design books. But at that point, I was playing by the rules, where I was lighting your face as an actor at 45 degrees. But I was frustrated because I couldn’t achieve darkness, so that was a disaster.

I made a mess of it, I think. But for the next play I designed, Ibsen’s Ghosts, I think I threw the rule book out of the window and I started to light the air around the actors. In real life, you’re not lit well. You could go in and out of shadows.

So I became a lighting design person and what often happens in India is that sometimes life turns your hobbies into a livelihood. My father lost a job very early in life. I had to start to be the support and I turned to lighting design and discovered people were willing to pay me, but there was never enough money in theatre. So I started to become what you and I now call event managers. I presented everybody from Yamini Krishnamurthy to Birju Maharaj to Begum Akhtar, jazz festivals, theatre, dance. All of this fed into the theatre, and over a 10–12 year period, there came a moment when we felt the need to document things.

The word document came into my sort of lexicon, as it were, and I turned to a very dear, much older, wiser, scholarly being, Samik Banerjee, who was then an editor at Oxford University Press. And he used to edit and publish for them, people like Girish Karnad and Badal Sircar and the early plays. They had a series called New Drama in India. I was airing my frustration about how the ephemeral nature of a certain kind of theatre activity would disappear because there was no way of freezing it, and I didn’t have the words, so Samik said: Publishing.

If a publisher is devoted to the theatre, the arts, the media, the visual, the cinema, and not worried about feeding 400 mouths like Oxford is, where you cannot survive off the slow-selling niche publishing, you have to do other things. I liked the idea, I said to him, ‘I don’t have a clear sense of scale and I don’t have the money, but we have a name, we already exist as Seagull, so Seagull Books, one more bird publisher.’ And that’s literally how it started.

H: I thought the name refers to Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

N: No, unfortunately, no, because the name Seagull actually came, as you may have read or heard, from a rock concert I had done in 1972 which was called Seagull Empire. And we used to present everything as Seagull. Anyway, so we decided to start this literally overnight, and I learned on the job. I was lucky that I fell into the hands of this wonderful editor mentor and founding editor of Seagull, Samik Banerjee. But we both fell into the hands of an even more interesting printer, a man called P. K. Ghosh—Prabhat Kumar Ghosh—of a legendary letterpress house called East End Printers. He was a very interesting printer because he would not say yes to a book unless he’d read the manuscript. So if you and I as colleagues went to him with a book, he would say, ‘Leave it with me, let me read it.’ He would then discourage you and say, but ‘I’m so expensive, why do you want to come to me?’ Once he accepted your book, he would have discussions with you after you had copyedited it, and discuss books. He was actually an editorial mind. And I learnt from him, literally I had no experience. But what I had was a kind of theatrical aesthetic, if you like. When you look back, you can find words for it. And instinctively, in a publishing culture in India, which was very suspect in the eyes of the rest of the world, where people always felt we had shoddy binding, terrible lamination, cheap, it’s like we couldn’t do it. But that was not the case, really, because I found there was good paper available, there were good binders available, there was good everything available. It was intent. 

But good literature needs to be well produced. You need the touch and feel of something material. So I instinctively gave this printer, P. K. Ghosh, the best of paper, the best grammage for cover colours. There were blocks made in those days. And he immediately understood what I was instinctively doing. In an environment with the same paper merchants and block makers that, say, Oxford use, I was able to produce better looking books because the intention was there and I’d had no sense of scale. We had started this company with borrowed money from a bank and we learned very quickly. I’ll jump a little here. In independent or any publishing, you do not publish one book and then say, I’m going to sell this, then the money that comes in will produce the second book.

No. The world, and particularly the world of publishing, distribution, book selling, demands that you make your presence felt by consistently bringing out books. It can be two books a year, can be six, can be sixty, that’s not the issue. The issue is that your distributor, as well as the chain that goes all the way to the bookseller and the book buyer, simply wants to be assured that you’re going to keep producing, it’s not a fly by night thing.

Where you do it from, how you do it, is a different issue, you build up a list, or what we used to call a backlist, which is the spine of any good publisher. Because, the nature of the publishing was very serious, after all, what were we doing? We were translating from different languages, Telugu or Tamil or Marathi or Bengali or Hindi, into English.

Not because we thought everybody would run around performing all these plays in English, but English was the link language, where you, sitting in Hyderabad, could translate something from Manipur, because you read it in English. I thought I’ll go to the original and translate. Retrospectively, it took 30 years of this before these books started to become texts. These are all texts now. At that moment it was just the excitement. Nobody had done it before and you did it. There was a very exciting cinema movement at that time. Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal, so you were documenting this. There was a 10-year period of very rich cinema that you would know. We started to do the screenplays. So that’s how the early Seagull started. There are other aspects of it, but they will come a time later: it took us a long time to build a backlist. In the back list, what happens is that you sell small numbers across that and then your...]]>Guest for this Episode is Naveen Kishore, Founder and MD of Seagull Books. Born in Calcutta Naveen Kishore received graduation in English Literature in 1973, and began working as a theatre lighting designer. He established Seagull Books in 1982, a publishing program focusing on drama, film, art and culture studies. Today, it also publishes literature including poetry, fiction non-fiction and English translations from 25 languages.At present, the company has registered divisions in London  New York and calcutta.

In 1987 Kishore established The Seagull Foundation for the Arts and set up The Seagull School of Publishing in 2012.

Kishore is a photographer who has extensively documented female impersonators from Manipuri, Bengali and Punjabi theatre practices. Kishore exhibited his work at Chatterjee & Lal in Bombay in the exhibition Greenroom of the Goddess.

Kishore is the recipient of the Goethe Medal, and was awarded the 2021 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature.

Kishore has had his poems published with Scroll.in, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, RIC Journal, Poetry at Sangam, Sylph Editions, amongst others.

Transcription:

Harshaneeyam: Welcome to our podcast. So nice of you to agree and come over to our podcast. Thank you very much.

Naveen Kishore: Thank you for having me.

H: You were interested in theatre initially during your school days and college days. How did it lead to publishing?

N: The theatre actually happened at school, everybody does theatre in school, so that was okay, but then I think it was in college that I really tasted blood, as it were, as far as theatre is concerned. But I remember there was a theatre group called the Red Curtain, which was essentially made up of young people from different colleges who had left school, started a theatre group as the school leavers. They started to do amateur theatre, but with great quality, aesthetic, style, production values. When I joined them, I was a backstage person. My first theatre experience was a play called Wait Until Dark, where I used to sit behind a refrigerator with a small cassette recorder. And every time the blind leading lady opened the fridge, I would have to put on the duct to create the sound of the machine and synchronize it with her shutting it. And at one point in this thriller, which was also a good film, this blind woman is trying to smash all the bulbs because she is going to be attacked by these two people. And I have to synchronize the swinging of her sort of stick to the bulbs and simulate a crash in a waste-paper basket with old bulbs and metal brass. This was my first beginning.

H: Sounds too complicated.

N: It was good fun. You were assisting backstage and then, immediately, you were plunged into the deep end. The next play was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard. The Red Curtain was a very democratic set up, so they said: You design the sets and light. I knew nothing about it, but the British Council Library was very useful, so I used to go and study lighting-design books. But at that point, I was playing by the rules, where I was lighting your face as an actor at 45 degrees. But I was frustrated because I couldn’t achieve darkness, so that was a disaster.

I made a mess of it, I think. But for the next play I designed, Ibsen’s Ghosts, I think I threw the rule book out of the window and I started to light the air around the actors. In real life, you’re not lit well. You could go in and out of shadows.

So I became a lighting design person and what often happens in India is that sometimes life turns your hobbies into a livelihood. My father lost a job very early in life. I had to start to be the support and I turned to lighting design and discovered people were willing to pay me, but there was never enough money in theatre. So I started to become what you and I now call event managers. I presented everybody from Yamini Krishnamurthy to Birju Maharaj to Begum Akhtar, jazz festivals, theatre, dance. All of this fed into the theatre, and over a 10–12 year period, there came a moment when we felt the need to document things.

The word document came into my sort of lexicon, as it were, and I turned to a very dear, much older, wiser, scholarly being, Samik Banerjee, who was then an editor at Oxford University Press. And he used to edit and publish for them, people like Girish Karnad and Badal Sircar and the early plays. They had a series called New Drama in India. I was airing my frustration about how the ephemeral nature of a certain kind of theatre activity would disappear because there was no way of freezing it, and I didn’t have the words, so Samik said: Publishing.

If a publisher is devoted to the theatre, the arts, the media, the visual, the cinema, and not worried about feeding 400 mouths like Oxford is, where you cannot survive off the slow-selling niche publishing, you have to do other things. I liked the idea, I said to him, ‘I don’t have a clear sense of scale and I don’t have the money, but we have a name, we already exist as Seagull, so Seagull Books, one more bird publisher.’ And that’s literally how it started.

H: I thought the name refers to Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

N: No, unfortunately, no, because the name Seagull actually came, as you may have read or heard, from a rock concert I had done in 1972 which was called Seagull Empire. And we used to present everything as Seagull. Anyway, so we decided to start this literally overnight, and I learned on the job. I was lucky that I fell into the hands of this wonderful editor mentor and founding editor of Seagull, Samik Banerjee. But we both fell into the hands of an even more interesting printer, a man called P. K. Ghosh—Prabhat Kumar Ghosh—of a legendary letterpress house called East End Printers. He was a very interesting printer because he would not say yes to a book unless he’d read the manuscript. So if you and I as colleagues went to him with a book, he would say, ‘Leave it with me, let me read it.’ He would then discourage you and say, but ‘I’m so expensive, why do you want to come to me?’ Once he accepted your book, he would have discussions with you after you had copyedited it, and discuss books. He was actually an editorial mind. And I learnt from him, literally I had no experience. But what I had was a kind of theatrical aesthetic, if you like. When you look back, you can find words for it. And instinctively, in a publishing culture in India, which was very suspect in the eyes of the rest of the world, where people always felt we had shoddy binding, terrible lamination, cheap, it’s like we couldn’t do it. But that was not the case, really, because I found there was good paper available, there were good binders available, there was good everything available. It was intent. 

But good literature needs to be well produced. You need the touch and feel of something material. So I instinctively gave this printer, P. K. Ghosh, the best of paper, the best grammage for cover colours. There were blocks made in those days. And he immediately understood what I was instinctively doing. In an environment with the same paper merchants and block makers that, say, Oxford use, I was able to produce better looking books because the intention was there and I’d had no sense of scale. We had started this company with borrowed money from a bank and we learned very quickly. I’ll jump a little here. In independent or any publishing, you do not publish one book and then say, I’m going to sell this, then the money that comes in will produce the second book.

No. The world, and particularly the world of publishing, distribution, book selling, demands that you make your presence felt by consistently bringing out books. It can be two books a year, can be six, can be sixty, that’s not the issue. The issue is that your distributor, as well as the chain that goes all the way to the bookseller and the book buyer, simply wants to be assured that you’re going to keep producing, it’s not a fly by night thing.

Where you do it from, how you do it, is a different issue, you build up a list, or what we used to call a backlist, which is the spine of any good publisher. Because, the nature of the publishing was very serious, after all, what were we doing? We were translating from different languages, Telugu or Tamil or Marathi or Bengali or Hindi, into English.

Not because we thought everybody would run around performing all these plays in English, but English was the link language, where you, sitting in Hyderabad, could translate something from Manipur, because you read it in English. I thought I’ll go to the original and translate. Retrospectively, it took 30 years of this before these books started to become texts. These are all texts now. At that moment it was just the excitement. Nobody had done it before and you did it. There was a very exciting cinema movement at that time. Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal, so you were documenting this. There was a 10-year period of very rich cinema that you would know. We started to do the screenplays. So that’s how the early Seagull started. There are other aspects of it, but they will come a time later: it took us a long time to build a backlist. In the back list, what happens is that you sell small numbers across that and then your economics work out. It’s not the success of one book. And we learned very early again on the job that sometimes, let us say, Satyajit Ray screenplays of the Apu Trilogy could sell 5,000 copies, but maybe Jabbar Patel’s The Threshold could only sell 500. So you learnt cross-subsidizing, which is actually a negative word in today’s publishing.

Today’s publishing wants every book to be a profit centre. What is known as a profit and loss management, PLM. So editors like you and me, when we are pitching something to our bosses in a publishing environment of a large house, we have to prove how much the book we are commissioning can sell. This is it. So you need to work that out. It’s impossible for anybody to do this, because no amount of market search will teach you how. Eventually, that book buyer is going to absorb what you have put out. What you put out may be half a dozen or twenty people’s excitement in your publishing house, but you don’t know that will translate into two thousand or twenty thousand people, right?

It’s a chance you take. You can’t predict whether the emotional truth of readers will be in sync with what you’ve published. It’s hard to make it a profit-and-loss matter. The same is true for other media. The Anand Bazaar Group in Calcutta that we’ve always grown up with, they used to have a lovely magazine, a literature magazine called Desh, but then there came a time when that literary magazine had to change its content because it was asked to become a profit centre, even when there are other magazines and papers around it which are capable of funding it. That’s the important thing. Even now, we’ve kept that principle in Seagull (this is our 42nd year) where it’s always a handful of books that fund a lot of the other books. It’s cash flow, right? It’s not about whether every book must make a profit or a loss. 

The other jump would happen in 2005, which had to do with the politics of one’s geographical location. Here you are in India for X number of years, maybe over two decades, doing these wonderful books, which everybody’s loving. The community of publishers also loves you. They don’t find you competitive because you’re publishing in a very serious niche. And so everyone’s showing you off to the world as it were.

But even now after 75 years of Independence, the English-speaking West expects Indian publishers to buy the right to sell within our country or our subcontinent, right? Whereas we felt at that point, when the word globalization hadn’t totally lost its meaning, that in a globalized world we should be able to be anywhere, it doesn’t matter, our location is not important. When I do good-looking books and my money is the same as yours, why should I just buy rights for India when I can buy rights for the world? So we experimented and set up Seagull Books London Limited. And the whole political twist to that was that we were just a tax-paying entity, based in England. Your location changes. You’re no longer in a black hole called Calcutta. So suddenly you’re a UK-based company. And suddenly everybody wants to distribute you because you’re doing good-looking books, so that was an amusing thing for us, that kind of a thing. But we also told ourselves that in the beginning we would be a registered, independent, tax-paying publishing house, not a branch or anything, just incorporated in Great Britain. And we would deal with the world. We would buy world rights. And we are distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The idea was to not spend money on infrastructure, but to have staff and offices. In any case, most British publishers are outsourcing production to other countries. You’re typesetting in Pondicherry or Chennai, you’re publishing in Korea or Hong Kong or China. So we said we have infrastructure in Calcutta. That becomes a servicing thing. So that experiment is over 500 books old. We own world rights to the books. We are distributed by University of Chicago Press. At that point, we had to take a decision on what the content would be—you’re going from a certain Indian theatre, cinema, culture studies into something more international on which the Indian end would ride piggyback eventually. But at that point, we were into translations. We turned to Europe. You have to understand, at that point, the world, the English-speaking world, let us say, was not encouraging translated literature. It had disappeared. When I was growing up, it was there. In the 70s, late 60s, early 80s, India was full of it because somebody was doing it.

And then, later, in their wisdom, the American publishing houses and the British ones felt that perhaps translation does not sell enough for them to meet their numbers. So it slowly disappeared. I’m talking about the English world everywhere. Because the chain effect is – How were books getting to India, you have to understand. A handful of importers, distributors in Daryaganj and in Calcutta, old man Rupa, who was a legendary figure who started Rupa, used to import some of the best books, because they were being done, so he could choose and he could bring in literature. But when it stopped happening, it was difficult to do that.

So when I turned to European literature in translation in 2005, I remembered it was going to be 100 years of Jean Paul Sartre. I went to Gallimard and asked for various Sartre volumes. There was great confusion as to why would you want to do this for India? And, it was interesting because it took us a while to explain that we wanted world rights for a French writer called Jean Paul Sartre. And that we were going to translate, not sitting in New Delhi at two rupees a word with some commercial translator who does business letters for consulates, but the person who usually translates Sartre. And we went to Christina. And we paid in those days 70 pounds per 1000 words. That was the rate then set by the UK Translators Association.

So you were learning that you had to get the best of everything, to get the quality, to make a name. And once they were convinced, and the first books came out, it opened a floodgate, because then you could show they are distributed, they are reaching America, they are reaching New Zealand, and they’re reaching Australia through Chicago’s network. But what was interesting at that moment in time was that when the Americans bought rights from the French, or the Germans, or the Italians, they would often buy just for the US and Canada. The UK would buy just for the UK. Some of them would buy for the world, but they could never get to India because their pricing didn’t work. I was offering them India as a given at a subsidized rate, we were letting the dollar market subsidize the rupee thing. And I was giving them America and Australia and everything, using their own systems of distribution. It’s not as easy as it sounds, but that’s the magic of theatre.

You make something look like it is very simple. But it is exciting, and you have to remember that the nature of independent publishing is precarious worldwide. It’s not just Seagull. It’s everybody, there are some wonderful independent publishers in this country. And there are some wonderful independent publishers in the rest of the world that we admire and respect, and they all have to be on their toes constantly. It is a tightrope act. You’re juggling resources, but you’re not giving in to a certain kind of philosophy that says, we actually wish to publish this kind of serious literature, but to make that possible we have to do 70 percent of something else. It doesn’t work. I think you should rather accept the fact that we are going to do 70 percent of what brings in the money and 30 percent of something else. It’s okay. But you don’t fool yourself. Or you have to do what a lot of independents like us do, which is: You somehow persist with just a wish list of what you feel needs to be published, right?

Eventually the market has a way of finding its way to you if you build enough pressure. So when you have a corpus of 500, 600, 700, 800, 900 books over, they get noticed. It takes that kind of patient persistence to be able to get noticed in today’s difficult publishing environment. And the other thing that is often asked is, are you threatened? In the old days we were asked, are you threatened by the Ebook? Are you threatened by this? I used to sometimes joke and say, where’s the time to be threatened? One would say that we like producing the book as an object, but we do it by using the very technology that you claim is threatening us. We do Ebooks. It’s useful. And we do it not necessarily as a revenue earner, so much as a reinvention. You’re the author. You’re alive. We owe it to you to keep your book from disappearing because in today’s world, the way distribution works, every season, every six months, your book becomes history and something else is replaced. So here you do a hardback. A bunch of sales people from Chicago promote it. Six months later, it disappears. You do other hardbacks. Then 18 months later, you bring back this book as a paperback. So they push it again for another six months. You bring in the Ebook simultaneously. Now, we’re turning our entire list into audiobooks. So what you’re doing is what publishers are meant to do. If you’re a dead author, it’s even more interesting. We handle the estates of Mahashweta Devi and Nabarun Bhattacharya, her son. And we keep reinventing, you’re doing paperback, hardback, new editions, sometimes new translations, sometimes pairing books together, the whole idea is to keep it new. You don’t want a dead archive of a backlist, you want books that are continuous and therefore you have to embrace the technology. If the young people are listening to Spotify, put the audio book onto Spotify. It’s perfectly all right. It brings them to the book...]]>b9855e96-a833-40c8-8300-1412b9aa7f47Fri, 26 Jan 2024 09:15:00 +053001:10:19falsefull31171173Writer, Translator Jegadeesh Kumar on Translating 'A Fine Thread and other stories' and 'The Writer Jeyamohan'In this episode writer, translator Jegadeesh Kumar talked about his translation of 'A Fine thread and other stories' , his upcoming projects and about author Jeyamohan.

Jegadeesh Kumar is a student of Eastern Philosophy, Mathematics teacher, writer, and translator, raised in Southern India, now living in South Carolina, USA. He writes, both in English and Tamil, short stories, poems, and Eastern Philosophy. His translated work ' A Fine thread and other stories' is a collection of short stories written In Tamil by Jeyamohan.

Jeyamohan is a Tamil writer and literary critic based in Nagercoil, India. One of India’s finest authors writing today, he has traveled the length and breadth of the Indian subcontinent, and his work examines and reinterprets India’s rich literary and classical traditions. A prolific writer, his output includes multiple novels, short stories, volumes of literary criticism, writer biographies, introductory texts to Indian and Western literature, books on philosophy, and numerous other translations and collections.

The book 'A Fine Thread and other stories' can be purchased using the link given in the show notes.

https://amzn.to/3HscADx

*Suchitra Ramachandran on 'The Abyss'

https://bit.ly/3Ub26Qc

*Priyamvada Ramkumar on 'Stories of the True'

https://spoti.fi/3u3PHmy

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*Contact us - harshaneeyam@gmail.com

***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

ఈ కథ నవంబర్ నెల ఈమాట వెబ్ మ్యాగజైన్ లో ప్రచురించారు.

చంద్ర కన్నెగంటి తెలుగులో మనకున్న విలక్షణమైన రచయితల్లో ఒకరు.

మూడో ముద్రణ, వాన వెలిసిన సాయంత్రం - చంద్ర కన్నెగంటి గారి రచనలు.

స్వాతి పంతుల గారు వారి యూట్యూబ్ ఛానల్ ద్వారా అనేక మంచి తెలుగు కథలను వారి చక్కని గాత్రంతో మనకందించారు.

షో నోట్స్ లో స్వాతి గారి యూట్యూబ్ ఛానల్ లింక్ వుంది.

https://www.youtube.com/@SwathiPantula

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*Contact us - harshaneeyam@gmail.com

***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

* For your Valuable feedback on this Episode - Please click the link given below.

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*Contact us - harshaneeyam@gmail.com

***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Kaija Straumanis translates from the Latvian and is the editorial director at Open Letter Books. A graduate with an MA in literary translation studies from the University of Rochester, she has translated works by Inga Ābele , Zigmunds Skujiņš , Jānis Joņevs, and Gundega Repše, among others. She is the recipient of several awards, including the 2015 AATSEEL Book Award for Best Translation into English (Creative Literature) for her translation of High Tide by Inga Ābele, and the 2019 Lillian Fairchild Memorial Award for her translation of Doom 94 by Jānis Joņevs.

* For your Valuable feedback on this Episode - Please click the link given below.

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*Contact us - harshaneeyam@gmail.com

***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

In this episode, She spoke about her writing career, Translations and the book ' So Distant from My life'.

Photo Credit : Anne Mimault

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Tina Kover is the translator of over thirty books from French, including Anne Berest’s The Postcard, Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental, and Emmelie Prophète’s Blue. Her work has won the Albertine Prize, the French Voices Award, and the Lambda Literary Award, and has been shortlisted for the (U.S.) National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, the PEN Translation Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and the Scott Moncrieff Prize.

Tina leads literary translation workshops for the American Literary Translators Association and masterclasses in literary translation for Durham University. She is also the co-founder of Translators Aloud, a YouTube channel that features literary translators reading from their own work along with her friend and Translator Charlotte Coombe.

Winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, Anne Berest’s The Postcard is a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, an enthralling investigation into family secrets, and poignant tale of a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling.

January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz.

Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why.

Novel can be purchased using the link given in the show notes -

https://harshaneeyam.captivate.fm/postcard

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Kari Dickson is an award-winning literary translator from Norwegian. Her work includes crime fiction, literary fiction, children’s books, theatre and non-fiction. She is also an occasional tutor in Norwegian language, literature and translation at the University of Edinburgh, and has worked with British Centre for Literary Translation, the National Centre for Writing and the Translators’ Association.

To buy the book 'The Lonliness in Lydia Erneman's Life' you may use the link given in the show notes.

https://bit.ly/3tGl1HS

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

We Are Light is an exquisitely translated novel in which obsession, mental illness, and deferred dreams lead to complex, compounding tragedies.

Michele Hutchison (b. 1972) is a literary translator from Dutch and French into English. A former commissioning editor at various top publishing houses, she has translated more than forty books from Dutch and one from French. She received the Vondel Translation Prize 2019 for Stage Four, her English translation of Sander Kollaard’s Stadium IV. In 2020 The Discomfort of Evening, her translation of Lucas Rijneveld’s novel was awarded the International Booker Prize.

Hutchison is also co-author of The Happiest Kids in the World: What We Can Learn from Dutch Parents.

To buy the book - 'We are light', you may use the link given in the show notes.

https://bit.ly/3S503f9

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

You can find the recommended list of books compiled by her in the show notes -

Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, , Jonas Lüscher , Lutz Seiler, Walter Benjamin, and Montaigne. Her translation of Maja Haderlap’s Angel of Oblivion won the ACFNY Translation Prize and the 2017 PEN Translation Award. Her essays and reviews have appeared in a number of journals and newspapers including The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, World Literature Today, The Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, and Bookforum. A Guggenheim and Berlin Prize fellow and a 2024 American Library in Paris Scholar of Note, she serves as an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and co-curator of the Festival Neue Literature, New York City’s annual festival of German language literature in English. www.tesslewis.org

Link to Article on 'Photography as a metaphor for Translation'

https://bit.ly/Phototrans

List of Books on Translations:

Is that a Fish in Your Ear, by David Bellos

https://amzn.to/3H5BHvn

After Babel, by George Steiner 

https://bit.ly/3Hjf1Z3

Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, by Mark Pollizzotti 

https://amzn.to/3TAMAwV

19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, by Eliot Weinberger

https://bit.ly/3tFb39B

Why Translation Matters, Edie Grossman

https://bit.ly/41FLphR

Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation, by Douglas Hofstadter

https://bit.ly/3RCSk6O

Translation Memoirs:

Catching Fire: A Translation Diary, by Daniel Hahn

https://bit.ly/3vcepRT

This Little Art, by Kate Briggs

https://bit.ly/41C0uRe

Translator’s Notes and Introductions:

Emily Wilson’s Odyssey

https://bit.ly/48d5ZbL

Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf

https://bit.ly/3vh86gd

Emma Ramadan’s notes for Sphinx by Anne Garreta

https://bit.ly/3GXfH60

Revenge of the Translator by Brice Matthieussent

https://bit.ly/3tqzZSr

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

you can find the link to buy the book, 'The Fires' in the show notes.

https://www.larissakyzer.com/about

Larissa Kyzer is a writer and Icelandic to English literary translator. Her translation of Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s A Fist or a Heart was awarded the American Scandinavian Foundation’s 2019 translation prize. The same year, she was one of Princeton University’s Translators in Residence. In 2021, she guest edited “On the Periphery,” a spotlight on new Icelandic writing for Words Without Borders. Her translation of Sigríður Hagalín Björnsdóttir’s The Fires was released in 2023 and will be followed by Fríða Ísberg’s The Mark in 2024. Larissa has received grant funding and support from the Fulbright Commission, the Icelandic Ministry of Education and Culture, the Icelandic Literature Center, and Finland’s Kone Foundation. She is a former co-chair of PEN America’s Translation Committee, is currently an At-Large board member for the American Literary Translators Association, and runs the virtual Women+ in Translation reading series Jill!

https://bit.ly/3tyKmDG

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Lola Rogers translates novels, short stories, poems, comics, and children literature from Finnish into English. Her most recent translation is the internationally acclaimed novel Summer Fishing in Lapland (U.S. Title Fishing for the Little Pike), by Juhani Karila. 

Lola’s translations have been shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and the Petrona Award for Nordic crime fiction. Her translation of Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun won the 2017 Prometheus Award. She was named an NEA Translation Fellow for her translation of The Death of Orvar Klein, a Finnish modern classic by Daniel Katz. Lola has served as a translation mentor through Finnish Literature Exchange, and is a founding member of the Finnish-English Literary Translation Cooperative.

In this conversation, She spoke about how she started translating Finnish literature, Finnish translator community and about the author Rosa Liksom and the novel 'The colonel's wife'.

The Book can be purchased using the link given in the show notes.

https://amzn.to/3vaj7Q6

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Set in Turkey in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, The Purchased Bride reflects the true story of Constantine's Greek grandmother, Maria, who was bought when she was fifteen by a much older, wealthy Ottoman man.

The novel can be purchased using the link given in the show notes.

http://bit.ly/purchasedbride

Peter Constantine’s recent translations include works by Augustine, Solzhenitsyn, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Gogol and Tolstoy. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann, and the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov. His translation of the complete works of Isaac Babel, published by W. W. Norton in 2001, received the Koret Jewish Literature Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation. He is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Connecticut and the publisher of World Poetry Books. 

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

In this episode he spoke about His journey of translation, Loss and Gain in Translation, Jon Fosse, Thomas Mann and his upcoming book on translation.

photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

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2016 లో విశాలాంధ్ర పబ్లిషర్స్ 40 కథలతో వీరి కథా సంకలనం ప్రచురించింది.

సాహిత్యంవైపు తనను మళ్ళించిన పరిస్థితుల గురించీ, చదివే పుస్తకాలగురించీ, తన రచనల గురించీ ఈ సంభాషణలో భాగంగా సత్యవతి గారు మాట్లాడారు.

To buy the book -

https://www.telugubooks.in/collections/top-rated-telugubooks/products/satyavathi-kathalu?_pos=1&_sid=65a68b028&_ss=r

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

(00:09) Introduction to Paul Russell Garrett

(01:39) Paul's Journey into Translation

(04:14) Paul's Experience in Translating Plays

(07:40) Paul's Experience in Translating Novels

(08:20) Promoting Danish Literature in Translation

(10:10) Paul's Mentoring Experience

(13:33) Paul's Translated Works

(21:07) Paul's Current Projects

(25:13) Discussion on the Novel 'Companions'

(29:45) Reading from 'Companions'

Paul is a literary translator from Danish and Norwegian, with drama holding a particular interest for him. He has translated a dozen plays and heads the translation mentoring programme at Foreign Affairs theatre company in London. He has also translated a score of books, most recently Michael Strunge’s punk poetry collection, Speed of Life. In 2020, his translation of Christina Hesselholdt’s Vivian was longlisted for The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Paul is the current chair of DELT (the association of Danish-English Literary Translators) and is a founding member of the translator collective, The Starling Bureau.

To buy 'Vivian' -

https://rb.gy/eavyug

To buy 'Companions' -

https://rb.gy/pstvun

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

In this episode, she spoke about her love for reading and writing which started at an early age, working with Polish Authors , organizations helping budding translators and about her work Stanislaw Lem's 'The Truth and other stories'.

He spoke about the Living in Japan, Translations, and Business side of translation.

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Here is Damion Searls -  talking about Jon Fosse and translating  his new book ‘A Shining’.

For people who live in twin cities - Akshara Book stores have a few copies of ‘A Shining’ and ‘Aliss at the fire’ both masterfully translated by Damion Searls.

On 25th December you can have  the Full 92 minute episode of conversation with Damion Searls talking about craft of translation, his work, Thomas Mann and Jon Fosse. 

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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

(01:06) Welcoming Mike Fu to the Podcast

(01:19) Exploring the Life and Works of Taiwanese Writer, Sanmao

(03:23) Introduction to the Book, Stories of Sahara

(06:18) Understanding the Chinese Language and Its Variants

(08:16) Mike Fu's Journey into Translation

(09:54) The Journey of Translating 'Stories of the Sahara'

(12:17) Mike Fu's Involvement with ALTA Mentorship

(14:04) Mike Fu's Work with Shanghai Literary Review

(16:25) Mike Fu's Connection to Taiwanese Literature

(17:22) Efforts to Bring Translations of Taiwanese Fiction into English

(18:45) The Challenges and Research Involved in Translating 'Stories of Sahara'

(21:37) Discussing Stories from 'Stories of Sahara'

(26:10) Conclusion and Farewell

In this episode, Mike Fu spoke about his Translation journey, organization 'Books from Taiwan' an organization which supports translations of Taiwanese literature, ALTA mentorship and his translation of writer Sanmao's book ' Stories from Sahara'

Mike Fu is a Tokyo-based writer, editor, and Chinese-English translator. He is the cofounder and translation editor of the English language journal The Shanghai Literary Review and the English editor of the bilingual art criticism magazine Heichi. Fu's translation of Stories of the Sahara by the late writer Sanmao was published by Bloomsbury and has received critical acclaim from the Paris Review, the Asian Review of Books, the Christian Science Monitor, the TLS, Asymptote, and other venues. He is currently a PhD candidate at Waseda University.

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(01:35) Simon's Introduction to Mongolian, Tibetan, and Manchu Languages

(06:13) Simon's Encounter with Mongolian Literature and Culture

(10:17) Simon's Meditation Practice

(12:45) Introduction to Mongolia and Its Sociopolitical Situation

(17:07) Overview of Contemporary Mongolian Literature

(22:35) Simon's Translation Works: Politics and Literature in Mongolia

(30:05) Simon's Translation Works: The Secret Life of Sixth Dalai Lama

(34:53) Efforts in Translating Mongolian Literature to English

(35:53) Introduction to the Short Story Compilation, Sun Cranes and Other Stories

(51:01) Reading from the Short Story Compilation, Sun Cranes and Other Stories

Simon Wickhamsmith was born in England and educated at King's College, London and the University of Washington. He spent his younger days as a monk in Tibet. He has been researching and translating Mongolian literature since the late 1990s. He currently lives in New Jersey and teaches at Rutgers University. His publications include a translation of poems by Ts. Oidov, The End of the Dark Era (Phoneme, 2015), an anthology, Suncranes and Other Stories: Modern Mongolian Short Fiction Columbia University Press, 2021), and a monograph, Politics and Literature in Mongolia 1921-1948 (Amsterdam University Press, 2020).

In this Episode, Simon spoke about his Journey into Translations, Mongolian Literature and about the book 'Suncranes and other stories'.

To buy the book -

https://bit.ly/3QJirID

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(01:47)  Background

(01:55) Early Life and Influences