In 2006, when I was pretty much ready to have my full-blown mid-life crisis, I got a call from an editor at Penguin who said they wanted to publish a translation of Sankar’s Chowringhee, and that the author couldn’t remember the name of the person who’d already done it! Since I’d put my name on that first print out, they traced it back to me. Occasionally when something like a quarter-life crisis would strike, I would say ‘I must go back to translations’ and I would pick out a book, translate half a page and that would be it. Life, work, journalism and everything else in Delhi kept me away from it. I moved to Delhi and I forgot all about translations.

In Gun Island, Ghosh states that he read so much that he was completely removed from his immediate environment and he was living in this other world altogether. In retrospect, I realise that I was not just bilingual but genuinely bi-literate from a very young age. But because I read Bangla very early on, it was hard-coded into my reading habit. When I joined Don Bosco in Class I, I discovered the wealth of English books and I switched from Bangla to English almost overnight.

Kishor Sahitya was actually for slightly older kids and I was reading it at the age of five. Bangla is a very nuanced language when it comes to segmenting your life in terms of age. Later, my uncle bought me a whole bunch of children’s books, which were called Kishor Sahitya. I started reading them, even though they were mainly for adults. My father’s elder cousin is the writer and poet, Ranjit Sinha, and he had all these books lying around the house.

The first books I started reading were in Bangla. Secondly, translating to Bangla makes you start thinking like a writer in Bangla, as opposed to a reader, and that’s a whole new ballgame.ĭo you find translating into English easier because you grew up reading mostly English books?ĪS: Translating into English is a little easier because I’ve done it more, so those muscles are well-tuned.

First, I wanted to challenge my head more, because as you grow older you need to throw higher obstacles in the path of your mind so that you stay more alive. What changed?Īrunava Sinha: I just wanted to take it up as a challenge - for two reasons. But you don’t usually translate to Bangla from English. MK: You’ve just finished translating Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island into Bangla.

Bengali people