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Uncut Poetry presents Red River SessionsAuthor: Sunil Bhandari Language: en Genres: Arts, Performing Arts Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Shobhana Kumar & K Srilata - Two Voices. One Echo.
Episode 5
Tuesday, 3 March, 2026
This episode is a conversation about translation — but also about voice, memory, the body, and the extraordinary journey of carrying one poet’s interior world into another language. i, Salma is not simply a translated collection — it is the bringing together of poetry, lived experience, and linguistic transformation. And at the heart of this process are two translators whose own literary sensibilities shape how we encounter Salma in English — K. Srilata and Shobhana Kumar.Salma is the pen name of Tamil writer Rajathi Samsudeen. Overcoming orthodoxy and having been confined within her home, Salma has now become an international literary figure and spokesperson for women’s rights. Her works have received acclaim globally and she is renowned in contemporary Tamil literature. With three volumes of poetry, three novels, two collections of short stories and a travelogue, Salma has made her mark as a distinctive Indian literary voice. She is also a a committed public servant and activist, and represents her constituent Trichy in Rajya Sabha. i, Salma is a collection of her poems, translated into English by poets K. Srilata and Shobhana Kumar. Shobhana Kumar is a poet, translator and chronicler of industrial, corporate andleadership histories. Her book of haibun, A Sky Full of Bucket Lists, won theRabindranath Tagore Literary Prize for 2021-2022, and The Touchstone DistinguishedBooks Award (HM), 2021, instituted by The Haiku Foundation, United States. She is currently working on two collaborative translation projects, which you will hear of in the course of our conversation. Shobhana is also the founder of Small Differences, an NGO that works with marginalized communities, including transgenders, single women and children, and serves on the board of several renowned NGOs.Srilata Krishnan is a poet, fiction writer, translator and academic. A Fulbright fellow and a recipient of the Charles Wallace Writing Fellowship, her books include seven collections of poetry including the best-selling “Footnotes to the Mahabharata, a novel Table for Four longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2009 and a non-fiction title This Kind of Child: The ‘Disability Story' named by The Better India in their list of Eight Best Bookson Disability. Srilata has also edited several anthologies and published translations. She is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor at Shiv Nadar University, Chennai and co-curator of the CMI Arts Initiative. i, Salma is important not only because it introduces Salma’s poetry to English readers in a sustained way, but because the translations preserve the emotional intensity and political courage of the original work. At its heart, i, Salma is both a literary journey and a human one — a movement through silence, resistance, memory, and becoming.This is a peerless episode from Red River Sessions presented to you by Uncut Poetry. In Red River Sessions, we talk to published poets, about their poetry, their craft and what haunts them. It is brought to you by Red River, which is the premier independent publisher of poetry books and Uncut Poetry, a much-loved poetry podcast.You can find books published by Red River online at redriverpress.in , on Amazon and in select bookstores.
