Archive

These edited excerpts from the Preface of the Bengali translation of Hoshang Merchant’s book, The Man Who Would Be Queen: Autobiographical Fictions by Sourav Roy are reprinted here with permission from the translator. During Hoshang Merchant’s 75 years over 50 printed and 38 electronic books (poetry, prose, critical studies, edited volumes, translations, interviews) have been published. His writings have been translated into Hindi (often by himself), Telugu, Malayalam, Croatian, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Italian and Esperanto. But until I translated this book, just a handful of his poems had been translated into Bengali. Widely read, circulated, critiqued, reviled and admired by a......