Last winter has been the season of literary festivals, seminars, workshops and activities related to cultural transation across the country. It was the National seminar-cum-workshop, titled, " Memory and Cultural Translation: Poetry and Praxis" on 7 -8 November, 2014, organized by the English Department, Sikkim University, which marked the very beginning of these events. The students of various departments participated in the workshop, learnt the art of ghazal composition in English and engrafted  it with the Nepali folk content, which were set to tune in the workshop itself. This was coupled with an academic session on cultural translation, where students and scholars from the nation were participants. As great ideas spark off at the same time elsewhere, soon after this event which met with tremendous enthusiasm from students and faculty members of the university, the Indraprastha University in Delhi in the month of December, 2014 and the West Bengal State University in the month of February, 2015, organized seminar-cum-workshops  on cultural translation on different perspectives.

 

          The fever of cultural translation could be avidly felt in the two major literary festivals  in January, 2015 at the same time. While I could not go to the Jaipur Literary Festival, I was invited to the Hyderabad one. The Hyderabad Literary Festival  took up Urdu as its special language and Poland as the guest country in focus. The revival of the Dastangoi tradition was celebrated through performance in the inaugural session and the festival had for its closing ceremony a brilliant musical  presentation of  Sahir Ludhianvi's creative life, by Tom Alter, who acted as elderly Ludhianvi  himself. In this presentation, some of the compositions by Ludhianvi in S.D. Burman's tune in  the films of yore were enough to bring tears of nostalgia to many eyes. I was invited by the organizers of the festival to chair a session on translation and publication, and was privileged to participate in the panorama of the poetics of cultural translation and intellectual discussions by writers, creative artists, publishers and stalwarts in academics like say, G.N. Devy. His  thought provoking discussion on "Endangered Languages of the Nation" included  some perceptive revelations about modernity. It echoed in many ways the theme of cultural translation in our Sikkim University workshop.  To  agree with his epiphanic  discourse, languages and cultures are perpetually caravan like in their translation in  geographical and temporal space, blurring boundaries and identities into a consciousness of composite "now".

 

          Sahitya Akademi in the same spirit, organized a Short Story Festival for the first time in Gangtok, in the month of February, 2015, where once again invited as an upcoming writer and academic, I enjoyed reading my short story among the creative writers and listening to a thousand tales in English translation from diverse cultures and contexts within the nation.

 

          My intellectual and creative pursuits related to cultural translation by sheer chance and co-incidence, took me to the  Mizoram University national conference, in early March, 2015, which  as a grand closure to the conference, invited the delegates to  the  Chapchur Kut Spring  Festival. The festival resonated with songs betraying Latino and Spanish colonial influences and echoing  processes of cultural translation through historical space.

 

          This season of  literary festivals , semiars and workshops, with its cultural interface, indeed has been an intellectual and creative carnival of sorts. My mind now experiencing a caravan consciousness feels the explosion of  time and space, as I grapple with my epiphanic sensibility of modernity as my existential reality.  

 

(Compiled by the Managing Editor)