It’s incredible to think that most of us have read Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Camus, Voltaire, Anne Frank, Kafka, Cervantes, Marquez, Borges, Neruda, Murakami or even Tagore and Premchand only in translation. Some things are lost in translation, but the gains are too many.
We at Outlook are always trying to bring voices from faraway places, especially of the marginalised and the forgotten. We have had poetry, stories and reports translated from Hindi, Punjabi, Assamese, Tamil, and Kashmiri in recent issues. We had Tamil writer Perumal Murugan’s beguiling short story set in Covid lockdown about a cat called Meowdi.
There have been incisive reports—translated to English—by Mandeep Punia in Punjab, Vishnu Narayan in Uttar Pradesh and Umesh Kumar Ray in Bihar, all of whom write in Hindi. Outlook will strive to enrich readers with more regional poetry, literature and stories from all across the country in the coming editions.
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