What is your personal relationship to language and translation? What drew you to Words Without Borders (and literature in translation more generally)?

It is impossible for me to talk about my relation to language and literature without talking about translation. My love for language developed very early because of the Bengali lullabies and folktales I heard before going to bed from my grandmother and my parents. My brother and I inherited a bunch of picture books from the USSR, translated from Russian into Bengali, that my mother had collected in the 1980s. Those books made a very strong impression on me. My formal education has mostly been in English, so naturally I then developed a love for literature in English. Now that I think about it, my relation to language also changed with access to the internet in my high school years. It’s funny when I think about the very serious second life I led online in those years, publishing these dramatic poems, and reviewing serialized novels and chatting (hello jennafina, are you out there!) with other very serious teenage writers. But around the same time, my relationship to poetry changed when I was handed by a teacher a sheaf of photocopied poems by Wisława Szymborska and Vasko Popa, and reading them, how should I say—a door that I vaguely knew was there, but locked, opened. It changed again when I was twenty-five and corresponded with Susanna Nied about her relation to Inger Christensen’s works for an interview. By changed, I mean I was jolted, the wind was knocked out of me. The depth of gratitude I feel for translators like Noni Bhoumik, who made the Russian picture books come alive in Bengali for the three-year-old me, is boundless.

My other formative education happened when I joined the team at Asymptote Journal. I was still a student, and what I learned about world literature, about a borderless team, and about publishing made me realize many things about what I wanted to do career-wise. So later, I spent seven years at a Big Five publishing house in India, and while it was great to be able to eventually build a list of my own, the story of an early-career editor is the same everywhere, meaning there will be burnout at the end of the road. I had to quit my job in 2022. I came to Words Without Borders after a year of being a freelancer, because I missed being able to publish new work and I missed being part of a team. When I was working at a corporate publishing house, publishing poetry was quite difficult given that poetry books and the “market” were seen like oil and water, so it’s been liberating to be able to publish poetry and prose about poetry in an online format and on a flexible schedule. I’m very excited to read works from all over the world and especially hope to engage with translators of color and early-career translators.

Could you share some of your favorite books and/or writers? What do you look for in a great book?

I love books I could never do elevator pitches for. I’m drawn to slim books that may be classified as anti-grand narratives. My favorite books are those that I keep going back to with my pencil and my post-its because I want to keep taking craft lessons from them. I’ll name three: Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli (tr. Christina McSweeney), Haytham El-Wardany’s The Book of Sleep (tr. Robin Moger), and The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza (tr. Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana). For comfort, I go back to a few books that bring to life the textures of childhood, its small but complicated joys and sorrows: Pather Panchali by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (tr. Thomas Teal). Finally, I must mention a favorite of favorites and one of the first books I ever read: Cholo Dekhe Ashi by Kanailal Chakravorty, a picture book which teaches early readers of Bengali to be fluent—the narrator invites us to walk through his village and meet its animals, trees, and people (the title, “Come, let’s go and see,” is a recurring phrase) and as the story and the alphabet progress, we learn more complicated words, phrases, and sentence patterns.

Are there languages, themes, or genres that you’re eager to see more of in English translation?

If we’re talking about books in English translation, my wish is to see many more experimental texts from the “global south” be published in the US/the UK—and when I say would like to “see” them, I wish that these books are made visible to readers as much as a European experimental book might be, with similar resources put behind their publicity, and perhaps more importantly that these books are treated with similar levels of energy and conviction. The wider implications for this seemingly simple wish: for mainstream publishing colleagues in the US/the UK to have more open and more honest conversations about “foreign” literature and tokenisms, for example, who exactly gets to define “audience,” “market appetites,” and “cultural opacity,” and label titles as “difficult” or “unmarketable” or “dense” or “too local.” Because there are books and writers and translators who have been, who are telling great stories and it’s a shame that these translations don’t get to travel across the great divide (and therefore are never eligible for most of the “international” book prizes whose eligibility criteria are sadly not at all inter-national) because they don’t fit the premeditated ideas about literature from that certain culture/geography/nationality/language. I also believe that there are readers for all kinds of literatures, so my wish is really for publishing to break free from its self-destructive shackles of being led by sales figures and “influence” and let go of static definitions of a “general reader” (at my last workplace, some of us spent considerable time in the foreign rights department trying to make some of these conversations materialize, but largely in vain).

You have significant editorial experience—including seven years at a major publishing house in India—but you’re also a writer and a poet. How does your own poetry practice inform your editing process?

The way I edit my own poetry is often similar to the way I edit the work of other writers (including prose)—which is to look for ways the units that make up the work (structure/chapter/scene/line) can be rearranged in the most interesting ways possible, to zoom in and out in order to see the overall shape(s) and interrogate the gaps (silences/narrative distance/line breaks/the unsaid).

Could you tell us about any poetry projects you’re currently working on?

I’ve started to work on new poems after a very long writing hiatus and I wanted to start from where I had left off in my first book: the “Future Library” series. As the name suggests, these poems were triggered when Scottish artist Katie Paterson announced her public art project in 2014, which involves tending to 1,000 spruce trees that were planted that year outside Oslo, to create a library for the future. Every year until 2114, one writer will be contributing a text to the library, and these unread manuscripts will be held in secrecy until a hundred years have gone by, when they will be printed with paper supplied by the spruce forest. Paterson’s artwork is an experiment to see if text produced in the present will find receptive readers in the unknown future. A hundred years is a very long time, so my poems speculate several futures and what reading could look like then, what a story might mean, what our languages might collapse into, what the forest that is homing the library might transform into. I’m also happy to report that the animals are slowly coming back into my dreams—for me, that is a sign that there are poems I need to write.

Beyond literature and translation, what are your passions and interests?

Sadly, my brain does not hold too many compartments, but one of my deepest interests is illustrations in children’s books. I’m now in a city where there are many independent bookstores —and I love browsing through their secondhand shelves to look for old picture books. Recently, I found one from 1967 (often these are withdrawn titles from libraries, this one is stamped “Mark Twain Library, Pasco, Washington”) and one from 1962 (also a stamped book, withdrawn from “Templeton School,” wherever that may be)—beautifully hardbound, with dreamy and loose illustrations on thick paper that has not withered with time. I can spend hours with these flowing lines that turn into pine forest and fox and melting snow. Other than that, these days, I’m also trying to be an attentive gardener and tend to the small family of plants I have in my little balcony.

Sohini Basak spent seven years at HarperCollins Publishers in India, where she headed the poetry list and comissioned nonfiction and fiction. She is also a writer and poet, and her first poetry collection, We Live in the Newness of Small Differences, was awarded the inaugural International Beverly Manuscript Prize and published in 2018. Her work has been honored with a Malcolm Bradbury poetry grant, a Toto Funds the Arts writing award, a Vijay Nambisan fellowship at Sangam House, and a Gulliver Travel Grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation. She is currently based in India.