HarperCollins announces the publication of After Death Comes Water: Selected Prose Poems by Joy Goswami translated from the Bengali by Sampurna Chattarji

‘Allow yourself to be outraged and furious, allow yourself to be swept into Joy Goswami’s intimate

world of passion. His poems are breathtaking. They will momentarily remind you of the time you were

resting your head on the chest of a lover, and by the turn of a page remind you of the bloodbath that

exists in the world outside. Sampurna Chattarji’s translations breathe life and fire into his words.’

Meena Kandasamy,Author of Exquisite Cadavers

‘In this book, Joy Goswami performs, with truly Baudelairean wildness and poise, what he calls “anyayshastra on what is poetry, on why metre should be thrown away”. His tragicomic poetic prose is

an explosive plasma, full of fire and irony, frequently leaving the body, sometimes the earth itself. Now,

Sampurna Chattarji recreates each of these twenty-firstcentury vision including the extraordinary sequence of one-paragraph outbursts on life and death, No shame in bathing before your mother in a living voice, as inventive and vivid as the English of Joyce. It’s almost more than ink can hold.’

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Editor of The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson

About the book:

An essential collection of prose poetry from Joy Goswami, the most important poet writing in Bengali since Jibanananda Das. Selected and translated by Sampurna Chattarji, this book showcases the extraordinary range of the writer’s genius and inventiveness.

About the author

Joy Goswami was born on 10 November 1954 in Kolkata and grew up in the small town of Ranaghat. His first poetry collection, published when he was twenty-two, brought him immediate critical acclaim. One of the most powerful poets in the post-Jibanananda Das era of Bengali poetry, he has published over fifty titles, including a novel in verse, and several collections of critical essays. Among his many awards are the Ananda Puroshkar (which he received twice), the Bangla Academy Puroshkar, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad in 2011, and the Moortidevi Award 2017 presented by the Bharatiya Jnanpith. Selected Poems, translated by Sampurna Chattarji, won him the first Tata Literature Live! Poet Laureate Award in 2014. Goswami has been a voice against violence, war and genocide, and has been awarded honorary doctorates from the Universities of Kolkata, North Bengal and Kalyani. In 2001, he was an invitee to the prestigious International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa.

About the translator

Sampurna Chattarji  is a writer and translator. She is also Poetry Editor for The Indian Quarterly. Her eighteen books include the short story collection about Bombay/Mumbai, Dirty Love (Penguin, 2013) and the novels Rupture (2009) and Land of the Well (2012), both from HarperCollins. Among her eight poetry titles are Over & Under Ground in Mumbai & Paris (WestlandContext, 2018), the result of a collaboration with Karthika Naïr; and The Bhyabachyaka and other Wild Poems (Scholastic, 2019), which she co-authored with Eurig Salisbury. Her translation of Sukumar Ray’s poetry and prose— Wordygurdyboom!—is a Puffin Classic. As a participant of international translation workshops, she has

worked with poets from Estonia, France, Galicia, Holland, Ireland, Malta, Portugal, Scotland, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland and Wales. She edited Sweeping the Front Yard, an anthology featuring women writing in English, Malayalam, Telugu and Urdu; and currently teaches writing to design students at IIT

Bombay. She wrote Space Gulliver: Chronicles of an Alien (HarperCollins, 2015, 2020) during her writing residency at the University of Kent, Canterbury

On the publication of the new volume, translator Sampurna Chattarji says: In my translation of Joy Goswami’s Selected Poems (2014), I mentioned having started translating Horiner Jonyo Ekok and deciding to save it for later, as well as earmarking individual poems that I intended to translate in what I described as ‘the project of a lifetime’. Fortunately, I did not have to wait that long! After Death Comes Water brings together, in pleasing symmetry, not one but three collections of prose poems that are dear to both Joy-da and myself. As his chosen translator, I feel deeply glad to be able to offer these poems to English readers, with love and thanks to the poet for his continued trust, and my publishers for their continued commitment.

Sohini Basak, Editor – Literary, HarperCollins, adds: Joy Goswami reinvents the very idea of a poet with his prose poems. We, at Harper Perennial, are very proud to publish the poems in Sampurna Chattarji’s exquisite translations. Poets translating poets is a magical genre really, and we can’t wait for readers to pick up this volume and be thoroughly charmed.

About HarperCollins Publishers India

HarperCollins Publishers India is a subsidiary of HarperCollins Publishers. HarperCollins India publishes some of the finest writers from the Indian Subcontinent and around the world, publishing approximately 200 new books every year, with a print and digital catalogue of more than 2,000 titles across 10 imprints. Its authors have won almost every major literary award including the Man Booker Prize, JCB Prize, DSC Prize, New India Foundation Award, Atta Galatta Prize, Shakti Bhatt Prize, Gourmand Cookbook Award, Publishing Next Award, Tata Litrature Live Award, Gaja Capital Business Book Prize, BICW Award, Sushila Devi Award, Prabha Khaitan Woman’s Voice Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and the Crossword Book Award. HarperCollins India has been awarded the Publisher of the Year Award three times: at Publishing Next in 2015, and at Tata Literature Live! in 2016 and 2018.

HarperCollins India also represents some of the finest publishers in the world including Egmont, Oneworld, Harvard University Press, Bonnier Zaffre, Usborne, Dover and Lonely Planet.

About Harper Perennial

Harper Perennial is a dedicated imprint for translations, showcasing the finest and most compelling narratives from Indian languages – books that are timeless and stories that capture the essence of their times and the region from which they emanate. In its entirety, the Perennial library which features well over a hundred titles presents the kaleidoscope of India as seen through the eyes of the greatest modern writers writing in the local languages, comprising award-winning and well-loved novels, short fiction, poetry, plays, memoirs, biographies and travelogues.

In the recent past, Harper Perennial has published a select list of titles in translation that readers have enjoyed – including S. Hareesh’s JCB Prize winning Moustache (translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil), Jayant Kaikini’s DSC Prize winning No Presents Please (translated from the Kannada by Tejaswini

 

Niranjana), Jnanpith awardee U.R. Ananthamurthy’s novel Avasthe (translated from the Kannada by Narayan Hegde), JCB awardee Benyamin’s novel Body and Blood (translated from the Malayalam by Swarup B.R.), the Crossword Book Award winning Diary of a Malayali Madman by N. Prabhakaran

(translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil), Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Blue Is Like Blue (translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara Rai) which won the Atta Galata–Bangalore Lit Fest Award for Best Fiction of the year as well as the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award, and many others.

For review copy, please email

Jaseya.Fazili@harpercollins.co.in