Literature of India's Partition and the role of translation in the narratives from Punjab, Bengal and the northeastern states are scheduled to be the focus of writers here at an event on February 16.
"Four Conversations", an event organised by a domestic literary magazine "The Four Conversations (TFC)" has lined up interactions between authors and readers about 'border' spaces, the literary production and translation practices in those spaces.
Prominent authors like Nirupama Dutt, Amandeep Sandhu, Arunava Sinha, Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Giriraj Kiradoo, Samartha Vashishtha, Aditi Rao, Ankit Chadha, Chintan Girish Modi, Debjani Sengupta, Nitoo Das, Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee and Abhimanyu Singh are participating in the event.
"Our particular intent through TFC is to fashion a serious dialogue between authors, translators and readers and viewers. We do hope that this first edition of the event will work considerably towards that aim," Arjun Choudhuri, Editor, TFQM, said.
The discussion would focus on role of translation in re-visiting a particular aspect of the past as it has been commemorated in Partition narratives.
It would also focus on how successive generations have been sensitised to the influence of the 'territorial' border that was drawn across the lives of one's parents, or grandparents, and how remembering the Partition's influence on one's past becomes a 're-storing/ re-storying' of many sorts.
The conversations would also discuss how regional languages in India have produced a wide range of Partition texts across the decades, and continue to do so even now.
"We have invited speakers working in different areas in order to facilitate a broader commingling of opinions and perspectives instead of limiting it only to literature and literary translation," Choudhuri said.
"Some of our speakers are translators, specifically, and some of them are academicians, graphic novelists, or performance artists, or cultural practitioners and journalists, while quite of a few of them are poets and authors as well," he added.
Launched in late 2011, TFQ is an english magazine published quarterly exclusively online.
With a three-member team comprising Arjun Choudhuri, Goirick Brahmachari and poetry editor Arjun Rajendran, the magazine focus is on poetry, prose (fiction, non-fiction, experimental writing), as well as artwork and photography.
