Swooning Sufis and Roaming Bicycles: A Roundtable on Translating South Asian Literature

Join us for a roundtable exploring new translations of South Asian literature. Hear from scholars and translators working on texts from 17th-century Urdu poetry to contemporary Hindi fiction, and the creative and critical challenges of bringing historic and modern South Asian voices to global readers.

Richard Williams (SOAS) will discuss his collaboration with Makoto Kitada (Osaka University) in translating the seventeenth-century Dakhani Urdu mas̤navī, the Gulshan-e-‘Ishq (Rose Garden of Love). Williams will examine the opportunities and challenges in relaying Dakhani into modern English, and the practical dimensions of literary translation.

Makoto Kitada will expand the discussion by examining the larger interpretations the Gulshan-e-‘Ishq affords. Kitada will explore how the poem can be read as an allegorical meditation on a youth’s psychological development, encompassing humoral physiology, spiritual renunciation, and Alexander the Great’s quest for immortality.

Francesca Orsini (SOAS) has recently finished translating a Hindi novel, Ten Kilometers from the City (Shahar se das kilometer, pp. 248) by Neelesh Raghuvanshi, a book that straddles fiction, reportage and reflection. Orsini will consider Raghuvanshi’s approach to expression and metaphor as tools for thinking and reflecting on post-liberalization, globalised India and the people and ways of life that survive at its edges and in its folds.

Maaz Bin Bilal (OP Jindal Global University) will take us on a tour of the concepts and cultural markers embedded in Urdu and Persian literature, drawing on his experience of translating Mirza Ghalib, Fikr Taunsvi, and Mohsin Khan.

Anandi Rao (SOAS) will share some of her new research on Hindi translators of Shakespeare in the early twentieth century, and the role they played in the translation and literary culture of their time. 

Image credit: Philadelphia Museum of Art