It occurs to me that the text on the Bangla books I designed are only accessible to those who read the language. So I will write a little more here about each of the books, starting with the first one – Amare dei tomar haate. It is a translation of Inês Pedrosa’s beautifully layered novel, Nas Tuas Mãos (1997) from Portuguese into Bangla by Rita Ray, and published by Jadavpur University Press in 2020.
The novel entwines the narratives of three extraordinary women from successive generations of the same family, each outrageously radical in their own way, and each directly participating in the political history of Portugal of their own times.
I drew Jenny, her husband and his lover on the front cover, in colours that I stole off a description in Jenny’s diary, which constitutes the first third of this book. In her words, the two men are as the sun and the moon, while Jenny herself is described further along the book as Santa (Saint) Madonna – an unlikely yet poignant coming together of Eve and the Virgin Mary.
I snatched motifs from the book for the back cover illustrations as well – of the boy with the moth pinned to his tie; or the oranges, milk and carnations that women bring in their bags for all the soldiers on the day the war ends; the garden that Jenny’s husband had manicured into the shape of a chessboard; or the camera belonging to Jenny’s adoptive daughter Camilla, whose narrative segment elaborates the stories behind the most striking documentary photographs and portraits she has took as a photojournalist. Like those of the resistance in Mozambique where she meets the father of her daughter Natalie.
Finally, Camilla’s daughter Natalia, who grows up to be an architect, writes the letters to her grandmother Jenny about her own life, constituting the final third of the book, they appear on my design in the border framing Jenny and hers.
The novel sparked off far too many compelling and irresistible visuals, more than I could possibly accommodate on the double spread. This was also my first ever attempt at hand-lettering a title in Bangla, so it remains very special to me.
