Anamika (poet)
| Anamika | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1961 (age 62–63) Muzaffarpur, Bihar, India |
| Nationality | Indian |
| Occupation | writer |
Anamika (born 17 August 1961, in Muzaffarpur, Bihar) is a prominent contemporary Indian poet, social worker and novelist[1] writing in Hindi, and a critic writing in English.
She is the author of eight collections of poetry, five novels and four works of criticism. She has won numerous awards, including the Bharat Bhushan Award for Poetry (1996), the Girija Mathur Samman (1998), the Sahityakar Samman (1998), the Parampara Samman (2001), the Sahityasetu Samman (2004) and Kedar Samman (2007). Anamika is Reader at the Department of English, Satyawati College, University of Delhi.
Early Life and Education
Anamika was born on 17 August 1961 in Muzaffarpur, Bihar. Her father Shyamnandan Kishore was a Hindi poet and her "first teacher in poetry". Anamika describes herself as a very lonely child who led a very isolated life in a huge household. Her only companions were the books from her father's library. She says reading these books, living a life of imagination and listening to her "aunts, classmates, other women, women in distress," their stories and their pain shaped her understanding of women, whose socially-constructed femininity she learnt to deconstruct and question after studying the work of poets like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Marge Piercy, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.
Anamika studied at the Universities of Patna, Lucknow and Delhi. Her PhD was on "Donne Criticism through the Ages" and her Post-Doctoral research on, "The Treatment of Love and Death in Post-war American Women Poets". "A Comparative Study of Women in Contemporary British and Hindi poetry" is her current topic of research as a Fellow at Teen Murti Bhawan, Delhi.[2]
Literary career
Anamika considers writing a "criticism" of life and a tentative "translation" of words and half-ideas that float inside oneself. According to her "each utterance is a translation" and the "critical" and the "creative" are Siamese twins.
As a feminist translator who hates to "domesticate" a work she translates, she feels translating from English to Hindi is fun, like "playing hopscotch with an old friend, a sakhi" while translating from Hindi to English is "more akin to the pleasures of playing a crossword puzzle which teases, irritates, challenges" it "finally boils down to an issue of prestige." Her ideal as a translator is to make the source text feel at home in the target language, just as one would try to make a visiting foreign poet feel at home. Anamika has translated the works of writers like Octavio Paz, Rilke, Rabindranath Tagore, Les Murray and Girish Karnad.
Bibliography
Poetry
- Galat Pate ki Chithi
- Beejakshar
- Anushtup
- Doob-Dhaan
- Khurduri Hatheliyan
Novels
- Das dvaare ka Peenjara
- Tinka Tinke Paas
Criticism
- Post-Eliot Poetry
- Streetva ka Manchitra
Translations
- Nagamandal
- Afro-English Poems
- Kahti hai Auratein
