Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Not the least remarkable feature of this book is the ‘Translator’s Introduction’ by Rani Ray. Outlining the genesis of Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Aranyer Dinratri, first published in Jalsa, a popular film journal based in Calcutta, Ray locates the novel both in its immediate context within the Bengali literary map and within a larger canvas of textual politics of the 1960s the world over.

The novel Anitya by Mridula Garg is a fascinating story that beautifully weaves the personal and political into one thread. It effectively uses the backdrop of the independence struggle to recount the failings of a nation and also the individuals caught in a web of conflicting ideologies.

The time has come, it seems, for India to read what Bharat has written. The spate of translations over the last few years is welcome for two main reasons: one for introducing the real India to the world and two, for raising the level of translations in this country to a degree that now one actually looks forward to reading them.

A woman is a thing apart.She is bracketed off, aComma, semicolon, at mostA lower case letter, lostthe literary circus.………… but when she speaksHer poems bite, ferocious. (p. 102)

Explaining his location clearly as writer, translator, and linguist, the author Professor U.N. Singh paints a wide canvas on translation as an instrument of language growth. A growth that is essential to make languages ‘modern’, ‘a step which makes a given speech capable of being used in a much larger number of domains and in many manifestations’ (p. 183).

Translating Saratchandra Chattopadhyay is no easy task: his novels are so deeply embedded in the social and cultural atmosphere of his time, and the events and emotions he describes are so inextricably bound up with the energies,

A remarkable compendium of fascinat-ing tales, Chitra Deb’s book is an unselfconsciously written account of generations of women in Bengal’s most significant family.

All the three novels that are grouped together in this collection, one of them separated from the others by more than 30 years, explore situations of extra-marital rapport that have the potential to become full-blown affairs.

For quite a few decades, the world outside Bengal knew Rabindranath Tagore primarily as a poet since it was mostly his poems that were first translated into other languages.

An Endless Winter’s Night presents 19 commendably translated contemporary short stories (and two poems)—all of equal literary merit—written in various Indian languages over the last two decades.

Kalpana Bardhan’s anthology is a comprehensive introduction to modern Bengali literature in translation. The chronological arrangement of these two volumes encompasses the breadth of modern Bengali literature and presents an overview of the major authors, works, genres, periods, movements and so on.

My only quarrel with Julius J. Lipner relates to the subtitle of this meticulous and valuable study. ‘Study’ may seem a strange word to use for what is primarily the translation of a gripping work of fiction.