IndiaJadavpur University Press

Jadavpur University Press was founded in 2012. As our name suggests, we’re the official publisher of Jadavpur University in Kolkata. Universities in India rarely have their own publishing houses, so I think our press is quite rare.

Jadavpur University established India’s first academic course to train editing and publishing professionals in 2003, and with it came the idea of setting up our own publishing house. Then around 2010, the vice-chancellor at the time proposed the idea of establishing a publishing house as an independent organization. At first, it was intended to publish teaching materials and other literature being used on campus, but that wouldn’t have been realistic for such a small publisher. Instead, it was decided to focus primarily on academic research. Initially, we didn’t really have any plans to publish translations. But around that time, there was an upsurge of interest in translation around campus, particularly for direct translations into Bengali from the source language, that came mostly from the Faculty of Arts with its diverse language departments. More and more people were interested in actually trying their hand at translation, so we started looking into translating and then publishing the works as well. India has a lot of languages, with Hindi at the top of the list, but Bengali is the official language of West Bengal, where the university is located.

As for Japanese works, when Professor Abhijit Mukherjee of the Faculty of Engineering and Technology, who is also a teacher of the Japanese language course, expressed his desire to translate a short story by Murakami Haruki into Bengali, we decided to tackle the idea. But everything was new to us. We didn’t know how to go about translating a work of literature or getting the publishing rights, and it took us almost a year just to get in touch with the needed rights agency and Japanese publisher. It was a continuous learning process. Once we were finally able to establish smooth communication with an American agency, they suggested we translate a novel, instead of a short story, and so we ended up working on Kafka on the Shore.

We were the first to translate a work by Murakami directly from Japanese into Bengali.

Bengali is the official language of the state of West Bengal in India and the national language of Bangladesh, which has over 160 million people. That’s why we always take into account trends and information from Bangladesh, as it’s a large market for Bengali-language books. Kafka on the Shore was actually already a well-known title in Bangladesh when we published it. A lot of foreign literature is published in English there.

Murakami Haruki is very popular, so people already had access to his work in English and other languages. But there were still a lot of people who wanted to read him translated directly into Bengali, without passing through English first. Some people enjoy reading both versions and comparing them, too. That’s why our Bengali version of Kafka on the Shore sold well in Bangladesh as well.

There was a huge reaction to it, particularly on social media. A lot of people have written reviews on Facebook and there were lots of long reviews by Bangladeshi writers and translators. It was clear that they really took our work seriously. Some even suggested it would be better to read the Bengali translation than the English translation.

When it comes to Japanese works to translate, we usually pick up those recommended by our translators. That’s because, while we can get by in French or English, unfortunately it’s still difficult for us to read something in Japanese directly and find it interesting enough to want to translate. Personally, I’d like to read Tezuka Osamu’s manga and other work in Bengali, but when you think about whether other people share my interests, or if there’s someone capable of translating it, it’s not that straightforward. Still, moving forward, we’d like to take a different approach and explore our readers’ interests in addition to recommendations from our translators and get more actively involved in selecting what works to translate with long-term planning in mind.

There are lots of people who can translate from French or German in the Bengal region, but few are able to understand and translate East Asian languages, Korean and Japanese in particular. Finding translators is no easy task.

In addition to finding good translators, training translators is also a challenge. That’s why Abhijit Mukherjee, who’s been involved in a lot of translations aside from just Murakami Haruki, has been working hard to train young translators. Actually, we are about to publish two collections of short stories by Murakami Haruki, Men without Women and The Elephant Vanishes, which are translated by some of our early-career translators together with Professor Mukherjee. Working with a talented translator helps them grow and become ready to work on translating a slightly longer title next. Our pool of translators has grown thanks in part to this kind of attempt, although gradually. It is important to create systems to support young translators.

At the moment, we take care of the editing work in-house. But since we don’t have anyone who’s sufficiently fluent in Japanese internally, we rely on translators a lot. We do as much as we can, of course, and if anything’s unclear, we consult with the translator and clear things up, taking as much time as we can to do a proper editing job. We believe the overall process could be improved, though. And if possible, we’d like to bring on editors who can speak Japanese.

Right now, we’re working on The Housekeeper and the Professor (Ogawa Yoko) and The Sound of the Mountain (Kawabata Yasunari). In the future, we’d like to work on more contemporary novels and fiction. Not just classic literature, but crime fiction, manga, and the like would be good, too. We’d like to do more and more.

In India, there’s huge interest in not just Japanese literature and language, but also Japanese food and life in general. We hope that our involvement in publishing Japanese literature will also help spread Japanese culture.

Interview recorded February 24, 2022

Photos courtesy of Jadavpur University Press