Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
As we wait for the International Booker Prize announcement on May 26 — Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell, is on the shortlist — we have a spotlight on translators in Literary Review, as also a review of the book. Today also happens to be Bob Dylan’s 81st birthday. The musician, artist and poet who is touring the U.S. with his pandemic album Rough and Rowdy Ways is also putting the final touches to a new book, out in November. The Philosophy of Modern Song (Simon & Schuster) is the first book of new writing Dylan is doing since Chronicles, Volume One (published in 2004 and on the New York Times bestseller lists for over 50 weeks) and after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. According to the publisher, Dylan offers a master class on the art and craft of songwriting in his new book with over 60 essays on songs by other artists from Stephen Foster, Hank Williams, Nina Simone to Elvis Costello. “He analyses what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal.” While they are reflections on music, they are also meditations on the human condition, like in many of his songs.
In reviews we read Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, Seema Chishti’s new book on her parents Sumitra and Anees, their ‘khichdi’ marriage and her mother’s cookbook in which mutton biryani hobnobs with sambar, a biography of Soli Sorabjee, and a special on 12 translators who are getting almost as much attention as authors.
Books of the week
“A tale tells itself. It can be complete, but also incomplete, the way all tales are.” With these opening lines, Geetanjali Shree provides the key to her sprawling and powerful novel, Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell and shortlisted for the Booker International Prize. The story of the 80-year-old at its heart, Ma, is told from the perspective of various characters including humans, birds and crows, butterflies, even doors. In her review, Mini Kapoor writes that by the time the “shapeshifting” novel is over, all of human history, literature, art, thought, politics have been at the service of this tale that’s telling itself. “Ma has a 1947 storyline to pursue, and does so heroically, opening the trapdoors to her adolescent past. But her message is not just about Partition all that was left behind. In this epic account of her 81st year, her message holds good for every aspect of the lived life: ‘A border does not enclose, it opens out… A border is a horizon. Where two worlds meet. And embrace.’ It is a message that binds Ma’s past and present, and the future too of so many who’ve helped along her story.”
Seema Chishti writes a moving story about her parents, Sumitra and Anees, and the possibilities they dreamed of in an India that belonged to everyone. Chishti’s book, Sumitra and Anees: Tales and Recipes from a Khichdi Family (HarperCollins), begins by celebrating the ‘khichdi’ of mixed marriages. Khichdi is that much loved dish made with a mixture of rice and dal and a part of all our lives, present in some form on every table, representing the richness and regional variations of Indian cuisine, says Rana Safvi in her review. Chishti writes that she was forced to lend words to a sacred marriage of two people bound by love and shared interests, though she knows that had her parents been alive, they would have baulked at this public display of personal details. Yet, whether it was the Emergency or the ‘tremors of the demolition of the Babri Masjid that changed India’, Anees and Sumitra, says Chishti, realised slowly that the hurdles they thought they had faced when they got together were simply ‘genteel objections’ compared to what the country was now experiencing. “With the diversity under attack, Chishti chose to share details of ‘not just an idea, but a lived reality’.”
Sumitra and Anees — Tales and Recipes from a Khichdi Family review: Love in the time of hate
The story goes that Soli Sorabjee’s life-long passion for jazz began accidentally, while he was in college. He was at Bombay’s Rhythm House, now shuttered, looking for Brahms’ ‘Hungarian Dance No. 5’ but the salesman inadvertently handed him a single, with jazz clarinet and big band maestro Benny Goodman’s, ‘Tiger Rag.’ Sorabjee became an instant convert, and not long after began playing the clarinet in the college band. The love affair with jazz continued throughout his life. In Soli Sorabjee: Life and Times, An Authorised Biography, Abhinav Chandrachud constructs a biography based on the multiple cases Sorabjee appeared in, many of them leading to landmark judgments, all part of public record. It’s an interesting idea, says the reviewer Radha Thomas, to create a biography of a person’s life through the court cases he appeared in. “It’s almost like solving a crossword puzzle -- and soon a theme is visible. It is clearly one of a man who was apolitical, believed in fair play and possessed moral integrity. It must have been difficult to stick to one’s position, especially in an era where politics was violent and brutal, such as during the Emergency.”
Spotlight
Decoding and understanding problem | Photo Credit: lucky336
In India, English translation is undergoing a renaissance, says Anusua Mukherjee in an essay, ‘My bhasha, our bhasha’. Gone are the days when translated books meant dull-looking volumes littered with typos. Now they have snazzy covers, which usually announce the translator’s name. Mini Krishnan, Co-ordinating Editor, Tamil Nadu Textbook & Educational Services Corporation, says, “Earlier, translation was voluntary and a translator went from door to door lugging typescripts. They were overwhelmingly retired teachers of English Literature. Over the last 20 years or so, seeing a ‘business opportunity’ in the thousands who emerge with higher education degrees equipped with only English, publishers have become pro-active in commissioning and locating translators, seeking advice from regional language bodies and assembling lists for the home market.” A literary campaign, #translatorsonthecover, started on International Translation Day (September 30) last year. It was a demand by American translator Jennifer Croft (who shared the 2018 Man Booker International Prize with Olga Tokarczuk for her translation of Tokarczuk’s novel, Flights) and British novelist Mark Haddon to have the translator’s name alongside the author’s on book covers. The petition, which has more than 2,500 signatures till date, stated its purpose simply: “For too long, we’ve taken translators for granted. It is thanks to translators that we have access to world literatures past and present... They should be properly recognised, celebrated and rewarded for this.”
The International Booker Prize may give English translation in India its moment in the sun
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- Amendments in the citizenship law in India have spawned distinct regimes. In Citizenship Regimes, Law, and Belonging: The CAA and the NRC (OUP), Anupama Roy argues that the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 and the National Register of Citizens have generated a regime of ‘bounded citizenship’ on the assumption that citizenship can be passed on as a legacy of ancestry.
- In How to Prevent the Next Pandemic (Penguin Random House), Bill Gates, leans on experts and on his experience of combating fatal diseases to explain the science of corona diseases. He lays down how nations, working with one another and the private sector, can ward off COVID-like catastrophes and eliminate respiratory diseases, including the flu.
- Mumbai: A City Through Objects (Harper Design), edited by Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, director of the Dr. Bhau Baji Lad Museum, tells the story of Mumbai through 101 objects. Interpreting the city through its artefacts, the book celebrates 150 years of the museum, formerly called the Victoria and Albert Museum, opening its doors in 1872.
- Twenty-two-year-old Wendy Doniger arrived in Calcutta in August 1963, on a scholarship to study Sanskrit and Bengali. In An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963-64 (Speaking Tiger) the India she describes to her parents back home is young, like her, still finding its feet, and learning to come to terms with the violence of Partition.
