"This issue has six scripts: Hindi, English, Kannada, Urdu, Swedish and Catalan, keeping Pratilipi on track to be a multiscript, multilingual space. This issue has a feature on Swedish poet Ann Jäderlund which includes Staffan Söderblom's introduction to her poetry and an intimate piece by Teji Grover on translating her into Hindi. Excerpts from Wagish Shukla's Vishesh: Ek Tilismi Upakhyan make an outstanding piece of writing that blends pagan narrative devices with those of a crime thriller.

Three young poets - Sameer Rawal, Vivek Narayanan and Annie Zaidi; three of the most well-known Indian poets - Mangalesh Dabral, Sheen Kaaf Nizam, and H.S. Shiva Prakash; and K.V.K. Murthy, better known online as James Joyce, are the poets in the issue."

"This issue of Pratilipi could have been titled "History and Literature". It presents the inter-textualities of history and literature in instances where the narrative of history enters a literary text, where a literary text makes history its subject and, also, as a text in which a historian – a novelist in his secret ambition – takes account of these(literary) texts.

A second title for this issue could be "poetry". In a time almost defined by prose and, in the same breath, in a time almost defined by the market - writing poetry is not an industry conducive to good health. The logic is simple: No one reads poetry. The proof? Books of poems do not sell. And if books of poems are neither sold nor read, it’s proof that good poetry is not being written. We humbly submit 12 poets - in five languages and spanning, chronologically, a hundred years - in refutation."

"With this issue we have ventured into music, cinema and popular art.

Sridala Swami is curating a series of writings on Indian documentary films. In each issue, two filmmakers will write about the various issues involved. Some numbers by Sridhar/Thayil and a write-up along with brilliant pieces by two young Hindi poets on shehnai-legend Bismillah Khan inaugurate our focus on music. A separate section, Lok-Priya (Hindi for 'popular', literally 'something that is dear to the public') is also a new addition. We begin with translated excerpts from Sarnath Banerjee's graphic novel The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers, Ashok Banker's short story and the Sridhar/Thayil songs."

"The texts presented here read the relationship between translation and India in many ways. Sudhir Chandra, while narrating the complex story of the formation of modern Indian cultural consciousness in the context of colonization, calls attention to how the first Indian translators tried to use translation as a double-edged sword which soon turned into an 'epistemological submission'. Madan Soni's text reads the development of Hindi prose as fallout of colonization and problematizes its post-colonial history. Purushottam Agrawal, in decoding the pre- and post-colonial translations of Kabir, finds that, in these translations, the translators have created a different Kabir out of their preconceptions - not just a different poet, but a different person. Annie Montaut's paper reads Nirmal Verma and Krishna Baldev Vaid's fiction (and her own translations of that) in light of Indian and Western perceptions. Giriraj Kiradoo, in trying to read Tejaswini Niranjana's book, problematizes the proposed project of using post-structuralist methods to solve post-colonial questions and of the position of the original vis-a-vis the translation. "