2013 was a positive year for publishing, certainly for translations. Translations were on the shortlist of DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2014, a prize that mainly focuses on general fiction in English, not in a separate category — Anand’s The Book of Destruction (translated from Malayalam by Chetana Sachidanandan) and Benyamin’s Goat Days (translated from Malayalam by Joseph Koyippalli). Other translations that left an impression on literary conversations of the year are — Shamsur Rahman’s The Mirror of Beauty (translated from Urdu by the author); Habib Tanvir’s Memoir (translated by Mahmood Farooqui); Sunanda Sikdar’s A Life Long Ago(translated from Bengali by Anchita Ghatak) and Sachin Kundalkar’s Cobalt Blue (translated from Marathi by Jerry Pinto); Ajay Navaria’sUnclaimed Terrain (translated from Hindi by Laura Brueck); Uday Prakash’s The Walls of Delhi (translated from Hindi by Jason Grunebaum); Syed Rafiq Husain’s The Mirror of Wonders (translated from Urdu by Saleem Kidwai); Malarvan’s War Journey: Diary of a Tamil Tiger (translated by M Malathy); Mohinder Singh Sarna’s Savage Harvest: Stories of Partition (translated from Punjabi by Navtej Sarna); Prabha Khaitan’s A Life Apart (translated from Hindi by Ira Pande) and an anthology, New Urdu Writings: From India & Pakistan(edited by Rakhshanda Jalil). In fact, Penguin India’s best fiction title for the year was The Mirror of Beauty, according to Managing Editor R Sivapriya. She adds, “At Penguin we are developing a focused translations list that spans contemporary texts and modern classics and older classics.”
