CODE: Journal of Translation
Vol. VI
RAISIN IN THE SUN
CODE is the Student Journal of Translation of Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. I illustrated and designed Volume VI, which was published in January 2020.
This volume celebrates the spirit of the weavers of the written word, as they write essays, memoirs, and musings about themselves, each other, or the world around them that simmers with the dynamic processes of action and resistance. The cover illustration exploits this currency of colour and change along with the everyday intricacies of existence to delve into the lives of select writers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Haruki Murakami, Arundhati Roy, Sushila Takbhore, Nirmal Verma, etc., as they negotiate the microcosmic nature of their routine life with the uninterrupted larger process of making art that howls and resists through the printed word.
My main intention was to portray artists and writers just existing in their natural space, where they create and conjure up words that possess so much power.
INSIDE CODE
The Journal is a compendium of sixteen translations, capturing essays, interviews, memoirs, excerpts, and fictional conversations, either written by or featuring famous writers. Each piece inside the volume was accompanied by an illustration.
The vibrant colours and topsy-turvy shadows and lights in the illustrations speak just as loudly as the words do. They demand to be seen and interpreted, and that interpretation is of course, open-ended and fluid.
A CASE FOR MARGINS
We in earnest tried to raise the overall aesthetic value of the mammoth project we took on this year and opted for a cleaner design this time, with brief introduction notes on all of the wonderful texts we chose, to give the reader a sense of clarity with respect to the context of the texts and extracts.
Giving the text more room to breathe through these huge margins was to work on two levels: first was to sort of frame the text and the illustrious writer in a special focus, and second, was to make a symbolic statement to let translated literature that usually occupies the margins, to speak for itself and demand attention.