Roundtable: "Towards a Collectively Translated Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Newar Verse" [in English]

Five translators with different linguistic backgrounds, but all engaging with Newar in their ongoing academic work came together just over a year ago to pursue their shared interest in Nepalbhasa and poetry by jointly reading, translating, and producing English versions of Newar poems composed between the beginning of the 20th century and today. In this roundtable, the translators will talk about what motivates them to translate Nepalese verse, what it means for them to engage poetically with the Newar language, how (and how well) collective translating works, and to read out select poems and their English re-creations.

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About the speakers

Christoph Emmrich is Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies at the Department for the Study of Religion of the University of Toronto and instructor of the Classical Newar modules of the Toronto Newar Summer School. He holds a PhD from Heidelberg University and works on the literature and practice of the Newar Buddhists and Hindus of the Kathmandu Valley. His research focusses on life-crisis rites involving girl children and adolescents, early print culture and translation history, travel writing, list making, material culture, shopkeeping, and poetry. 

Camillo A. Formigatti started studying Indology and Sanskrit as a secondary when he was studying Classics at the Università Statale in Milan. He studied Sanskrit, Classical Tibetan and textual criticism in Marburg and Sanskrit and manuscript studies in Hamburg. From 2008 to 2011, he worked as a research associate on the project “In the Margins of the Text: Annotated Manuscripts from Northern India and Nepal,” within the framework of the research group Manuskriptkulturen in Asien und Afrika, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. After that, he worked in the Sanskrit Manuscripts Project at the University of Cambridge from 2011 to 2014. He was John Clay Sanskrit Librarian until 2022 and Information Analyst for Asian collections until 2024 at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. He is currently working as Research Collaborator in the project “Universals in Indian Philosophy of Language,” Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia.

Marilena Frisone is a social anthropologist working as assistant lecturer in the Study of Religions Department, University College Cork, Ireland. She has conducted fieldwork in Nepal on religious conversion, ritual, and medical pluralism. She has also worked on language revitalization, heritage, and food practices among Newars in the UK.

Bal Gopal Shrestha a researcher affiliated with the University of Oxford, UK, obtained his PhD in anthropology from Leiden University, the Netherlands. He taught Government and Politics of South and Southeast Asia at Leiden University. He has been Lecturer at CNAS, TU, Research Fellow at IIAS, Leiden and at the Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona, Switzerland. He has conducted fieldwork in Belgium, India, the Netherlands, Nepal, and the UK, and published widely on Nepalese religious rituals, Hinduism, Buddhism, ethnic nationalism, the Maoist movement, political developments in Nepal, and on the Nepalese diaspora. He is the author of the monographs The Sacred Town of Sankhu: The Anthropology of Newar Rituals, Religion and Society in Nepal, and The Newars of Sikkim: Reinventing Language, Culture, and Identity in the Diaspora. He is also a compiler of A Dictionary of Classical Newari Compiled from Manuscript Sources. In Nepalbhasa, he has written and translated a dozen of literary and research books that include culture, history, critics, essays, poetry, short stories, and folk stories.

Ian Turner is an anthropologist and literary historian of Buddhism. Ian’s expertise finds a home amidst the competing Newar Buddhist counter-publics and private lineages of intellectualism, ritual performance, and cultural memory of modern and contemporary Nepal. His dissertation focuses on questions of modern domesticity in the Kathmandu Valley as an ethical, narrative, and ritual problem space. Ian combines long-term ethnographic work with textual analysis of contemporary culture writing, social-realist fiction, and liturgical handbooks and manuscripts in Newar, Nepali, and Sanskrit languages.