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Translator's Note: Discovering Prasanta Mridha's essay series "Lost Livelihoods" was a delight. The first one I spotted was about black market Indian mill-woven cotton saris—a flourishing business during the early eighties. I was instantly transported to my childhood. There were many products being smuggled from India, but saris are the contraband I have a direct memory about. Bangladeshi mill cottons, according to my grandmother, had not achieved the softness of...

WWB's panel at AWP: Karen Emmerich and Kareem James Abu-Zeid (top photo); Edward Gauvin, Shabnam Nadiya, and Susan Harris (bottom photo) Last week, WWB was in Los Angeles for the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference. Editorial director Susan Harris led a fascinating and engaging panel on “The Translator as Coauthor: Collaborative Translation” with WWB contributors, each of whom discussed their diverse experiences working with authors to...

I translated my first story when I was thirteen. It was done for purely altruistic reasons: I’d read a fabulous sci-fi story by Robert Sheckley called The Odor of Thought and wanted my best friend to read it, too. Her English was shaky and she declined. The only way for her to read it, I figured, was to turn it into Bangla. I didn’t connect what I was doing to the word “translation,” and I must have made all kinds of mistakes, but I finished the story, she read it...