Translating the Untranslatable: Sana R. Chaudhry Wins Mozhi Prize

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Posted on Tuesday 16 January 2024

Congratulations to Dr Sana R. Chaudhry who has been awarded The Mozhi Prize 2023 for her translation of Fahmida Riaz’s short story ‘Flights of Birds’ from the Urdu.

The distinguished jury panel for The Mohzi Prize 2023 included renowned writers and translators Jenny Bhatt, N S Madhavan, and Rahul Soni.

N S Madhavan writes: “Dr. Sana R. Chaudhry’s translation of the late Fahmida Riaz’s story, Flight of Birds is an example of bravery of choice. At one level, the story is about the making of an Urdu dictionary, where use of Urdu words and phrases become inescapable. A feeble-hearted translator would have tucked the story into a box labelled ‘untranslatable’, and moved on. But not Dr. Chaudhry; she found innovative devices to overcome these seemingly insurmountable difficulties, and in a different tongue, presented Fahmida Riaz in all her elegance and subtlety.”

Sana was awarded her PhD for The Politics of Mute Speech in the Urdu Short Story, from the Department of English and Related Literature in 2021. She is currently working on her monograph, which is slated to be published soon with Clemson University Press.