From ULR
Issue 13 – Memories of the Future
Editorial: Translations – ULR Issue 13, Memories of the Future
Stillness threatens memory’s seal. Violence marks Darjeeling’s days. Glimpses of revolution flicker. Memories: shards glinting, tilting past into present, a constant future.
“The days were longer then (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.” (Middlemarch, George Eliot)
Time is subjective. Time is fluid. Memories flow—from the past to the present, until the present becomes the past and the future becomes the present. This was all I remembered to remember once the submissions poured in for the “Memories of the Future” issue, and my sense was not betrayed.
In this issue, which is also experimental—marking our first foray into a “Non-fiction” vertical within the Translations section—I am doubly delighted to bring you translations from Kashmiri and Nepali.
In Sarib Yousuf’s translation, time stands still, and yet there is movement in that stillness—one that threatens to break the seal of sanity and memory. In Saswati Saha and Abrona Lee Pandi’s translation, the memory of time is measured by the violence of the everyday in Darjeeling, “cobbled together” (translators’ note).
In the Non-fiction section, we feature Muktibodh’s essay, deftly translated by Richa Bajaj; a personal essay by Kanupriya Dhingra, interweaving the art and act of translation with memory; and an excerpt from Awadhesh Tripathi’s latest translation of Ram Prasad Bismil’s A Glimpse of My Life, offering insight into the remarkable life of the Indian revolutionary.
I hope you find as much joy in this folio as I did while curating it. May it prompt you to consider how memories are shards that glint—tilting from the past into the present, and from the present into the past—with the future as the constant variable.
Happy reading!
Sonakshi Srivastava
Sonakshi Srivastava is a writing tutor at Ashoka University, Sonepat, India. She is one of the recipients of South Asia Speaks mentorship programme (cohort 2021), working on translating the Hindi novel, “Titli” into English under the mentorship of Arunava Sinha. She was the contributing translator columnist at “The Bilingual Window’. She was longlisted for The Stinging Fly Translation Bursary 2022, and was awarded the Katharine Bakeless Nason scholarship for the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference 2023. Her works have previously appeared in or are appearing in ASAP art, Usawa, Proseterity, The Monograph, Alipore Post, Hakara, potluck zine, orangepeel mag, Qissa mag, and Rhodora among others.