‘I believe in neither government reports nor happy literature’: A writer-translator conversation

In 2022, when I started translating Chandan Pandey’s short stories, there was very little I knew about him as a writer and his literary aesthetics. I took up the project because I was eager to try my hand at translating from the Hindi. As I worked my way through the nine stories in The Keeper of Desolation, I was introduced to a world that was so unlike my own. Traversing big cities, small towns, and villages, Pandey’s gaze is fixed firmly on the underdog. His characters range from poor families riddled with debt to corporate workers being bullied at the office, and a boy who’s forgotten by his needy family.

The hyperrealism of the stories borders on the absurd and what starts off “realistically” often assumes a fable-like quality. Pandey seems to be interested in the dubious morality of human beings, especially men, whose greed and hypocrisy have caused much pain around the world.

Over the next two years, as I worked on several drafts of the translation, I got to engage with Pandey at a more personal level. We talked about his stories, the philosophies that guide him as a writer and discussed how best we could bring his stories to an English reader. It...

Read more