About Paar

Paar(পার) means crossing — getting to the other shore. It's the word you use when you row a boat across a river in Bengal, or when you finally make it through something difficult.

It felt like the right name for a translation project.

Bengali has a rich literary tradition that almost no one outside the language can access. Not Tagore — he's been translated. The others. The detective fiction of Hemendra Kumar Roy. The sci-fi of Premendra Mitra. The satire of Rajshekhar Basu. These writers defined the childhoods of generations of Bengali readers, and almost none of their work exists in English.

Paar publishes careful, human-edited translations of Bengali literature in the public domain. We start with the stories we loved as kids. We translate them the way they deserve to be translated — not literally, but honestly.

Every text on this site is translated from the original Bengali. Every story is in the public domain. Every translator is credited.