Recently, in a talk given by Professor Nigel Leask at the University of Delhi on Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, he struck a comparison between Burns and Rabindranath Tagore. He mentioned how both appropriated Scottish ballads and folk music in their respective compositions and therefore, how both could be aptly titled ‘people’s poet’ or ‘poet of the soil’.
Referring to the craft of translation and its difficulties, J.M. Coetzee had commented in his rather well-known essay, ‘Roads to Translation’ that ‘Translation seems to me a craft in a way that cabinet-making is a craft. There is no substantial theory of cabinet-making, and no philosophy of cabinet-making except the ideal of being a good cabinet-maker, plus a handful of precepts relating to tools and to types of wood’ (Coetzee 151).
Once again in her latest novel, as in most of her earlier work, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala explores the situation of foreigners in India and what India does to them. But unlike her earlier work (seven novels and three collections of short stories), here for the first time…
Mythology has always been a good source of raw material for fiction in literature. Recent activity on the Indian literary scene has reaffirmed this old proposition with a series of publications, including some bestsellers.
Although works of Indian language fiction in English translation are being published since the early nineties by the country’s major publishing houses, it is rare for these publishers to show the same enthusiasm for poetry in Indian languages.
Bertrand Russell was born in 1872 and died in 1970 at the ripe old age of ninety-seven. Mathematician, philosopher, pacifist during World War I, advocate of war on Russia soon after World War II, campaigner for nuclear disarmament towards the end of his life, and prolific writer on a variety…