P. Lal
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Purusottama Lal, born 1929 in the state of Punjab in India, is a poet, essayist, translator, professor and publisher. He is the founder and publisher of Writer's Workshop in Calcutta, where he lives presently.
Under the name of P. Lal, he has written eight books of poetry, over a dozen volumes of literary criticism, a memoir, several books of stories for children, as well as dozens of translations from other languages, chiefly Sanskrit, into English.He has also edited a number of literary anthologies.
He is perhaps best known as the translator into English of the entire Indian epic poem Mahabharata. His translation, which has been published in an edition of over three hundred fascicules since the early 1970's, is currently being republished in a collated edition of eighteen large volumes; this edition began appearing in 2005 and is scheduled for completion in 2008. His Mahabharata is the most complete in any language, comprising all the slokas included in all recensions of the work.
His translation of the Mahabharata is characteristically both poetic and swift to read, and oriented to the oral/musical tradition in which the work was originally created. To emphasize this tradition, in 1999 he began reading the entire 100,000-sloka work aloud, for one hour each Sunday at a Calcutta library hall; this reading series still continues.
In addition to the Mahabharata, his translations from Sanskrit have included a number of other religious works, including 21 of the Upanisads, as well as plays and lyric poetry. He has also translated modern writers such as Premchand (from the Hindi) and Tagore (from the Bengali).
Since his founding of Writers Workshop, he has published over 3000 volumes by Indian literary authors, mostly in the English language, including poetry, fiction, educational texts, screenplays, drama, "serious comics," and children's books, as well as audiobooks. Writers Workshop has published first books by many authors who went on to fame, including Vikram Seth, Pritish Nandy and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.
His publishing enterprise is unusual in that he personally serves as publisher, editor, reader, secretary, and editorial assistant. The books are also unique in appearance, being hand-typeset on local Indian presses, and bound in hand-loomed sari cloth.
Recent highlights of his publishing house are Holmes of the Raj by Vithal Rajan and Labyrinth by Arunabha Sengupta.
P. Lal is honorary Professor of English at St. Xavier's College, Calcutta. He was Special Professor of Indian Studies at Hofstra University from 1962-3, and has since held Visiting Professorships at many colleges and universities throughout America.
He married Shyamasree Devi in 1955, and has a son, Ananda, and a daughter, Srimati. P. Lal's wife Shyamasree is the daughter of Late Kalidas Nag, an eminent historian and Indologist, and Shanta Devi, a novelist.
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