Arabic's Magical Formulas: Interview with Francisca Mcneill

At ITA, the latest crop of mentees were announced for the Writers Centre Norwich's annual literary translation mentorships. In the last of our series of interviews with the recepients, our publisher, Deborah Smith interviewed up and coming translation star Francisca Mcneill.

What's your connection to the language you'll be translating from? Are there any other languages you know, or have even tried translating from?

I didn’t start out with a connection to Arabic – it was a bet. I’d never heard it before, didn’t know anything about it, didn’t know anything about the Arab World; I was more into Scandinavian languages and Italian. And I always watched German TV, on top of the American, British and Dutch TV I grew up with, so those were the languages I really liked playing with. But I always got excited about language learning – all my friends knew about it because I’d constantly bother them with stuff in different languages and I’d send them letters with sentences I’d made up and stuff. So one day a friend of mine said, “I bet you can’t learn Arabic”. It was the first and last language-learning bet I ever took. I did it without knowing in the slightest what I was in for: up to that point I had looked at languages as something to write with, to express yourself with, to have fun with. But some time into learning Arabic, after I’d decided to study it formally, I realized that this “language” is not just a language: it’s a wealth of magical formulas, a mystery that cloaks a huge empire, and the amount of knowledge that can be found in this language is just astonishing. I completely changed my direction in life when I started studying it: I went from wanting to become a musician to wanting to become a translator. The other languages I’ve tried translating from, in a literary capacity, are mainly Russian and German, but I’ve also translated some stuff I’m hoping will be published somewhere at some point, for example Manifestation by Swedish writer Vio Szabo (published by Mix Förlag) – a bitter short story about one person’s gender transformation in a Swedish activist “commune”. I’ve learned how to read several other languages, and I do use those for commercial translation, but I think it might be better to reserve my literary skills for those languages whose literatures have really influenced my life. I’m still dreaming of getting to translate some Flemish and Swahili literature some day, as well.

What's the appeal of literary translation, and how did you fall into it? What's your path been like so far?

I do love taking on other people’s voices when I translate, and trying to catch all the little nuances, references and hidden meanings that exist in literary texts. The challenge of literary translation is not only to render all those things correctly and stylishly, but to discover them in the first place. It’s an exercise in understanding, and I’ve found that trying to translate a story makes my understanding of it that much deeper. That makes literary translation a bit like a treasure hunt. But I didn’t “fall” into literary translation – it was a conscious choice, and I think that might be the same for a lot of people, because making a name for yourself in publishing is hard. You have to really persevere to be able to even translate one book for one publishing house once in your life, so only a very lucky few accidentally end up being full-time literary translators. So I think my path is fairly straightforward and similar to that of a lot of aspiring literary translators. I knew a few languages, studied translation at university, found out what types of things translators do, and started doing all those things. I’m not special. But I think literary translation is. Literary translation is an art form, and that’s a draw for me because I feel like art is the highest thing we can strive for in our society. What appeals to me about it as well is the fact that stories stay with people. Storytelling in general, including as part of other creative outlets besides books, has such a huge effect on the world. Stories can create our entire realities (just look at the stories Donald Trump tells himself). A translator has the hallowed job of introducing new ways of thinking, new knowledge, to new audiences. What’s not to like about that?

Do you have a favourite author whose work you'd love to translate? What kind of writing appeals to you? As well as your aesthetic preferences, are there any other issues - gender, social class etc - that would make you keen to translate a particular author?

For the Writers’ Centre Norwich Emerging Translators Mentorship I am focusing on works by Jordanian/Egyptian writer Ghalib Halasa. I’ve been studying his writing for so long it’s become like a pipe dream to publish any of his works in translation, but I am hoping that this mentorship will change that. It was actually his translations that introduced me to his writing: I did my MA thesis on the Arabic translation of one of my favourite books – one of my teenage bibles – The Catcher in the Rye (by J.D. Salinger). Ghalib Halasa was the person behind that translation, and naturally I got curious as to what else he had done. He is dead, but not to worry, because I have been holding séances with his spirit to make sure he is happy for me to promote his works... The type of writing I normally go for is actually pretty antiquated in comparison with Ghalib Halasa’s. Whereas he was a very controversial figure who was always pushing boundaries, the other writers I’ve drawn inspiration from were very much accepted by their contemporaries. I tend to read things from way, way back, and I’m definitely more about story than style. I’ve read nearly everything by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for example, and the authors who have influenced me most are probably him, William Faulkner, H.P. Lovecraft, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson - and those last two are known better for their essays. Even Dostoyevsky wasn’t exactly known for his wonderful style. But in the past few years I have come to realize that the canon consists mainly of white, male, Christian, dead authors, and obviously the movement around that now means it is a great time to start enriching our writing with some fresh perspectives. So if I could choose a literary project I would have to go for something that plays with ingrained, one-sided perceptions – that would interest me. I can’t think of any specific author that I would like to put forward; maybe Vio Szabo, although I’m not sure they published anything this last while. Maybe others across the world who write about transgender issues. I’ve always had a huge respect for the drag community, for example, which I think is another community that gets left out in mainstream literature. RuPaul of Arabia, anyone?

 Aside from literary translation, what do you do?

Too much stuff, to be honest. I’m always busy with something language-related. Right now I’m writing a thesis as part of a Leverhulme-trust funded, full-time Linguistics PhD that’s part of the project Morphosyntactic Variation in Bantu: Contact, typology and change with Professor Lutz Marten, Dr Hannah Gibson and Dr Rozenn Guérois as well as others at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London) and other universities. At the same time I’m doing this WCN mentorship and an editorial internship at London media company White Label Productions. I’ve also been responsible for the Translation Society at SOAS, which I founded in 2014, but I’m hoping to pass on the torch very soon (volunteer applications welcome!). On top of that I do freelance translation work for some clients from Russia, Germany and the Benelux, Sweden, the US and the UK, and I recently founded a company called BOOM Linguistics, which promotes creative language work and creative translators. When I get a free moment I usually play guitar, go to concerts, stand-up comedy shows and films, or just explore a bit on my motorbike (although it’s no cakewalk driving in London). I travel a lot, too, mostly to see friends and family, but this year has been pretty good for tourism as well: I visited Kazakhstan and St. Petersburg (Russia) for the first time, and I’m about to go to Sicily.

The talented Francisca Mcneill

Francisca Mcneill is a translator and linguist currently based in London, England. Her professional interests include languages of the less powerful, literature challenging normalized thinking, and cross-overs between different forms of art, including interactive media and music. Her growing arsenal of literary languages includes Arabic, German, Russian, Swedish and French. She is currently investigating languages of the Kilimanjaro area (Tanzania and Kenya) as part of a doctoral research project at SOAS University of London. Get in touch with her at instagram or twitter @linguafrancisca.

Introducing Indigenous Species

In December 2016, we launched our first poetry book, Indigenous Species by Khairani Barokka. Indigenous is not your usual poetry book, though. It's a jagged, hard-hitting narrative poem about a young girl's abduction in the Indonesian jungle, featuring brilliant glitch-inspired artwork, and was conceived as a sight-impaired-accessible art book, with a braille translation and tactile artwork. We at TAP are immensely proud of this book, so we thought we'd share Khairani's inspiration for creating it.

"In 2013, in Jakarta, I wrote a poem that seemed to propel itself onto the page. The idea I had in mind was to craft an accessible spoken word performance, involving subtitles and video art projections. What poured out onto the page encapsulated all the fury, dismay, and deep sadness that wells up when I encounter news stories on Indonesia’s oceans, air or indigenous peoples. Stories of pollution and indiscriminate destruction; of shortsightedness, irresponsibility, and implicit disrespect; of circumstances which no human being should ever have to experience. 

[T]he destruction continues year by year, through the fires and forced relocations used to clear the way for new factories and plantations, through the seas of rubbish that surround our 17,000-plus islands, and through the deadly smog which killed nearly one hundred thousand Indonesians last year alone, and many thousands abroad. 

Because of course, this is not just Indonesia’s story. At this ominous stage of climate change, all of our futures are tied to that of the orangutans in Kalimantan, of the hundreds of indigenous cultures spread across the islands, of kids in Jakarta whose days are spent laughing and singing amidst automobile fumes. We live in a world where what we ingest, peruse in bookstores, slather on and wash off, are all direct products of unsustainable forestry systems, where the crises of ecosystems may not enter the consciousness of those who consume their fruits on a daily basis. We are all just trying to live a good life, and for many of us that entails access to products, whether “budget” or “luxury”, that are tapped from jungles we’ve never even been close to. 

So out came Indigenous Species, first performed in 2013, as a spoken word poem at Melbourne's Emerging Writers’ Festival. And then, one day, I found myself at a residency in Malaysia, a place of quiet and calm. Trees outside my window, holding the city at arm’s length. Thinking about the jungle, I remembered this poem, and found that the images I’d imagined for the original production were still there inside my head. Longer story short, it became a proposal for a book, one where these images would be a tactile experience, existing alongside text—and also alongside Braille.

The last thing this book is meant to be is an act of charity. As a disabled person myself, but one who accesses two-dimensional text and images with ease (thanks to glasses and contacts), I am an outsider who in no way intends to “voice for the voices of the voiceless”, or to imply that blind and visually-impaired people are not long-standing advocates for their own community. This community includes several friends and colleagues to whom I am hugely indebted for educating me. I am also in favour of at least understanding the social model of disability, where “disabled” is not the opposite of “unable” but “enabled”, and that many disabilities are societal and societally exacerbated. The Braille-and-tactile form of this book is an effort to emphasize one form of such discrimination, which persists in the publishing industry. Its contents, however, were created in a haze of anger and bewilderment at what has been happening in my own and other countries. If you’re sighted and are reading the “flat”, non-Braille, non-tactile version, you’ll notice the word “Braille” (in Braille) on every other page. This is an attempt to invert what scholar Georgina Kleege alerts us to in her article “Visible Braille/ Invisible Blindness”—the usual visibility of Braille in public places for the benefit of sighted people. I believe this corresponds to the usual lack of Braille in literature meant for sighted people, which can mask publishing’s discrimination. Thus Indigenous Species attempts to make the absence of Braille visible and felt in its sighted-reader version, just as sight-impaired or blind readers feel its absence in every two-dimensional book."

The lovely Khairani with Indigenous Species

To really experience the brilliance of both the poem and the author, you need to see Khairani perform it - and you can catch her at these upcoming events:

Sat, Feb 18: Reading with a Q and A on Indigenous Species at Verve Poetry Festival, Waterstones Birmingham, 1.15-2.30PM.

Wed, Feb 22: Reading and discussion on Currently and Emotion with Sophie Collins, University of Liverpool.

Mar 10: Discussion on centring women in the arts and publishing, as part of the Southbank Centre's Women of the World Festival in London.

Hindi, Korean & Malayalam: Interview with Agnel Joseph

At ITA, the latest crop of mentees were announced for the Writers Centre Norwich's annual literary translation mentorships. In the second of our series of interviews with the recepients, our publisher, Deborah Smith interviewed up and coming translation star Agnel Joseph.

What's your connection to the language you'll be translating from? Are there any other languages you know, or have even tried translating from? 

I just had my first Skype session with Jason (a fellow translator) and he put it beautifully: We’re two guys who have no business speaking the languages we do. Hindi for him and Korean for me. You see, I translate mainly from Korean. Now, thanks to the mentorship offered by the Writers’ Centre Norwich, I get to dip my toe in the waters of Hindi literature.

I was born and raised in New Delhi in North India, the centre of the Hindi heartland so to speak. My parents hail from the southern state of Kerala at the opposite end of India so their mother tongue is Malayalam. Growing up, I navigated quite naturally between Hindi, Malayalam, and English. To add to this sweet mess, I ended up learning Korean in college. So there you have it: I speak four languages. Well, three and a half really, because while I can converse in Malayalam, I can’t read or write in it. As for Hindi, we’ve had a turbulent relationship. It was my weakest subject in school. I still can’t count beyond 50, and still confuse grammatical genders. Thankfully, I have no problems counting in English and I don’t have to deal with the pesky problem of genders. Whew!

 What's the appeal of literary translation, and how did you fall into it? What's your path been like so far? 

You know, that feeling you get after you successfully fit all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle or solve a difficult mathematical equation. Translating literature gave me that same high. So, initially, it was all about this very personal pleasure. I received a fellowship from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea) to attend their Translation Academy where I could get some grounding in the mechanics of literary translation. I still didn’t think anybody would ever want to read my translations. Then, in 2013, I won the LTI Korea Award for Aspiring Translators and The Korea Times’ Modern Korean Literature Translation Award. I guess that gave me a much needed push and I began to translate in earnest. I’m working on my first full-length book: Park Min-gyu’s omnibus collection Double. 

 Do you have a favourite Hindi author whose work you'd love to translate? What kind of writing appeals to you? As well as your aesthetic preferences, are there any other issues - gender, social class etc - that would make you keen to translate a particular author?

One of the reasons I applied for the mentorship was to improve my knowledge of the contemporary Hindi literature scene with which I’m not well versed. When I saw that Jason was the mentor for Hindi, I knew I had to grab this opportunity because I had recently read his translation of Uday Prakash’s short story collection The Walls of Delhi and was blown away. Jason has already sent me a couple of links where I can check out stories by different writers. We plan to translate around half a dozen stories during the mentorship. I have to pick my first story within the next week. (No pressure!) I don’t have any preconceived notions of what I want to translate. I’m definitely interested in issues like gender, caste, LGBT, social class and so on, but I want the writing to speak to me, to excite me in some way. Even better if it is something I haven’t come across in English or Korean before! With over 300 million speakers, I should be able to find interesting voices in Hindi literature, shouldn’t I?  

Aside from literary translation, what do you do?

Are you asking me how I make my living? (Because surely literary translation can’t be it, right?) Well, I work as a translator-slash-editor-slash-program-officer at LTI Korea (ltikorea.org). I’m part of a new venture where we are trying to set up two-way translation and publication projects between Korea and countries where Korean literature hasn’t been introduced. I also edit the Korean Literature Now magazine (koreanliteraturenow.com). 

Rising talent Agnel Joseph

Agnel Joseph translates Korean and, more recently, Hindi literature. He won the LTI Korea Award for Aspiring Translators and The Korea Times’ Modern Korean Literature Translation Award in 2013. He works as a program officer at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea and edits the Korean Literature Now magazine. He is currently translating Park Min-gyu’s omnibus collection, Double. He tweets as @AngelMisspelled.

Our 2017 best picks

2017 is finally upon us and it looks set to be a good year for publishing, if not for politics. We have a brilliant list (which is discounted until the end of Jan) – a prize-winning Thai story collection, a cult South Korean novel, new books from 'India's Ferrante' and IFFP-nominated Hamid Ismailov – but don't only want to blow our own trumpet – there are plenty of other sensational translations coming from both sides of the pond. Our publisher Deborah Smith discusses the books she's excited about for the first half of this year.

January

Record of a Night Too Brief by       Hiromi Kawakami

Record of a Night Too Brief by Hiromi Kawakami – The new year sees the launch of Pushkin Press' Japanese Novellas series, excellent news given that the form is particularly strong in Japan and Korea, meaning we finally have access to the work that wins the top prizes. Quirky Kawakami, already a favourite in translation, is a great one to kick off with, translated by Lucy North. 

           Confessions by Rabee Jaber

Confessions by Rabee Jaber – Lebanese author Jaber counts the International Prize for Arabic Fiction among his laurels, and The Mehlis Report, also from New Directions, was inexplicably overlooked. Confessions, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, promises to be equally powerful – I hope this one makes Jaber's name.

February

Of Darkness by Josefine Klougart

Of Darkness by Josefine Klougart – A genre-bending apocalyptic novel from 'the Virgina Woolf of Scandinavia'? YES. Translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken, published by Texan translation-heroes Deep Vellum.

The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso

The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso – Two elderly widows, one black, one white, whose relationship exposes the faultlines of South Africa's past. Omotosos second novel has the potential to be a serious hit; I can already tell I'll be gifting it next year.

March

Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada

Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada – I've loved Tawada for years, so it's great to see the buzz this book has been getting. She writes in both Japanese and German, and this one's the latter, which means she gets the privilege of being translated by Susan Bernofsky. And the premise, exploring life under communism through three generations of a zoo-kept polar bear family, makes it a relatively accessible introduction to Tawada's 'magnificent strangeness'.

Frontier by Can Xue

Frontier by Can Xue – Speaking of experimental fiction by East Asian women, Can Xue is another whose work can be pretty far-out. This book, like her others, is an incredible synthesis of philosophical and intellectual ideas, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, and published by translation stalwarts Open Letter.

April

Segu by Maryse Conde

Segu by Maryse Conde – Caribbean writer Conde is a living legend, shortlisted for the Man Booker International when it rewarded bodies of work rather than individual titles. Great to see this historical epic of an African dynasty included in Penguin's Modern Classics series, in a new translation by Barbara Bray.

Kintu By Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

 I've been excited about this since I heard the author won the Kwani manuscript prize; I'm even more excited now that it's coming out from the wonderful Transit Books, a dynamic young translation publisher in Oakland, California.

June

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

A new novel from anti-capitalist crusader Arundhati Roy, her first since the Man Booker-winning The God of Small Things. Enough said.

Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin

 By Qiu Miaojin– A group of queer misfits coming of age in 1990s Taipei in this postmodern cult classic, translated by Bonnie Huie and introduced by no less than Eileen Myles. One of a kind.

Interview with Somrita Urni Ganguly

At ITA, the latest crop of mentees were announced for the Writers Centre Norwich's annual literary translation mentorships. Our publisher, Deborah Smith interviewed some of these up and coming translation stars, starting with Somrita Urni Ganguly.

What’s your connection to the language you’ll be translating from? Are there any other languages you know, or have even tried translating from?

I speak in four languages, read and write in three, think in two, dream in one and I claim the language that I dream in as my own. English is the language of my emotional make-up. I was born and bred in an ‘Anglo-Indian’ locality of Calcutta -- Ripon Street (and it is still Calcutta for me, not Kolkata; at least not in English). When we relocated to the North Calcutta, of rickety rickshaws, red-brick walls, treacherous trams and Bonedi Bangalis, later in life, I got branded as ‘too Anglicised’ by the custodians of Bengali culture. English was my first language in school, a Methodist school run by always-English-speaking, occasionally-Bible-reading teachers. I played with English speaking young Calcuttans, listened to Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys, read Shakespeare and Austen, sat in Oxford Cha Bar as a pretentious dilettante, walked down the South Park Street cemetery as a flaneuse in search of Henry Derozio. It was the language of conversation at home with mum and dad. It was the language in which I wrote my first love-letter (still unsent), composed my first verse (still unpublished) and dreamt my first dream (still unrealised).

My parents, anticipating in some visionary way, my eventual relocation to the Hindi-speaking Capital of our country, as early as 1996, had decided to opt for Hindi as my second language in school. I complied. For a six year old, language was of importance to the extent that it could be used as a vehicle to express wants and crib complaints – “I want a chocolate pastry”; or “woh mera seb kha gayi”!

French has been an adult obsession for me – sometimes intense, sometimes neglected. I started learning French at Alliance to be able to pronounce the names of swanky French dishes in suave French restaurants correctly, so as to avoid the smirks of the trained servers. However, given that my ambitions in French were so humble to begin with, my knowledge today remains limited to vous vous appelez comment.

My engagement with Bangla has been fairly recent. By the time I joined University (in Delhi) my inadequacies in what should have been my mother-tongue had been pointed out to me on several occasions. I discovered Jibanananda Das, under the pressure of this cultural chauvinism, in my grandfather’s jaundiced library one day when I was twenty-one and immediately fell in love with the literature that I had been accused of neglecting for so long. Yet, I have been wary of the politics of assigning a language as someone’s ‘mother tongue’. Mother-tongue has a fairly straightforward definition – it is the language native to your mother. But the Truth is hardly so simple. My mother is from East Bengal, my father from West. They both speak in Bengali, but very different Bengalis. Which is the standard version, which the dialect? And what is my mother tongue? Bangla or Bangaal? What if a child is brought up by her father whose native tongue is not the same as her mother’s and the child embraces the father’s language? What if the family has lived away from their native land and the child adopts the langauage of the new clime?

I suppose I could say that Bengali is the mother-tongue that I arrived at belatedly, instead of being born into it.

Before translating from Bengali, I used to translate from Hindi: lyrics or short poems, mostly – Gulzaar and Harivansh Rai Bachchan, mostly.

What’s the appeal of literary translation, and how did you fall into it? What’s your path been like so far?

Professor GJV Prasad (who is now my PhD supervisor) offered us an extensive course when I was in the third semester of my MA programme – Translation: Theory and Practice. He gave us an exhaustive reading list: Walter Benjamin, Derrida, Lefevbre, Harish Trivedi, Mahashweta Sengupta, Tajaswini Niranjana, N Kamala, Sujit Mukherjee, and the other usual suspects. However, in class, before proceeding to the readings, he always dedicated an hour to discuss our translations. He reminded us daily that his course was not just about the theory of translation but also the praxis and that by the end of the course he would expect us to have built our own portfolios. None of us got that far in four months, I think, but it initiated me into the process of translation. I had read out my translation of Gulzar in class one day when Prof. Prasad told me in his characteristic matter-of-fact way, “Gulzar will be happy with your work. He is a very fastidious man. You should send him a copy of this.” I have not been able to chance on Gulzar’s mailing address yet. I have a cover letter on stand-by though, just in case!

For this course I undertook two projects: translating Kabir Das and translating Anjan Dutta. One was a fifteenth century Indian Bhakti saint, a prophet-poet, writing in a language that challenged the very idea of standardized Hindi and pure Sanskrit. His mystic philosophy is too myriad to be pinned down even today.

The other is a modern Bengali singer-songwriter, penning lyrics about the beauty of the everyday. My experience with these two vastly different writers helped me conclude that I thoroughly enjoyed translating. This was three years ago.

Besides, given my chequered history with Bengali, initially in my growing up years, I had read Bengali literature in translation. Reading Tagore in translation was blasphemy just as ‘reading Lolita in Tehran’ was sacrilege. This helped me realize the potential of literary translations. There is a time-tested tradition of using art for revolutionary purposes. Translation, by creating wider access for a text, not only gives it a fresh lease of life, but also multiplies its incipient, potential threat.

Recently, I was a participant at a workshop on translating disability literatures - ‘Translating Disability Across Cultures: The Translation and Representation of Disability in the Modern Indian Short Story’ organized by the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study (JNIAS), with the academic support of the International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS), in association with Routledge. I translated two stories by Tagore for the workshop.

My translation-mentor, Arunava Sinha, and I have been discussing some writers who shake us out of our comfort zone – those dreams will have to be realized sooner than later

Do you have a favourite Bengali author whose work you’d love to translate? What kind of writing appeals to you? As well as your aesthetic preferences, are there any other social issues – gender, social class, etc – that would make you keen to translate a particular author?

The Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, I have always felt, is less of an individual author, more of an experience that has enthralled the Indian imagination for generations. That is one author I would love to translate, despite the existence of preceding translations. Every translation, I think, is an act of rereading the text and there can never be one kosher translation. The author’s genius lies in creating enough space within the text that can accommodate these different readers and contain all these various versions. So, some day, I will perhaps add my own interpretations of Tagore through my translations.

I also dream of translating authors writing in English, that I have grown to love, to Bangla – perhaps Joyce’s Dubliners, or Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, or Bronte’s Wuthering Heights one day! To translate an idiom that is so rooted in a particular socio-cultural context would be a challenge; the real excitement would come from taking my readers to texts which have changed my life significantly, and to show them why.

I am a dreamer (and a socialist!). However, I do not really pick up a book with the intention of finding a gendered angle in the narrative, for instance, or a discourse on marginalities: racial, physical, social or sexual. The discovery of the politics is a journey, a process, not a destination that I plan to consciously arrive at. It is hard to explain why I like a particular story, just as it difficult to define what a good story is: something that I have been able to identify with, something that has talked to me over the years. If I were to translate something, I would do it for the love of the story – that alone; unless, of course, this translation is a part of a commissioned project that would require me to focus on certain issues. For example, I would like to contribute towards the building of an archive of Indian writings on disability. Presently, some of us are considering this project seriously. That would require me to identify, among other things, disability literature in India and translate some of this fiction to English and Hindi. This is a project with an agendum, so I shall be looking at texts with a specific motivation.

Aside from literary translation, what do you do?

I am presently a Doctoral Research Scholar at the Centre for English Studies (CES), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi; and a Project Fellow with the University Grants Commission of India under their Special Assistance Programme at the CES, JNU. For my PhD thesis I’m looking at the representation of female athletic bodies in sports fiction.

1 ‘Bonedi’ is a Bengali word meaning aristocratic or affluent or someone with inherited wealth.
2 ‘Woh mera seb kha gayi’ is the Hindi for “She ate my apple”.
33 “What is your name”, in French.

New talent, Somrita.

Somrita Urni Ganguly is a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She was selected for the Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme by the Writers' Centre Norwich in 2016 and is presently working with the award-winning translator Arunava Sinha on translating a novel-in-verse from Bangla to English. She writes fiction and falls in and out of love, habitually. You can follow her on Twitter @blessed_damsel. 

If you'd like to write a guest post for us, please get in touch with Sabeena@tiltedaxispress.