Vasantha Surya’s Translations into English

Translations of Poetry

The Ballad of Budhni – a full-length narrative poem in the folk tradition, translated as poetry from Bundeli Hindi (Budhni ki Aalha) – Writers Workshop, 1992

She has translated poetry (as well as a prose excerpt from Koogai, see below) for Tamil Dalit Writing, OUP, editied by D. Ravikumar and R. Azhagarasan. One of them is a long narrative poem, “Christmas at Keelvenmani”, written by an anonymous poet.

Translations of Short Stories

She has translated some poems of Rilke and Brecht from German into Tamil for Tamil magazines.

Contemporary Tamil Short Fiction, EastWest Books, Manas imprint (1999). Republished twice by Penguin as A Place to Live, 2004 and 2005, is an anthology of her translations into English of outstanding short stories by 29 modern Tamil writers.

Imayam’s Short Stories – (tentative title)— an anthology of her translations of the Sahitya Akademi award-winning Tamil writer, which is scheduled to be published in December 2022 by Harper Collins.

Some of her short story translations, as well as her English and Tamil poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Alan Duff’s and Alan Haley’s The Inward Ear. Her translation of MaN by La Saa Ramamritham was translated into Spanish.

Novels:
Yamini by Chudamani Raghavan, Macmillan India – which is prescribed in schools

Birthright by Vaasanthi, Zubaan

The Enquiry Commission, Sa Kandasamy (Sahitya Akademi Award winner) , Sahitya Akademi

The Defiant Jungle, Sa Kandasamy (Sahitya Akademi award-winner) New Horizons

—Muthumeenakshi, A.Madhaviah (Oxford University Press), which is the second part of Sita A.Raman’s biography of the social reformer A.Madhaviah.

—Koogai The Owl, by Cho Dharman, OUP