Sukti Sarkar and Rituparna Mukherjee engaged in a heart-to-heart as fellow translators to explore the former’s on-going translation of Papree Rahaman’s voluminous and socially significant novel Bayan that deals with the livelihoods of Bangladeshi Jamdani weavers. The text is a multi-generational, many-layered narrative that is remarkably insightful into the ways of human nature and the numerous gendered ways around which the society is constructed. This conversation centers around the translation process undertaken, the kind of research required to to handle a work that has extremely specific regional and cultural practices. It also delves into the difficulties of translation, especially the challenging aspect of transferring nuances of cultural context and dialectical fervour in a language which is a separate entity altogether. Finally, it wades into the concept of subjectivity in translation, the question of where a translator is placed in weaving a narrative, perhaps as complex as the jamdani weave itself.

Also, read a creative non-fiction piece telling the story of a dog, written by Parimal Bhattacharya, translated to English by Bisnhnupriya Chowdhuri, and published in The Antonym. 

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