Editorial
In December 2014, Almost Island invited submissions for its first manuscript competition. Books of poetry, experimental prose and cross-genre works, in English or in English translation, by citizens or residents of South Asian countries were eligible.
Out of the fifty-plus qualifying submissions, our judges Adil Jussawalla and Eliot Weinberger chose Ranjani Murali’s manuscript of poetry Soars a Face as the winner. The runner-up was Sushil Sivaram’s All This is Night.
The Monsoon 2016 issue of Almost Island features selections from both these manuscripts, as well as from some other shortlisted works, which include:
The Miraculous Phantom and His Beautiful Companion, an excerpt from Subimal Misra’s anti-novel Actually This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale, translated from the Bengali by V. Ramaswamy.
Poems from The Owl and the Laughing Buddha by Siddhartha Menon, and from The Grasp of Things by Aishwarya Iyer.
An excerpt from Tigerform, a novel in Telugu by Viswanatha Satyanarayana, translated by Sreekantha Gummuluri and Satya Gummuluri.
In addition to the selections from the manuscript competition, the issue also carries exciting new work in prose and poetry from South America and India:
Argentinian writer Sergio Chejfec’s singular Baroni: A Journey, is an encounter of the self with a certain kind of visual art, its creators, and also with the life that all three spring from. In both language and imagination, the work holds a kind of active truth which keeps transforming, contradicting and even eluding itself. Deeply original in how it uses prose to navigate the nuances of these encounters, the work is also carefully and meticulously brought into the English by Margaret Carson.
In Bruno Se Dobla, Cae, Raúl Zurita utters the world of the wounded suffering human, speaks through them in their last cries. INRI, from which this excerpt is taken, is a work of disturbing depths and truths, poetry almost as a document, always bearing witness, and at the same time a work of great luminosity. Brilliantly translated by Anna Deeny Morales, these poems are soon forthcoming in Sky Below: Selected Poems by Raúl Zurita.
Valerie Mejer Caso’s poems from Without Republic, translated by Torin Jensen, are haunted by memories and absences, of things half seen, half remembered, half understood, where men resemble insects and the primitive glimmer of stars calls to mind scattered fires.
And finally some image and text from Finding My Way, a remarkable book by Venkat Raman Singh Shyam and S. Anand, that tells Venkat’s life story threaded through with myth and song, the excerpt here performing an essential re-imagination and re-contextualisation of the Ekalavya episode from the Mahabharata in one precariously balanced, profuse yet precise sentence.
– The editors