Subhransu Maitra

Subhransu Maitra is an alumnus of the Departments of English at Presidency College, Kolkata and Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. He has had a chequered career in Public Relations, Advertising, and Business Journalism, before taking up what was to be a long stint (2002 to 2020) as Publication Superintendent at Netaji Subhas Open University, Kolkata. Maitra’s forte is translation, in which he made a debut by rendering Ernest Hemmingway and Howard Fast into Bangla. Since then he has worked avidly to translate Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shankha Ghosh, and Mahasweta Devi, to mention the most prominent. Maitra has contributed to The Essential Tagore, published initially by Belknap Press, Harvard University; and subsequently by Visva-Bharati, India. Glimpses of Maitra’s ideological orientations can be witnessed in the detailed ‘Introduction’ and his translation of six iconic stories from Bangla to English in Section IV of From Popular Movements to Rebellion: The Naxalite Decade, published by Social Science Press, New Delhi. The poems he has contributed to this edition of Dead Metaphor are part of Maitra’s large oeuvre of ruminations on life penned at different points of time over the last two decades.