EDITOR’S NOTE
“In a time of destruction,
Create something: a poem, a parade
A community, a school, a vow, a moral principal;
One peaceful moment.”
– Maxine Hong Kingston.
May ended in a trail of destruction in several parts of the world. Here, in this part of the world, it came in form of a natural calamity, a severe cyclone that lashed through huts and tenements, caused landslides, claimed lives. One wonders at the class elitism that shapes our points of view, reflected in our social media statuses, and none of us are immune to this. While most of us in the concrete jungle waited for the storm to lash out and bring cooling rain to a scorched and parched city, people in the mangroves fled for their lives, evacuated in congregations, creating interim communities.
Elsewhere, war rages, forces of patriarchy choose women and children as targets almost everywhere in a range of many, more and most horrifying acts and while celebrities walk red carpets with watermelon pouches in support and solidarity, nothing changes where it matters most. Fascism rages through humanity threatening democracies and it is during such time that one turns to literature and films, both near and far, for it is in this medium that voices emerge, subverting propaganda, autocracy and dominance in micro and macro spaces, because what affects one, always affects many. None of us are truly immune. However, as history has shown time and again, when forces of autocracy loom too large, we are saved by one another. There’s hope yet.
In this spirit, this month we try to cover a wider range of stories and voices from different parts, focusing especially on Kannada literature this time in form of poems and informed book reviews. We also cover Malayalam, Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, Italian and Albanian translations, all of which talk of the essential human condition, life as we live it in this deeply clefted world.
The Antonym Magazine
- Fiction
Curfew— Vandana Yadav
TRANSLATED FROM THE HINDI BY SHIVANI YADAV Girls are as delicate as a piece of cotton. They...
- Poetry
Clouds and Other Poems— Anita Agnihotri
TRANSLATED FROM THE BENGALI BY SARMISTHA DUTTA GUPTA AND SHAMBHOBI GHOSH Clouds Translated by...
What's New
- Non Fiction
Tempting Fate — Jean Frémon
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY JOHN TAYLOR TEMPTING FATE – Jean Frémon Translated from the...
- Colloquy
Conversation with Poet Nimrod— Patrick Williamson
INTERVIEWED BY PATRICK WILLIAMSON Patrick Williamson: What themes or ideas do you...
- Bookworm
A Book Review of Afsar Mohammad’s “Evening with a Sufi”— Oudarjya Pramanik
BOOK REVIEW BY OUDARJYA PRAMANIK “Evening with a Sufi” by Afsar Mohammad stands...
- Work In Progress
MEMOIRS & LETTERS: TAGORE IN TRANSLATION— EPISODE 7
This is the seventh installment in our series on a selection of the journals and correspondences...
Very insightful interview taken by Owshnik Ghosh of my work and reflections. Thank uou Owshnik.
[…] Antonym Magazine. The first of a multiple-installment focus on the Murder Ballad can be found at the Antonym Magazine…
Nicely done
Beautiful 😊😊👌🏽
Loved the way Debraj links it a full circle, though they're 3 characters from different novels. Kudos!!
Excellent translation doing full justice to the essence of the original poems