Kalpana Raina’s path into translated literature was a gradual return to an earlier interest, not a sudden departure from her working life. After studying English literature and spending 25 years in finance, she supported translation initiatives and literary organizations; in 2024, she also became one of the translators of a collection of stories by her uncle, Kashmiri writer Hari Krishna Kaul.
From studying literature to a 25-year finance career
“I started life, you know, as a student of literature,” Raina told the Yale MacMillan Center in 2024. She said she had been working toward a PhD in English literature before moving into finance because academic jobs were unavailable. The finance career, she said, worked well for 25 years.
Her literary interests did not disappear during that time. In a 2019 interview with Scroll.in, Raina was described as a senior executive with financial experience and a board member of media organizations including Words Without Borders (WWB). That profile shows her bringing professional and financial experience into literary support; it describes her roles at that time, not necessarily her current positions.
How Raina supported translation
Yali’s mentorship and publishing aims
Raina helped finance Yali, a translation initiative run by Sangam House in Bengaluru. In the 2019 Scroll interview, she described its aims as nurturing younger translators through mentorship, supporting small publishers, and encouraging translation both into and out of Indian languages. During Yali’s first two years, the interview reported work involving Hindi, English, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Kashmiri.
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Her approach was collaborative: translation needed more than one institution or source of support. Publishers, cultural organizations, funders, and translators each had a role to play. Raina’s 2019 interview also reported that WWB published work by 145 authors from 46 countries, translated from 29 languages in 2018. Those are the organization’s reported figures for that year, not a current output total.
Different forms of support serve different needs
Translation support can address several points in the path from a manuscript to a reader. Mentorship helps translators develop their practice; grants can provide time to work; publishers turn translations into books; and literary platforms help readers encounter writing across languages. The programs below illustrate distinct parts of that landscape, rather than interchangeable or necessarily current opportunities.
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| Program or initiative | Who or what it supports | Form of support and scope |
|---|---|---|
| Yali, as described by Raina in 2019 | Emerging translators and small publishers | Mentorship and support for translation into and out of Indian languages; the interview reported several languages represented during its first two years. |
| PEN/Heim Translation Fund | Literary translators | PEN America reports that the fund has supported nearly 200 in-progress translations from more than 35 languages since its establishment in 2003. Its official program page says it began with an endowed gift of $730,000. Consult PEN America for current eligibility and application details. |
| New India Foundation translation fellowship | Translators of eligible nonfiction from ten Indian languages | The fellowship page states a six-month grant of ₹6,00,000. Application-cycle dates and criteria should be confirmed on the foundation’s page. |
How patronage led Raina back to translation
A family visit to India shortly before the pandemic brought Raina back to stories by Kaul that she had heard growing up but had not read. Her father read the stories aloud. Raina felt earlier translations had softened aspects of Kaul’s voice, so her first plan was to organize a new translation project: assemble collaborators, oversee the work, and bring it to completion.
That project became personal as well as organizational. Raina has said she spoke Kashmiri but could not read it. Recordings of the stories helped prompt her to take part in translating them. Her movement from patronage into translation was therefore not a rejection of her earlier role; it was a deeper involvement in the same collaborative effort to make literature available across languages.
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For Now, It Is Night and the collaborative translation
For Now, It Is Night: Stories by Hari Krishna Kaul is an English translation of stories by Kaul, Raina’s uncle. The collection, released in March 2024 according to Yale, was translated collaboratively by Raina and three other contributors. Yale describes it as the first translated collection of Kaul’s Kashmiri stories published in the United States. It brings the stories to English-language readers while making clear that the translation was a team effort, not Raina’s alone.
In her first-person account for Literary Hub, Raina recounts how family memory, listening, and the limits of existing translations shaped her involvement. The project connects the two strands of her literary life: support for the people and institutions that make translation possible, and the demanding work of translating a writer’s voice.
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What Raina’s story says about translation patronage
Raina’s experience illustrates why literary translation often depends on more than a translator’s skill. Translators need time and sustained work; smaller publishers need resources to take on books that may otherwise struggle to find a route to readers; and readers need ways to encounter writing beyond the languages they already know. Raina has linked this work to preserving linguistic and cultural identity, while emphasizing that no single organization can meet every need.
Her 2019 reading recommendations also reflected the breadth of translated fiction she was following then: Hanne Ørstavik’s Love, translated by Martin Aitken; Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, translated by Lorin Stein; and Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar, translated by Srinath Perur. These were her recent favorites in that 2019 interview, not a claim about her current reading list.
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