translators from the Hindi

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra & Jason Grunebaum

read from their work

Wednesday, November 2, 2011, 7:00 PM

McNally Jackson Books

52 Prince Street
(between Lafayette & Mulberry)
New York, NY 10012
(212-274-1160)

co-sponsored by McNally Jackson & New York Review Books

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in Lahore in 1947. He has translated Songs of Kabir (New York Review Books Classics, 2011) and The Absent Traveller: Prakrit Love Poetry from the Gāthāsaptaśatī of Sātavāhana Hāla (Penguin Classics, 2008). In the New York Times Book Review, August Kleinzahler compared his translations of Kabir to previous translations done by Ezra Pound, Robert Bly, and Rabindranath Tagore, saying “Mehrotra’s new translation brings the poetry of the great 15^th-century Indian poet and holy man to life in English for the first time… it is Mehrotra who has succeeded in capturing the ferocity and improvisational energy of Kabir’s poetry.” Mehrotra is the editor of Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), The History of Indian Literature in English (Columbia University Press, 2003), The Last Bungalow: Writings on Allahabad (Penguin, 2003), Periplus: Poetry in Translation (with Daniel Weissbort, Oxford University Press, 1993), and The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (OUP, 1992). He has published four collections
of poetry, The Transfiguring Places, Distance in Statute Miles, Middle Earth, and Nine Enclosures. A volume of his essays, Partial Recall: Essays on Literature and Literary History, was published in 2011 by the press Permanent Black. He has also been the editor of the literary magazines Ezra, Fakir, and Concrete Poetry. He is a professor of English at the University of Allahabad and lives in Allahabad and Dehra Dun.

Jason Grunebaum is a Senior Lecturer in Hindi at the University of Chicago. He is the
translator of Uday Prakash’s novel The Girl with the Golden Parasol (Penguin India, 2008) and Manzoor Ahtesham’s The Tale of the Missing Man (with Ulrike Stark). His translation of Prakash’s story “The Walls of Delhi” was included in Delhi Noir (Akashic Books, 2009) and will be published along with two other novellas by Uday Prakash in a collection entitled The Walls of Delhi in early 2012 by University of Western Australia Press. Grunebaum has been awarded a PEN Translation Fund grant, a NEA Literature fellowship, and an ALTA fellowship for his translation work, as well as residencies at the Blue Mountain Center for the Arts and the Djerassi Foundation. He has a B.A. from Brown University and a M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia University. His fiction has been published in the magazines One Story, Web Conjunctions, Southwest Review, and Third Coast. Salman Rushdie selected his “Maria Ximenes da Costa de Carvalho Perreira” as a
distinguished short story of 2007.

The Bridge is the first independent reading and discussion series in New York City devoted to literary translation. In association with McNally Jackson Books, one of the city’s premier independent booksellers, and other engaged cultural institutions, the series aims to promote public awareness about the art of translation by serving as a regular venue for readings, by both well-established and emerging translators and authors, and discussions on a range of translation-related issues. For regular updates, please email “subscribe” to thebridgeseries@gmail.com, or join our Facebook page.