Pratilipi, June 2008 Issue

[Rahul Soni]

(http://www.pratilipi.in/)

Pratilipi is an online, bilingual (Hindi/English), literary magazine - possibly India's first. It is, for the time being, a completely non-commercial venture running on the editors' investments and on the works of like-minded contributors. It aims to be a multilingual, multiscript space for conversation and debate between diverse sorts of writings and writers.

The second issue (June 2008) is now out and has six scripts: Hindi, English, Kannada, Urdu, Swedish and Catalan.

Contributors to the second issue include, among others: Uday Prakash, Ann Jäderlund, Staffan Söderblom, Wagish Shukla, Badri Narayan, Rustam (Singh), Malayaj, Krishna Baldev Vaid, Sampurna Chattarji, Teji Grover, Sara Rai, Sangeeta Gundecha, Udayan Vajpeyi, Chandrahas Choudhury, Purushottam Agrawal, Mangalesh Dabral, K.V.K. Murthy, Sheen Kaaf Nizam, H.S. Shiva Prakash, Sameer Rawal, Vivek Narayanan, Annie Zaidi and Madan Meena.


Rahul Soni
(Editor, Pratilipi)

[Eric]

This is a worthwhile venture, as it proves to people in Europe that the literature of India is written in languages other than English, and does of course show people in India that European literature is alive.

I had actually heard of this venture, as I translated a few poems by Ann Jäderlund into English myself for a forthcoming Canadian anthology, and the name Teji Grover was mentioned during correspondence with the editor.

In the English-speaking world, it is nearly always those Indian authors that write in English who attract the attention. The rest are virtually ignored, as translation is not yet a normal activity in Britain, the USA, etc.

I do admire the efforts of Martin Kämpchen in trying to show Germany that Indian literature can be translated into European languages.