Letter from Summer, Written in Winter

Languages entered the room. Look with me back to July 2025, looking south from the morphing and vanishing season that I inhabit, Scottish winter. Look south, to the north of England, and a sunny afternoon. Join the audience for Acrobat. This is the book of a mother and daughter. Nabaneeta Dev Sen had written over a hundred books in her lifetime, and translated from many languages (Kannada, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Malayalam, Chinese, Russian, Hebrew); in the very days leading up to her death, still writing new poems, she also signed the publication agreement for Acrobat – the collection in which she would be translated by her daughter Nandana Dev Sen. The daughter reckons that it took her a year to complete work on this selection, ‘not that long […] considering that it represents an intricate body of work woven over 60 years’. Acrobat appeared from Archipelago Books in 2021. Four years later, at a session of the English: Shared Futures conference, a handful of intensely interested listeners gathered in a room at King’s Manor, York, a site occupied for over a thousand years.

There exists an intimate and far-reaching genealogy for Acrobat – Nabaneeta Dev Sen, as Nandana notes, was ‘[r]aised by two celebrated poets, Radharani Debi and Narendra Dev (and named by Rabindranath Tagore)’ – but the intergenerational, mother-daughter translation appears as the site of most immediate poetic intimacy, and freedom is one of its names. A language activist who preferred translating others’ work rather than her own, Nabaneeta Dev Sen had been delighted when Nandana gave her – a seventy-fifth-birthday surprise – Make Up Your ...