Season of Migration to the North, published in Bangla under the title Uttare Deshantarer Mausum, is a translation of Mawsim al-Hijrati ila al-Shamal, the celebrated Arabic novel by renowned Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih, originally published in Arabic in 1966 and selected by the Arab Literary Academy in 2001 as the most important Arabic novel of the twentieth century.

Without loosening the texture and narrative force of the original work at any point, and while remaining wholly faithful to the source text without falling into the pitfalls of literal translation, this Bangla translation displays, page after page, a finely crafted harmony between the source language and the target language.

Several Arabic novels have explored the dialectical relationship between East and West, and many of them offer certain pathways toward resolving that conflict. Yet in this novel, Tayeb Salih moves away from such idealised and simplified propositions and instead attempts to probe deeply into the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. Translator Izfandior Arion has not merely translated the novel; as a gift to readers interested in Arabic fiction, he has also included an extensive critical analysis in which he seeks to analyse the novel’s thematic substance through various perspectives drawn from postcolonial criticism.

For all nations that came into direct contact with colonialism during the previous century, that encounter turned into a long and bloody struggle. Even after freeing themselves from the naked claws of empire, they have continued to bear its wounds for decades. Immersed in crises of identity and fractured by the conflict between self and other, such nations continue to search for their postcolonial character. In illuminating the postcolonial condition of these disoriented peoples, Uttare Deshantarer Mausum, the inaugural novel in Bangabihar’s Shashwata series, stands as an essential and compelling work.