Completed | Kolkata Poetry Confluence – Multilingual Poetry Translation Competition

Feb 18, 2022 | Past Projects | 7 comments

The Antonym and Bhasha Samsad are jointly organizing a poetry translation competition which will require participants to translate poems from different South Asian languages into English and Bengali. The best translations for each of the source and destination language pairs will be awarded. The winning translators will also get the opportunity to attend the Kolkata Poetry Confluence – River of Words, in Kolkata along with the poets they translated. The event will be held in June,2022.

More than ever now, we live in a world that materializes and evaporates in translation. In poetry, as in life, what we gain in translation is as important as what we lose. The Antonym and Bhasha Samsad are going to host this poetry translation competition to bring together diverse poetic traditions and build bridges across languages and cultures. Eleven poets writing in ten different South Asian languages have each selected five of their own poems for translation. Below is the list where you can click on each poet’s name to view the poems up for translation :

Language	Poet	Jibanananda Das Award for translating into English	Sonali Ghoshal Award for translating into Bengali
Assamese	Sameer Tanti	English	Bengali
Bengali	Mohammad Nurul Huda	English
Bengali	Ranajit Das	English
Gujarati	Kamal Vora	English	Bengali
Hindi	Anamika	English	Bengali
Kashmiri	Naseem Shafaie	English	Bengali
Malayalam	K Satchidanandan	English	Bengali
Marathi	Santosh Pawar	English	Bengali
Oriya	Saroj Bal	English	Bengali
Tamil	Sukirtharani	English	Bengali
Urdu	Munwaar Rana	English	Bengali

Contestants must submit their work through https://antonymmag.submittable.com/submit by March 31, 2022.

Please note that separate submissions will have to be made for each source-destination language pair. The Antonym will present the Jibanananda Das Awards of INR 5000 each to the best English translators, and Bhasha Samsad will likewise present the Sonali Ghoshal Awards of INR 5000 each to the best Bengali translators.

The awards ceremony will be held on June 11-12, 2022, at The Kolkata Poetry Confluence. All successful translators will get the opportunity to travel to the event in Kolkata (domestic travel and accommodation will be arranged by the event organizers).

Selection Process:

The submissions will be judged at two levels. A language specific judging team comprising of poet translators from each language will confirm the fidelity of the translated work to the original while achieving poetic expression in the destination language. At the end of this step, a long list will be announced.
At the next level, the final jury members drawn from a set of international poet translators will find the best translations for every poet’s work.
To confirm, there is no competition among participating poet’s works, rather comparison among translations done on a specific poet’s chosen poems.
The overall selection process will be coordinated by the Selection Committee Chair, Mr Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee

Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee is an editor, critic, translator and cultural administrator. Has taught English Literature at Gauhati University and Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University. Worked as Director, National Book Trust; Director, K K Birla Foundation and Editor, Indian Literature. From 2013 to 2016 he worked as the Editorial Consultant of the Multi-volume Documentation Project of the Rashtrapati Bhavan launched by Shri Pranab Mukherjee, the then President of India. An accomplished translator from Bengali into English and vice versa, his English translations of fictions of Rabindranath Tagore (Two Sisters, Quartet ), Mahasveta Devi ( The Armenian Champak Tree ), Sunil Gangopadhyay ( The Dreadful Beauty ), Manik Bandyopadhyay ( ‘Burnt Turmeric’ ) and Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay ( The Ghost of Gosain Bagan ) have all been very well received. He has also translated a Kannada short story collection of U. R. Anantamurthy and a Marathi novel by Viswas Patil into Bengali in collaboration with the original authors. Recipient of the best translator’s award from IBBY Congress at London in 2012, Mr Bhattacharjee has also edited The Complete Plays of J P Das, published by Har-Anand Publishers, New Delhi, co-edited a collection of stories of displacement from Assam (Barbed Wire Fence, Niyogi Books), four volumes of the Best of Indian Literature (1957-2007), published by the Sahitya Akademi. He currently works as the Editorial Director of Niyogi Books, New Delhi.

Key Dates:

Submission opens: February 17, 2022

Submission closes: March 31, 2022

Announcement of ther long list : April 30, 2022

Final result: May 31, 2022

For any query, please write to [email protected]

To know more about Kolkata Poetry Confluence – The River of Words, visit www.kolkatapoetryconfluence.org

To know more about The Antonym magazine, visit www.theantonymmag.com

To know more about Bhasha Samsad, visit www.bhashasamsad.co