Ayswarya S Dutta

Ayswarya S Dutta was born and brought up in Tamil Nadu. She studied animation at NID, Ahmedabad where her diploma film was a hand-drawn animation based on a Tamil folktale. She has animated several short films including Chitrashala (2015), Wittgenstein Plays Chess With Marcel Duchamp (2020) and the Scent of Earth (2022), that have been screened in various film festivals and museums worldwide. She has also written film screenplays, illustrated books, written a graphic novella and a book on the 18th century Pahari paintings on the Nala-Damayanti story. She writes in English and Tamil.

Translator’s Reflections

Dogri is a very earthy language and yet has a refined sweetness to it. It has a unique musicality when spoken that I initially took for granted, noticing it only to differentiate from other languages of the family like Punjabi or Kangri. But when I read Dogri in Devanagari in these poems for the first time, it was quite a revelation. The amount of detailing in aspirating the sounds, the way the spellings are structured to couch the subtle nasals and accents gave the picture of an essentially, lovingly, aural language. I had to ask Amit to read them out to me several times. While translating, the challenge was to keep this straightforward, conversational tenor of the poems palpable, while also not missing out on the poetic pacing, deliberation, functional ornamentation and wonderment. These poems are a selection from a forthcoming 120-book bilingual collection of poems with illustrations.