Sunanda Basu
India

Sunanda Basu

Sunanda Basu was born in Kolkata, in eastern India. After taking her Master's degree in “mental and moral philosophy” at the University of Calcutta, she studied German at the Goethe-Institut in Pune, over in the western state of Maharashtra. In September 1970, after teaching for two years, she attended teacher training in Munich for a year and a half. After returning to India, she began teaching at the Goethe-Institut and continued working there till 2005. She has been a visiting lecturer in German at Presidency University in Kolkata for several years now.
In connection with literary events held by the Goethe-Institut, Basu has translated a number of short works and excerpts from longer works by such major German literary figures as Günter Grass, Goethe, Schiller and Bertolt Brecht. Her Bengali translation of Sebastian Haffner’s memoirs about the rise of Nazism, Die Geschichte eines Deutschen (The Story of a German), came out in 2009.
In 2020, Basu co-translated two plays by Roland Schimmelpfennig, Wintersonnenwende (Winter Solstice) and Idomeneus, into her native Bengali for the Goethe-Institut Mumbai’s contemporary drama translation project.