Modern Poetry In Translation

ABOUT SIDDHARTHA BOSE I was born in Calcutta and spent the first five years of my life there. This city, which was once the second city of the British Empire, was where English literature was fi rst introduced as a discipline of study, to civilise the natives. I spent the next eight years in Bombay, and returned to the city of my birth for another five before moving to the USA on my own when I was eighteen. After seven years in America, I moved to London in 2005 on a British government scholarship. I have lived in London ever since. My writing grows out of this fractured upbringing across three continents. The linguistic eff ects of this fracturing are peculiar. I grew up with three languages (English, Bengali, and Hindi) and started learning another (French) when I was fourteen. Strangely, given the formative years of my schooling took place in Bombay, I cannot read what is – ostensibly – my mother tongue (Bengali), though I still speak it. I am illiterate in the language of my ancestors. ‘Elegy, Father’