Career
Under the name of P. Lal, he wrote eight books of poetry, over a dozen volumes of literary criticism, a memoir, several books of stories for children, as well as dozens of translations from other languages, chiefly Sanskrit, into English. He also edited a number of literary anthologies.
He is perhaps best known as the translator into English of the entire Indian epic poem Mahabharata. His translation, which was published in an edition of over three hundred fascicules since the early 1970s, was republished in a collated edition of eighteen large volumes. His Mahabharata is the most complete in any language, comprising all the slokas included in all recensions of the work.
His translation of the Mahabharata is characteristically both poetic and swift to read, and oriented to the oral/musical tradition in which the work was originally created. To emphasize this tradition, in 1999 he began reading the entire 100,000-sloka work aloud, for one hour each Sunday at a Calcutta library hall.
In addition to the Mahabharata, his translations from Sanskrit included a number of other religious works, including 21 of the Upanisads, as well as plays and lyric poetry. He also translated modern writers such as Premchand (from the Hindi) and Tagore (from the Bengali).
Since his founding of Writers Workshop, he published over 3000 volumes by Indian literary authors, mostly in the English language, including poetry, fiction, educational texts, screenplays, drama, "serious comics," and children's books, as well as audiobooks. Writers Workshop has published first books by many authors who went on to fame, including Vikram Seth, Pritish Nandy and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.
His publishing enterprise was unusual in that he personally served as publisher, editor, reader, secretary, and editorial assistant. The books were also unique in appearance, being hand-typeset on local Indian presses, and bound in hand-loomed sari cloth. Writers Workshop continues to publish, under the direction of Lal's family members.
Some of the last works he was engaged in publishing were Holmes of the Raj by Vithal Rajan and Labyrinth by Arunabha Sengupta.
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