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Sameer Rawal

Visat núm. 8
(octubre 2009)

Born at Delhi, India in 1973, Sameer Rawal currently resides in Barcelona, Spain. He chose to do his graduate programme in Spanish Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi rather than pursuing a career in medicine, which was the other option he had. This was, amongst other mundane causes, due to his seeing Las mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, a ‘classic’ Almodovar movie and concluding that the Spanish culture was highly exotic and therefore most interesting to study.

Conscious that language, culture and identity are intertwined in a spellbinding complexity: he translates and writes between/in four languages: Hindi, English, Spanish and Catalan (the latest language he acquired). He has translated the evergreen Catalan novel La plaça del diamant to Hindi.

Taking advantage of his ‘quadrilingualism’ he published Calaix de sandal, his poetry in Hindi-Catalan bilingual edition (Servei de Publicacions, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, 2006) where each version has different form-content combine. The poems experiment intimacy in strange, short, nearly exact and vapour like verses. The double language edition serves as an imaginary symbol for those who know only one of the languages; and for those who know both, the poems represent asymmetrical, ‘real’ relations between two languages, and indicate the ideological impossibility of translation i.e. moving 'meaning' from one language to another.