A new project to help bring the “extraordinarily rich” literature of south Asia to English-speaking countries will launch this summer, it has been announced.
The cross-continental South Asian Literature in Translation (Salt) project has been set up by the University of Chicago, in partnership with the American Literary Translators Association, English PEN, Words Without Borders and the British Council. The multi-year project will try to “strengthen each part of the publishing chain across the English-speaking world”, the University of Chicago has said.
Organisers aim to set up mentorships for translators working with south Asian languages, a south Asia-focused literary translation summer school, workshops for publishers across south Asia and the provision of various funds and grants to support publishers and translators.
The Salt project has been developed by British writer and translator Daniel Hahn – a former chair of the Society of Authors and the founder of the Translators Association First Translation prize – and translator and professor Jason Grunebaum from the University of Chicago’s department of south Asian languages and civilisations.
While south Asia is home to about a quarter of the world’s population, “only a minuscule number of translated literary works from south Asian languages make it to the US and other western anglophone markets”, Hahn and Grunebaum said in the project’s announcement. Translations from south Asian languages account for “less than 1% of all translated literature published in the US over the past 10 years”, they added.
Geetanjali Shree, author of the Hindi-language novel Tomb of Sand, the English translation of which won the 2022 International Booker prize, called the Salt project a “truly momentous step towards promoting a humanitarian and pluralist globalism to counter the grabbing globalism of the totalitarian market”.
Tomb of Sand’s translator, Daisy Rockwell, is on Salt’s advisory board, along with author and Urdu translator Musharraf Ali Farooqi and Bengali translator Arunava Sinha. Rockwell expects the impact of the project to be “enormous”.
While within south Asia, and especially in India, “there is a vibrant translation scene, both from Indic languages into English and between those languages, such as from Hindi to Tamil,” she said, “scarcely any of this work gets published outside the subcontinent. I have been publishing translations in India for over a decade, but Tomb of Sand was the first book I ever published in the UK or the US.”
The fact that so few translations of south Asian books are published in the UK and US “is partly a funding issue”, Rockwell added. “But it is also an issue of prejudice. It is well documented that the US/UK publishing world is predominantly white, and that whiteness is reflected in translation choices. Not enough translations are published in the US/UK, period – but of those, the vast majority are from western languages, especially western European languages.” The Salt project, she hopes, will “make it easier and more attractive for western publishers to bring out south Asian literature in translation.”
Aniruddhan Vasudevan, who is longlisted for this year’s International Booker prize for his translation of Perumal Murugan’s Pyre, described the project as “wonderful”.
“I wish I’d had opportunities for such mentorship when I was starting out as a translator,” he said. “I’d have done better work!”
The Salt project, which is funded by “one generous individual donor”, will begin formally in July, with applications for grants and mentorships set to open in the following months.
