some things, some updates

I didn’t write a lot last year, since I am busy working on a longer project. My first manuscript ( a novella) is still without a publisher but not everything has been bad. My translation of Bhuwaneshwar’s short stories, Wolves and other stories, was shortlisted for the PFC-VoW award and my next translation of Rajkamal Chaudhary’s short stories, Traces of Boots on Tongue and other stories, should be out early next year with Seagull Books.

Here is a review of Bhuwaneshwar’s Wolves that was published on The Book Review:

Saudamini Deo’s English translation of short stories by Bhuwaneshwar Prasad marks a significant event in Hindi literature. Not only does it reinvigorate a chronically under-appreciated Hindi writer in a new language, but it also attempts to rewrite the story of Hindi modernism as seen through the lens of non-canonical texts […]  Like all translations, Wolves and Other Stories is an act of renewal and resurrection, but unlike most translations, it is also an act of reparation, of righting an error.

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I am currently working on a book of essays on Kali temples. Perhaps it will be easier to publish but we will see.

In any case, here are links to my writings that were published last year + a response that the writer/editor Daniela Cascella wrote on my piece (My immense gratitude to her for giving attention to my writing. I just can’t not share it).

1. Our Lady of the Forest, part I, MAP Magazine
2. Our Lady of the Forest, Part II, MAP Magazine
3. Seeking Shelter in Language, Words without Borders
4. A Faded Souvenir of a Forgotten Past, Outlook India
5. Entre mes lèvres, Bastille Magazine
6. Trincomalee, Firmament, Sublunary Editions

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Something happened. To ask where would be misleading: it is at once in Prague and in the Sundarbans, in deep waters and in the eyes of a beast of prey, no longer in a place but in certain inexpressible turns of the mind. […] Beauty here, most of all, is inextricably tied to danger; drawn by that same spell that bound Sindbad the sailor to go back to his journeys, Belinda to follow the rose through to the Monster.
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Time warps, the text swarms with ruptured memories of other tales, scientific findings and geographical lapses, heard in a whisper or perhaps in a dream, a figure from one story may belong in another, a river in Prague is a stream in India, its waters flowed and filtered in the mind of the teller who makes their coexistence plausible in the pulse of her telling—the only possible reason, the only plausible derangement. She leads us through those flows and deviates us, is driven by those flows and drifts off them. We are enchanted by a narrator who is in turn enchanted.

Writing That Walks Across The Tops of the Trees, Daniela Cascella‘s response to my piece for MAP Magazine.

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Literarily, this was it. Here’s hoping that the next year would bring some good publication news. In any case, I hope to continue to write – with or without a publisher.

Thank you to anyone still reading the blog. It remains close to my heart and I promise to get back to it once I am done with my current project.

Wishing everyone a marvellous 2023. May it be a year with splendour.