The singularity of literary production: Nirmal Verma and Jorge Luis Borges in London, 1976

On 16 June 2022, a website called Literary Activism devoted three magazine posts to the Hindi writer Nirmal Verma (1929–2005). It republished a story, “Terminal” (1992), an essay – “‘I Am Lost Somewhere’: Borges in London” (1976) – that appeared for the first time in English translation, and in the third post published an introduction to Verma by Vineet Gill as a preface to these works. The preface, “By Way of Introduction: Thoughts on World Literature and Nirmal Verma”, was an excerpt from Vineet Gill’s book (published after the posts came out). At the end of the Borges essay, Gill describes Verma as “one of the pioneers of modern Hindi writing” who “published some of the most important and formally complex novels, short stories and essays of his age”. Gill also provided a longer translator’s note to the essay that can be productively read as making three salient points on the singularity of literary production and the problem of the universal. “In this essay, as in all the rest of his work, Verma leaves absolutely no markers to establish that he is a Hindi or an Indian writer”, Gill remarks, and adds that Verma “claim[s] Borges as part of his own, self-created tradition”.

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