Siddhartha Deb
Somewhere and Everywhere | Reading Literature in Translation
Siddhartha Deb
For too long, the American publishing industry has faced inward, bringing English-language writers to English-language readers, and sequestering everything outside the Anglosphere into a single, vague category of “world literature.” In 2007, only three percent of books put out in the U.S. were translations, and this sliver hardly offered a truly global tour: according to a study of translated titles published between 2008 and 2020, 45 percent were originally written...
The Empire Marches On
Siddhartha Deb
In 1913, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel Prize in literature on the basis of Gitanjali, a single volume of poems idiosyncratically self-translated from Bengali into English. “A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination,” W.B. Yeats wrote in his introduction. A British colonial subject, Tagore was an inhabitant of that thing we call the world, which...
