Locked Down in Kolkata: Translating Iconic Bengali Authors with V. Ramaswamy
Watch the final conversation in the Locked Down series, a series of conversations between LAF Director Alexandra Büchler and former Charles Wallace India Trust Fellows.
The last in our series was a conversation and Q&A with V. Ramaswamy that streamed on Tuesday, 15th of July at 4pm BST in collaboration with Yr Egin Ar-lein. The conversations were recorded during the Covid-19 lockdown and were followed by a live Q&A session.
V. Ramaswamy who was our inaugural Charles Wallace India Fellow in 2016. His non-fiction writing has focused on social activism, advocating for the rights of the city’s poorest inhabitants, and more recently on literary translation. He has translated the Bengali anti-establishment experimental writer, Subimal Misra, and during his residency he translated another leading contemporary Bengali author, Manoranjan Byapari. Professor Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, where the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship is based, joined the conversation and moderated the Q&A session.
The annual Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship in literary translation and creative writing is hosted by Literature Across Frontiers at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. The Charles Wallace India Trust offers opportunities to writers, translators, artists and researchers from India to spend time in the UK working on a project of their choice in a range of disciplines. There are currently three other CWIT fellowships in the field of writing and translation: two in writing, based at the Universities of Stirling and Kent, and one in translation, based at the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.
The Wales fellowship, launched by Literature Across Frontiers in 2016, is unique in combining the creative disciplines of literary translation and writing, and is part of LAF’s decade-long engagement with India creating literary connections between the two countries.
Watch the session with V. Ramaswamy here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qcz7nHbEj0Y&feature=youtu.be