Translations from Bengali to English
The Stream Within
The Stream Within: Short Stories by Contemporary Bengali Women. Edited by Swati Ganguly and Sarmistha Dutta Gupta. Calcutta: Stree, 1999.
I translated two stories in this collection while I was working for Stree. They were ‘Gunin My Friend’ by Rajluxmee Debbee, and ‘Strangers’ by Nasreen Jahan.
This was a very interesting project to work on with Swati and Sarmistha. They collected in the book some little known and extremely high quality stories by Bengali women writers from about 1930 to 1990.
Proiti Ray did the cover.
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Apon Katha: My Story
Apon Katha: My Story, by Abanindranath Tagore (Chennai: Tara, 2004)This is a translation of the first volume of Abanindranath’s autobiography and the only one the author wrote himself (the subsequent volumes were dictated by him to various people). I was actually supposed to translate his Buro Angla (a fantasy loosely based on Norwegian writer Selma Lagerlof’s The Adventures of Nils) but there were issues with the copyright holders. That translation is lying with me half-completed.
The cover art is a detail from ‘Shakata-bhangan’ by Abanindranath Tagore and is reproduced courtesy Rabindra Bharati University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.
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Titu Mir
Titu Mir, by Mahasweta Devi. (Calcutta: Seagull, 2000). The semi-fictional story of a nineteenth century Wahabi revolutionary who fought against the British and built a famous bamboo fort which he held against them for a surprisingly long time.
Cover designed by Navin Kishore.
Shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award for translation, 2000.
