Samartha Vashishtha

Samartha Vashishtha (born 1983) is an Indian poet writing in English and Hindi, his mothertongue. He has published two volumes of poems in English — Anhadnad, a collection of his childhood poems in the year 2000, and Shadows Don't Live in Walls in 2004. In 2017, Rajkamal Prakashan, the leading publisher of literature in Hindi, released his third book of poems, Sapne Mein Piyaa Panee (सपने में पिया पानी). .[1] He won a Poetry Chain-Poetry Society (India) Annual Poetry Prize in 2003 for his poem-sequence, Simla.

Samartha has also contributed to prominent Indian literary journals. His work in English has appeared in Chandrabhaga edited by Jayanta Mahapatra, Sahitya Akademi's Indian Literature, The Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, The Journal of the Poetry Society (India) and Poetry Chain. His poems in Hindi have appeared in Pahal, an influential literary magazine brought out by Gyanaranjan from Jabalpur, Naya Gyanodaya, Vartaman Sahitya (Ghaziabad), and Sahitya Akademi's Samakaleen Bharatiya Sahitya besides several other publications.

Translation

Samartha is a co-translator (along with Shailendra Shail) of Soumitra Mohan's long Hindi poem, Luqman Ali (लुक़मान अली) into English. The translation was published in Chandrabhaga 14/2007 and then in Asymptote. Luqman Ali is widely considered a landmark poem in Hindi literature, and Samartha's co-translation of it made it accessible to a new generation of readers. In the foreword to his volume of collected poems, आधा दिखता वह आदमी, Soumitra Mohan acknowledges the role of this translation in introducing Luqman Ali to an international readership.

Samartha has also translated the poetry of Langston Hughes into Hindi, and the works of Paash, Vyomesh Shukla and Asad Zaidi into English. He continues to work across three languages — English, Hindi and Punjabi — consistently striving to build bridges between their literatures.

Personal life

Samartha was born in 1983 into a literary family. His grandfather, Prof. Khushi Ram Vashishtha, was a poet of repute in the Indian state of Haryana. In 1968, Prof. Vashishtha was bestowed with the honorary title of Rajya Kavi (State Poet of Haryana); the first of the only two poets to ever earn this title. Samartha's father, Dr Jitendra Vashishtha, a renowned poet himself, published three volumes of poems in his lifetime, and left behind several unpublished manuscripts in the wake of his untimely death. Shailendra Shail, noted Hindi poet and memoirist, is Samartha's paternal uncle.

Samartha lives in Noida, India. For over a decade, he worked with Adobe Systems, where he led the user-assistance content activities for Photoshop, earning the informal title of "Chief Content Wrangler" on the credits splash screen for the 19.x releases.[2] After a year long stint with Expedia Group in Gurgaon, he is now a full-time Content Design Manager at Atlassian Bengaluru.

He is married to Ashu Vashishtha. They have a daughter.

gollark: I see.

gollark: Maybe the design was bad or maybe people messed up the execution. But a good design factors in some degree of problems in the execution side.

gollark: The existence of working ways to modify them as needed isn't guaranteed.

gollark: Yes. It's still a bad fire extinguisher regardless of how good the designers thought/claimed they were being.

gollark: Systems have no intentions. People in them might, and the designers probably did, and the designers also likely claimed some intention, and people also probably ascribe some to them. But that doesn't mean that the system itself "wants" to do any of those.

References

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.

[1] "Press announcement".

[2] "Photoshop splash screen".