Kunwar Narain Author

Kunwar Narain (author) was born in 1927 and spent his early years in Ayodhya and Faizabad before moving to Lucknow; after many decades there, he moved to Delhi where he now lives with his wife and son. His A uvre spans various genres, including poetry, epic poems, short stories, literary criticism, essays, translations of the poetry of Cavafy, Borges, Mallarme, Roewicz and Walcott among others, and writings on cinema, history and the arts. Among his many honours are the Sahitya Akademi award; Kabir Samman, the highest all-India poetry award; Warsaw University's honorary medal; Italy's Premio Feronia; Shalaka Samman, the Hindi Academy's highest honour; India's civilian honour Padma Bhushan; the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary honour across all languages and genres; and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, the highest honour of India's national literary academy. Apurva Narain (translator) was born in 1967 in Calcutta and grew up in Lucknow and Delhi. He variously read physics, management, philosophy, development and human ecology, in India, and at the University of Cambridge, and has had diverse professional interests as a consultant, researcher and editor. But it is literature that has been his abiding interest from an early age. He writes in English. This volume is a testament not only to his own literary sensibilities but also to his patient resolve to bring to readers of English an outstanding poet's work. Widely travelled, he is based in Delhi and spends time in India, England and France. [email protected] Harish Trivedi (introducer) is Professor of English at the University of Delhi, and was visiting professor at the universities of Chicago and London and the CETRA Chair Professor of Translation Studies for 2006. He has translated into English a wide range of poetry and short fiction from Hindi and co-edited Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (with Susan Bassnett, Routledge, London, 1999) and a special issue of Wasafiri with Focus on Translation (with Theo Hermans, Winter 2003). He has published several essays and encyclopaedia articles on translation in India and is currently editing an anthology of Indian literature in English translation, 1500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.