Translating Magadh with Rahul Soni
In this event we celebrate the publication of Magadh with the collection's translator, Rahul Soni. The discussion will be chaired by Mantra Mukim.
Magadh, Shrikant Verma's masterpiece, was first published in Hindi in 1984 and is widely regarded as one of the most important works of modern Indian poetry. A chorus of narrators - commoners, statesmen, nameless wanderers - pieces together the histories of ancient cities and kingdoms on the Indian subcontinent, their rise to splendour, their decline and eventual fall. In poems that are stark and urgent yet arch and richly allusive, Verma lays bare their tales of corruption, guilt, ignorance and arrogance. Rahul Soni's landmark translation stays faithful to the spare, haunting, incantatory cadences of the original, revealing how startlingly prescient and relevant Magadh remains today.
Rahul Soni is a writer, editor and translator. He has edited Home from a Distance, an anthology of Hindi poetry in English translation, and translated Shrikant Verma's collection of poetry Magadh, Geetanjali Shree's novel The Roof Beneath Their Feet (forthcoming from And Other Stories in 2026), a selection of Ashok Vajpeyi's poetry A Name for Every Leaf and Pankaj Kapur's novella Dopehri.
Mantra Mukim is an incoming Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. Previously a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at ÚMR Heritages, Paris, his research interests include global modernism, critical theory, decolonisation, and twentieth-century Hindi poetry. His research articles have appeared in Textual Practice, Interventions, Journal of Modern Literature, and English among other place. His first monograph, Samuel Beckett's Lyric Failure (Bloomsbury), came out in 2025.
