Description
Nights at the Calcutta Café
by Peter Schulman and Somrita Urni Ganguly
Paper
$17.99
979-8-88838-410-7
2023
Nights at the Calcutta Café is a result of an enriching collaboration between poets from Calcutta, Montreal, and Norfolk, VA originally curated in memory of a beloved, erstwhile Indian restaurant near Columbia University. The poems delve into issues of loneliness, poverty, belonging and of course love during the pandemic as a way of breaking geographical barriers when the world was still separated. The poems accentuate the differences between these cities but also urban commonalities that highlight global solidarity in times of great calamity. We have assembled a group of highly respected, world-wide legendary poets who have contributed to this volume and is the fruition of an on-line poetry event meant to bridge geographical boundaries and distances in the spirit of an exchange of words and ideas. Catherine Cormier-Larose, Kelly Norah Drukker and Hector Ruiz from Montreal; Joanna Eleftheriou, Catherine Fletcher from Norfolk; Amit Shankar Saha, Naina Dey, Gopal Lahiri, Mallika Sengupta all contribute to this unusual, melancholic but powerful mosaic of voices and spaces.
Dr. Somrita Urni Ganguly is a professor, and award-winning poet and literary translator. She was a Fulbright Doctoral Research Fellow at Brown University, and is an alumna of the University of East Anglia’s International Literary Translation and Creative Writing Summer School. Somrita served as a judge for the PEN America Translation Prize, and the Kamala Das Poetry Awards, and an Expert Reader for the English PEN Translation Grant, the National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant offered by the US federal government, and the National Translation Award (US). She is currently Head of the Department of English, Maharaja Manindra Chandra College, University of Calcutta, and has worked on literary translation projects with Room to Read, USA, and the National Centre for Writing, UK. Her work has been showcased at the London Book Fair, and she has read in cities like Bloomington, Bombay, Boston, Calcutta, Cove, Delhi, Hyderabad, London, Miami, Providence, and Singapore. Somrita edited the first anthology of food poems, Quesadilla and Other Adventures (2019), and translated 3 Stories: Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay (2021), Firesongs (2019), Shakuni (2019), and The Midnight Sun: Love Lyrics and Farewell Songs (2018), among other works
Dr. Peter Schulman is Professor of French and International Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of The Sunday of Fiction: The Modern French Eccentric (Purdue UP, 2003) as well as Le Dernier Livre du Siècle (Romillat, 2001) with Mischa Zabotin. He has translated Jules Verne’s last novel The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz; George Simenon’s The 13 Culpritsas well as a meditation on waves by Marie Darrieussecq, On Waves; Suburban Beauty from poet Jacques Reda; Adamah from poet Celine Zins; Ying Chen’s collection of haiku Impressions of Summer and Virginie Beauregard D’s The Last Runners and Silvia Baron Supervielle’s Pages of Travel . He is currently co-editor in chief of ajournal of eco-criticism, Green Humanities with Josh Weinstein and has co- edited the following books: The Marketing of Eros: Performance, Sexuality and Consumer Culture (2003) ;Chasing Esther: Jewish Expressions of Cultural Difference (2006) and Rhine Crossings: France and German in Love and War (SUNY Press, 2005). His translation of Marie Nimier’s playAnother Year, Another Christmas (Noel revient tous les ans) was performed by the Haberdasher Theater company in Columbus Ohio and New York City in November 2017.
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