Anjum Hasan's fascinating look at 'Reading Hindi literature in translation' -- English translation -- in The Caravan, Novel Renditions, is now fully accessible online.
An interesting overview -- and many interesting observations, including that:
More depressing than just how little Hindi literature has been translated is how little of even just that has made it, readily accessibly, to US/UK shores. For every Uday Prakash (The Girl with the Golden Parasol, The Walls of Delhi) there seems so much more that is at least available in English but not readily available locally.
But this does get me to put my copy of Gillian Wright's translation of Raag Darbari closer to the top of my get-to pile.
An interesting overview -- and many interesting observations, including that:
It is striking how so many of the novels recently translated into English capture life at a modern, usually mid- to late-twentieth-century, juncture. The dodgy, if not outright corrupted, nature of this modernity is what gives these novels their charge.Surprising, too, that apparently The Gift of a Cow-author Premchand -- "the king himself", Hasan writes -- has only had some 70 of his 300 stories translated.
More depressing than just how little Hindi literature has been translated is how little of even just that has made it, readily accessibly, to US/UK shores. For every Uday Prakash (The Girl with the Golden Parasol, The Walls of Delhi) there seems so much more that is at least available in English but not readily available locally.
But this does get me to put my copy of Gillian Wright's translation of Raag Darbari closer to the top of my get-to pile.