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In this issue we have that very rare thing—an excerpt from Bei Dao’s recent book length poem, Sidetracks, due out in English in 2024, translated by the poet Jeffrey Yang. In the excerpt, Bei Dao refers to the India-China Writers’ Dialogues, created by Almost Island and the Chinese journal Jintian, edited by Bei Dao. Four meetings have taken place till now, in New Delhi, Beijing, Shanghai, Mumbai, Hangzhou and Hong Kong.

Perhaps the most significant poet in this issue, in these traumatic times of the Palestine-Israel conflict, is one of Palestine’s foremost poets, Najwan Darwish, with his crystalline, heartbreaking poems, translated with great skill and insight by Kareem James Abu-Zeid.  

Anish Garange’s poems, in Hemang Ashwinkumar’s robust translations, are fierce acts of self-portraiture, where the self is neither legible nor entirely realised, knowing well that it is the faceless face threatens those with faces, and the voiceless voice that dismantles the presiding orchestra.    

In poems that await, imagine, and desire change, Umesh Solanki shows us how newness sometimes enters the world not through the front door or the window, but by replacing what we call the world. Hemang Aswinkumar’s adept translations retain the fervid musicality of these poems in English.

Ashis Nandy talks to Almost Island editors Somak Ghoshal and Sharmistha Mohanty on his iconic work, The Intimate Enemy, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.

Geet Chaturvedi’s tender memoir on stealing books takes us to a very unusual place where readerly joy and readerly sin seem perfectly exchangeable. Anita Gopalan’s terrific translation encapsulates a wide range of affects: from the tumultuous interior journey of the narrator to the minutiae of the bookstore landscape in post-independence Bombay.

Manoranjan Byapari continues to disturb and move us with his story of Jibon. This is an excerpt from the last volume of the Chandal Jibon trilogy, The Vagabond. V. Ramaswamy continues to do an admirable job of translating this work.