Teji Grover


Teji Grover is a Hindi poet, fiction writer, translator and painter. She is regarded as an important voice in Hindi poetry in the generations born after 1950. According to poet and critic Ashok Vajpeyi, "Teji Grover shapes her language away from the prevalent idiom of Hindi poetry. In her poetry language acquires a form which is unique..." Her poems have been translated into many Indian and foreign languages.
Grover's fiction is known for its intertextual weaving and the seamless blending of dream and reality, the time past, present and future and the mythological and everyday in such a way that writing comes to predominate every thing else. As the Polish Hindi scholar Kamila Junik has written about her novel Neela, "All the characters write. All the events are being written. The existence is being written as well. There is no other world beyond writing."
Through her numerous translations, Teji Grover has introduced some of the most significant modern Scandinavian writers and poets to the Hindi reader, such as Knut Hamsun, Tarjei Vesaas, Jon Fosse, Kjell Askildsen, Gunnar Björling, Hans Herbjørnsrud, Lars Amund Vaage, Edith Södergran, Harry Martinson, Tomas Tranströmer, Lars Lundkvist, and Ann Jäderlund, as also the controversial French writer Marguerite Duras.
An abstract painter, Grover uses organic and natural colours; the latter she makes herself.

Life

Teji Grover was born on 7 March 1955 at Pathankot, a small town in the state of Punjab in India. She taught English literature at MCM DAV College for Women at Chandigarh for over two decades before taking early retirement in 2003. Since then she has been a full-time writer and painter.
She is currently based in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.

Awards and fellowships

She has received the following awards and fellowships:

Original work

Teji Grover's individual collections of poetry are:
The second edition of the collection Lo Kaha Sambari was published by Vani Prakashan, New Delhi, in 2016.
Her poems also figured in the following books:
The most recent publication of her poems in Hindi was in the online literary magazine Samalochan.
Grover has published two books of fiction:
The second edition of her novel came out in 2016.
Grover has also published a collection of essays, memoirs and travelogues and another collection of essays on folktales:
Teji Grover's poems have been translated into Indian and foreign languages including Marathi, English, Swedish, Polish, Norwegian, Catalan and Estonian. English translations of her poems have been included in the following anthologies:
Her poems figure in the following anthologies in foreign languages:
In 2019, a collection of Teji Grover's selected poems was translated into Swedish and was published by Tranan, a Stockholm based publisher. The title of the book was HUR SKA JAG SÄGA VAD SOM KOMMER. The poems were translated by six Swedish poets and translators, namely, Ann Jäderlund, Birgitta Wallin, Lars Andersson, Lars Hermansson, Niclas Nilsson and Staffan Söderblom.
Her poems have also appeared in a Marathi anthology of Hindi poetry: Sangini niwadak, Hindi stree kavita, ed. and trans. Chandrakant Patil.
The international literary journals in which the English translations of her poems have appeared include Poetry International Rotterdam, Rhino: The Poetry Forum, Chase Park, Modern Poetry in Translation, Hindi: Language, Discourse, Writing, Indian Literature, Paintbrush, Aufgabe and dialog.
The non-English international journals in which her poems have been published include Lyrikvannen, Karavan and Sirp.
In 2018 a section of an issue of the Swedish journal Karavan was focused on her work. The issue carried an interview with her, translation of a long poem by her and two articles on her paintings.
Her novel Neela appeared in English translation, by Meena Arora Nayak, in the journal Hindi: Language, Discourse, Writing in 2000. Its Polish translation, by Kamila Junik, was published by Ksiegarnia Akademicka, Kraków, under the title Blekit in 2009.
Two of her short stories, "Bhikshuni" and "Suparna", have also been translated into and published in English.

Translations by Teji Grover

Teji Grover has translated into Hindi the following works:

From the Norwegian

From among Teji Grover's essays in Hindi, the following two essays have been translated into and published in English:
"The Blue House" and "Looking at the Body of a Poem: The Journey of a Hindi Poet".
Further, the following essays were written and published originally in English:
From among these essays, "A Necessary Poem", "The Fragrance of Delgadina’s Soul", "Weak Pink Color: Translating Ann Jäderlund on the Ghats of the Narmada" and "A Poet Caged in the Act of Translation" have been translated into and published in Swedish.
Another of her essays, "Song of the Cows: Translating Lars Amund Vaage's 'Cows' into Hindi", has been translated into and published in Norwegian as part of an anthology of essays on the Norwegian author Lars Amund Vaage's work.

Children's literature

Teji Grover has edited four books for children in Hindi, all published by Eklavya, Bhopal. These are:
In 1999, Teji Grover read her poems at Bengt Berg's Book Cafe Heidruns in Torsby, Sweden. In 2008 she read her poems at the Baltic Center for Writers and Translators, Visby, Sweden, at their annual International Poetry Festival. In the same year, she read her poems in the Olav Hauge Centenary Festival at the poet's birthplace, Ulvik, in Norway. In 2011 she had readings of her poetry at Trondheim, Norway, during the IndiaFestival that was being held there. Further, in 2014 she read her poems at the Writers' House at Tallinn, Estonia.
In 1997, Teji Grover visited Sweden as part of a delegation of 10 Indian writers. Subsequently, she was one of the Indian collaborators of the Indo-Swedish Translation Project, 1998-2009. Under the aegis of this project she translated three volumes of poetry from the Swedish into Hindi In 2008, she lectured at the Book Fair at Gothenburg on her translation of the Swedish poet Ann Jäderlund's poetry into Hindi.

Exhibitions of her paintings

Teji Grover has held the following solo shows of her paintings:
Her paintings were also part of the following group shows: