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The paper is a study of a unique text in the corpus of Indian writing in English that has been overlooked by academia. Vikram Seth’s Three Chinese Poets, published in 1992, is a translation by an Indian writer from Chinese into English. The study will adopt a qualitative textual analysis to examine Vikram Seth’s translation of the three classical Chinese poets, Li Bai, Wang Wei, and Du Fu, by situating Seth’s text within the framework of translation’s role in world literature. It will employ a close reading of the translated poems through a historical and contextual paradigm, highlighting their contribution to the movement of these ancient poems across temporal and cultural borders. A post-colonial critique of the history of literary translation, focusing on Western writers’ translations of Chinese poems, will be used to uncover the literary hierarchies that have shaped the texture of these translations. The analysis will also draw on paratextual references from Vikram Seth’s prefaces and notes to emphasise Seth’s attempt to cosmopolitanise world literature.
Dr Divya Pradhan. “Verses Across Borders: A Study of Vikram Seth’s Three Chinese Poets.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 3, June 2026, pp. 680-708. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n3.42.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
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