As we celebrate September as the Translation month, here are a collection of favorites and our recent translations!
SAKINA’S KISS WRITTEN BY VIVEK SHANBHAG, TRANSLATED BY SRINATH PERUR
Written by one of the most well-known literary voices in India and Kannada author, Vivek Shanbhag and translated by Sahitya Akademi Award winner, Srinath Perur, Sakina’s Kiss is a literary masterpiece, keeping readers on the edge even as it interrogates the space between truth and perception.
Itis a precise meditation on the persistence of old biases, and a rattled masculinity, in India’s changing socio-political landscape. Set over four mostly sleepless days, the protagonist, Venkat, and his family find their lives turned upside down as they get embroiled in a world of street gangs and murky journalism.
It has been received extremely well by the audience and critics for its storyline, wit and translation.
WILD WOMEN BY ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM
Wild Women by Arundhathi Subramaniam, the Sahitya Akademi Award winning poet, weaves together haunting voices of, by and for women across the Indian subcontinent. These poems surprise with how intimately familiar their ravenous yearnings and ecstatic freedoms are. It invites us to reclaim an explosive inheritance of female power, rapture and wisdom.
This anthology of sacred poetry that arrives after the much-loved book, Eating God, Arundhathi Subramaniam, implicates three kinds of women: women mystics; male poets who choose to channel the female voice; and Goddesses. It is a unique and composite celebration of sacred female ancestry in India.
The names of Mirabai, Akka Mahadevi and Andal, are known to many, but innumerable women poets remain relatively unknown. When we hear of them, it is invariably as plaster saints or meek followers. It is time to smell the danger in their words again, to listen to their feral sensuality, their searing questions about custodians of gender and faith.
It is time to tune into their brazenness, their heartbreaking longing in Wild Women by Arundhathi Subramaniam. Not just for their sake but for ours too.
ZIN WRITTEN BY HARITHA SAVITHRI, TRANSLATED BY NANDAKUMAR K.
Set against the 2015–16 Turkish repression of the Kurdistan movement, Zîn, published by Penguin Random House India, is a novel in which an ordinary love story between people of two different nationalities and cultures is flung into an unexpected, extraordinary political and historical setting.
Written by Haritha Savithri and translated from Malayalam by Nandakumar K, It is currently on pre-order and is scheduled to release in the last week of January.
Zin captures the journey of Seetha, an Indian national and a student at the University of Barcelona, arrives in Diyarbakir, Turkey, in search of her Kurdish lover Devran. Having just found out that she is pregnant, she is desperate to find Devran, who has mysteriously vanished. She discovers some disturbing truths upon her arrival. The state is trying to trap Devran and his family for alleged terrorist links. The region is in the midst of a harrowing conflagration, where state-sponsored killings, enforced disappearances, political vendettas and torture cells are the norm. Seetha herself comes under surveillance of the Turkish security forces, who take her into custody and brutally torture her. In the scramble to rescue Sita from their clutches, many find themselves caught up in the conflict between the Kurds and the Turkish government.
A promising new voice in the thriller genre, the pacey and emotionally stirring novel throws light on how governments reduce minority communities to a lower status and use them as a tool to seize power—a situation that’s become all too familiar across the world.
ON THE OTHER SIDE WRITTEN BY RAHMAN ABBAS, TRANSLATED BY RIYAZ LATIF
On the Other Side by Sahitya Akademi Awardee, Rahman Abbas, unfolds a world of patriarchy, caste prejudice, religious intolerance and exploitation in the name of faith.
This book has received the Maharashtra State Urdu Akademi Award for the year 2011. Now translated to English, it is currently on pre-order and scheduled to release across the country on 30th June, 2024.
covers the psychological dilemmas of an enlightened, eccentric and liberal man from Mumbai living in an orthodox Muslim society.
In the novel, Abdus-Salam Kalshekar’s only aspiration was to publish his Dastan-e-Ishq, a seven-volume ‘Saga of Passion’, before his death. While Salam could only complete three volumes, an author sets out to write a novel about Salam, unveiling the fifty-three diaries about the latter’s past amours that consume the saga. It also reveals a certain beloved whom Salam could never bring himself to write about.
While Salam’s life unfolds a world that is riddled with patriarchy, caste prejudice, religious intolerance and exploitation in the name of faith, the deeper conflicts of love and abandonment are revealed in this expertly crafted narrative, now available in an English translation.
An existential novel set in the context of Indian society, it raises questions not only about our lives but also about the form of the novel itself. It exposes the process of Islamization in Indian Muslim society in a unique way with undertones of both seriousness as well as humor.
A TOUCH OF SALT, WRITTEN BY ANITA AGNIHOTRI AND TRANSLATED BY ARUNAVA SINHA
A Touch of Salt, written by Anita Agnihotri and translated by Arunava Sinha is a visceral, unsparing novel about a community of countless lives that lived, lost and were buried in salt and sand.
The Agariyas working in the salt pans have no water, homes or schools for their children. They are being squeezed out by the law that has identified the entire Rann as reserved forest for wild asses.
Tribhuban’s grandson, Azad, has no choice but to take up the fight for salt against the establishment once more, this time in an independent India.
Mahatma Gandhi to Dandi, and become a part of the historic violation of the Salt Act in British India. This is, of course, unrecorded by history. He was an Agariya, one of the salt-harvesters in the Rann of Kutch.
A Touch of Salt is the story of Tribhuban and Azad, of Mohandas and Kasturba, of Malati and Vishnuram, of the multitude of Agariyas, countless lives lived, lost, and buried in salt and sand.
