Mangalesh Dabral (May 16, 1948–December 9, 2020) was an acclaimed poet, translator, and Hindi journalist. He was born in a village in the hills of Uttarakhand. He was a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award (India’s National Academy of Letters) in 2000 for his collection Ham jo dekhte hain (That we see), published in 1995. He returned the award in 2015, along with others, in protest against the killing of scholar M. M. Kalburgi and the growing atmosphere of violence and intolerance against writers. His other poetry collections include Pahar par lalten (Lantern on the mountains, 1981) and Ghar ka rasta (The way home, 1988), and he wrote a travel diary, Ek bar Iowa (Once Iowa, 1996). His poems have been widely translated and published in all major Indian languages as well as in English, Russian, German, Portuguese, French, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and Bulgarian. Bertolt Brecht, Yannis Ritsos, Ernesto Cardenal, Pablo Neruda, and Zbigniew Herbert are among the major world poets Dabral translated into Hindi.
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for Vishnu Khare
How to convey one’s well-being over the phone,
It’s going all right,
All that is there is good or nothing is good.
The main thing to say is,…