: Interview: How we translated Shahidul Zahir’s Bengali fiction transcending national borders #IndiaNEWS Critically acclaimed in Bangladesh, late author Shahidul Zahir’s oeuvre imbues a polyphony

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Interview: How we translated Shahidul Zahir’s Bengali fiction transcending national borders #IndiaNEWS
Critically acclaimed in Bangladesh, late author Shahidul Zahir’s oeuvre imbues a polyphony of voices to register the syncretic yet conflicted history of the nation. His legacy is now inscribed in rich translations by V Ramaswamy and Shahroza Nahrin, who have collated two of his novellas in Life and Political Reality. We had an insightful conversation with the translators about the process and joy of translating Zahir into English.In the afterword to the book, you have written about how despite the many resonances with international writers of critical acclaim – like Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez, for example – the prose of Shahidul Zahir reflects the very particular sociopolitical reality of Bangladesh. With this masterful translation into a “global� language, even as Zahir’s ‘national fiction’ is now accessible to an international landscape, the crisis it documents is still very rooted in Bangladesh. Do you think translated authors who write f(r)ictional works about a local political reality find some difficulty in achieving global recognition of their literary merit? Can a “global� language like English homogenize the multitudinous layers of regional reality/context – and is that even desirable?V Ramaswamy: For me, Shahidul Zahir’s prose reflects not merely the sociopolitical reality of Bangladesh and her difficult history. It is Bangladeshi in spirit...Read more

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