Meena Kandasamy – Women Dreaming, by Salma

08/03/22 • 21 min

Literary translations are everywhere, but how and why they’re undertaken is often hidden. In this special episode, that coincides with the beginning of Women in Translation Month, poet and novelist Meena Kandasamy explains her routes into and through her translation of Tamil writer Salma’s novel Women Dreaming. The book details the experiences of an extended family of Muslim women who live and long in a small village, and who are forced to confront cultural and practical obstacles to the attainment of their dreams. In this episode, Meena discusses Salma’s reputation and importance in India, the way the translation of her work lived alongside major events in Meena’s own life, and the political stakes of a book that some critics dismissed as a simple narrative of tearful women.

‘Translation is an activity of love and trust.’

Craft is brought to you by Wasafiri, the magazine of international contemporary literature. Check out our website, www.wasafiri.org, for outtakes and a full transcript of this interview, and much more from writers all over the world.

*** As a special offer, Tilted Axis Press, publishers of Women Dreaming, are providing 20% off purchases of the novel to all Craft listeners with the code CRAFT20 ***

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

‘Translation is an activity of love and trust.’

*** As a special offer, Tilted Axis Press, publishers of Women Dreaming, are providing 20% off purchases of the novel to all Craft listeners with the code CRAFT20 ***

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan – Postcolonial Banter

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan burst onto the international poetry scene when a recording of her performance of her Islamophobia-excoriating 'This Is Not a Humanising Poem' at the 2017 Roundhouse Poetry Slam went viral, gathering over two million views online. Since then, she has become an outspoken critic of the marginalisation of Muslims in Britain, an educator, and a writer of renown, with work published in The Guardian, The Independent and several anti-racist anthologies, and performances around the world. She is the co-author of A Fly Girl’s Guide to University: Being Women of Colour at Cambridge and Other Institutions of Power and Elitism, and the author of Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia. In this episode, she discusses her first poetry collection, Postcolonial Banter. An intimate description of Suhaiymah's turn to poetry to tackle her feelings of exclusion at Cambridge University, and her development as a steadily more reflective artist, this episode charts her ongoing battles against simultaneous hyper-visibility and silencing and the increasing ambition of her writing.

'My voice is the only place I can lay guidelines on how I want to be seen.'

**Get 15% off Postcolonial Banter from Verve Poetry Press with code banterdiscount22 until 31 July 2022.**

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Next Episode

Saidiya Hartman – Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

A revolution took place in the United States after Emancipation. A great migration north of the formerly enslaved brought with it convulsive changes in the organisation of cities, the shape of communities, and the practices of everyday life. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals (2019), Saidiya Hartman charts the nature of those changes, tracking African American women and queer radicals who were pathologised in their time period and reframing them as revolutionaries, the avant-garde of new ways of living in the early twentieth century. In this final episode of our pilot season, Saidiya discusses her routes into the book, how it grew from her earlier work on Atlantic slavery, and how through it she sought to find life, agency, and vibrance through the gaps, holes, and absences in the historical archive. Saidiya is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007). She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, the Mary Nickliss Prize from the Organization of American Historians, and a MacArthur Fellowship (2019). She is University Professor at Columbia University.

'I wanted to think about making and doing and the practices of everyday life that are so important not just to sustaining survival but to making another way in the context of the enclosure.'

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