Tag Archives: Mauritius
‘Archipelagic Francospheres: Transoceanic Dialogues Through Translation’ an Interview with Ananda Devi
My first experience in literary translation was when I was asked by Dapper publications to translate The Counting House, a novel by the Guyanese writer, David Dabydeen, into French. It is a very powerful novel about a country with a colonial history very similar to that of Mauritius, despite the discrepancy in size between the two countries. I therefore understood it at a very deep level and was fascinated by the choices David made in telling that story. But when I came to the final part of the novel, written entirely in Guyanese English, I realized that this represented an almost incommensurable challenge: Guyanese English, despite having its own specificity, was understandable to anglophone readers, perhaps in the same way that Salman Rushdie’s Hinglish passages were.
Forced Exile: Shenaz Patel’s “Silence of the Chagos,” translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman
By Preea Leelah Every day, Charlesia walks to the ocean and fixedly gazes in the direction of her homeland, the island of Diego Garcia, the place she may never see again. Shenaz Patel’s novel Silence of the Chagos is the haunting, still unfolding story of the people of Diego Garcia, one of the 56 islands that form the Chagos Archipelago, situated in the Indian […]