Now on-line at:

www.geocities.com/christopherrollason/HectorTRfinal.pdf

is my translation into English of BONFILIO, a short story by Héctor Domingo (Mexico). This story was originally published in Spanish in Héctor's volume BITÁCORAS DE SOLEDAD (2008) (earlier reviewed on this blog by myself, in Spanish - entry for 29 June 2008).

Copyright resides with Héctor for the original and with me for the translation.

**

An EXTRACT from the translation can be read below

**

Ahora podéis encontrar en linea, en:

www.geocities.com/christopherrollason/HectorTRfinal.pdf

mi traducción hacia el inglés de BONFILIO, relato de Héctor Domingo (México). El original, en lengua española, se publicó en el volumen BITÁCORAS DE SOLEDAD (2008), libro ya reseñado en este espacio (entrada: 29-VI-2008).

Los derechos de autor quedan con Héctor (original) y conmigo (traducción).

**

  EXTRACT:

"7 September

  “Why are you taking it if it’s not for you?”, the sweeper asked me that evening in the little square. The sun was already hiding itself and the wind had blown towards me a leaf of paper, old-fashioned in appearance and delicately handwritten.

  “Is it yours?”, I asked him in surprise. He came up to me to take it away from me suavely, then raised his arm to the sky and let it float away after the first gust that rose up with sufficient strength.

  “That letter’s not for you – or me either”, he said as if apologetically. Then he withdrew to carry on with his labours, while the piece of paper flew on, down the street and towards the ocean.

  I went after the man with my uncertainties and he responded by pointing towards an old house situated uphill. There at the balustrade was a woman in a gala dress (...)"

MANJU KAPUR, "THE IMMIGRANT"

 Delhi: Random House India, 2008, ISBN 978 81 8400 048 1, hard covers, 337 pp.

**

Review by Dr Christopher Rollason, Metz, France – rollason@9online.fr

 **

Manju Kapur's fourth novel is about an Indian immigrant couple in Canada. Here is an extract from my review -

full text on-line at:

www.geocities.com/christopherrollason/ManjuImmigrantreview.pdf

**

Manju Kapur has already achieved a high degree of both critical and popular success, in India and abroad, as an admired exponent of Indian Writing in English (IWE), with her three previous novels, Difficult Daughters (1998), A Married Woman (2002) and Home (2006). The Immigrant, her fourth novel, in some ways observes continuity with its predecessors and in other ways breaks new ground. The Delhi-based novelist and lecturer (currently on sabbatical) at Delhi University’s Miranda House College has by now won a reputation as a frank and sensitive chronicler of the lives of (generally Hindu) Indian middle-class or lower-middle-class families and, above all, their women members.

Temporally speaking, Kapur’s territory has variously been today’s India and – what is not the same thing – her country’s recent past. If A Married Woman had a near-contemporary setting, while Difficult Daughters ushered its characters from pre-Independence days up to the time of writing and Home from the mid-60s to near to the present, The Immigrant here differs from all three in being located throughout in a period recent but not contemporary, the 1970s of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. Spatially, too, it represents a new departure: Difficult Daughters did not range outside the subcontinent, while in A Married Woman and Home the non-Indian world (the UK, the US) featured as vacation destinations and, in the former case, also as an academic mecca, but both narratives were set overwhelmingly in India. The Immigrant, by contrast and as its title suggests, divides its fictional locales between India and Canada (with a couple of excursions to the US), thus and despite the time-lag with the present locating India in the vexed context of globalisation with far greater emphasis than any earlier Kapur novel. Sociologically, and looking at the class and occupational backgrounds of the characters, if Home found Kapur exploring the (non-English-speaking) lives of people lower on the social hierarchy than the educated folk of her first two novels, here we are back in firmly middle-class territory, with characters’ conditions ranging from the shabby-genteel to the nouveau riche but with educatedness, command of English and a certain international veneer always presumed. (...)

NB: for a link to a recent interview with Manju Kapur, see entry on this blog for 12 August 2008

 23/12/2008

HARRY POTTER AND THE BROTHERS GRIMM'S RETURN - J.K. ROWLING'S "TALES OF BEEDLE THE BARD"

J.K. Rowling, "THE TALES OF BEEDLE THE BARD", London: Children's High Level Group / Bloomsbury Publishing, 2008, hardback, xvii + 109 pp., ISBN 978-0-7475-9987-6

**

Readers of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final volume in J.K. Rowling's seven-tome wizarding epic, will recall the inset story 'The Tale of the Three Brothers', attributed to Beedle the Bard, which appeared at one of that book's most dramatic moments - in chapter 21, when Hermione reads out the tale to Harry and Ron, all three on the run from the Death Eaters, in the home of the perfidious Xenophilius Lovegood. At the time it struck me as a remarkably powerful fairy-tale in the best Brothers Grimm mode, and it is now an enormous pleasure to find it once again, alongside with four new stories from the Bard's storehouse, in this welcome companion volume to the Potter series. The new stories are: 'The Wizard and the Hopping Pot', 'The Fountain of Fair Fortune', 'The Warlock's Hairy Heart' and 'Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump'; 'The Tale of the Three Brothers' is the fifth and last.

J.K. Rowling has vowed there will be no more Harry Potter books as such, but ancillary volumes such as this - joining Quidditch Through the Ages, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and to be joined at some point by Rowling's projected Potter encyclopaedia - do not amount to a breach of that promise, and represent an interesting extension of and commentary on the Potter phenomenon. The present offering appears as 'a collection of stories written for young wizards and witches' (Introduction, xi), written by Beedle the Bard in the fifteenth century and translated from the original runes by none other than Hermione Granger. Each story is accompanied by notes attributed to Albus Dumbledore and further annotated in person by J.K. Rowling, who also signs the introduction. This amalgam of story, purported translation, criticism and annotation in fact constitutes a highly sophisticated textual mix, and it may, I believe, be reasonably argued that with this little book Rowling is, once again, doing the world an educational service - this time by gently urging her younger readers along the much-needed path of textual awareness and intelligent criticism. Cervantes offered Don Quixote as an alleged translation from the Arabic; Edgar Allan Poe presented The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as his imaginary hero's adventures relayed to the world by himself; J.K. Rowling now serves up a set of narratives claimed to be written by one of her characters, translated by a second and commented on by a third.

Intertextuality, then, rules from the beginning: in her introduction, Rowling refers to 'those familiar with the history of the most recent wizarding war (everyone who has read all seven volumes of the life of Harry Potter ...)' (xv-xvi), and indeed most readers of these tales will be in that position. It is assumed that readers know what a Horcrux is, and if a term like 'Animagus' is glossed it is to refresh memories, not to introduce something brand-new. Dumbledore's commentaries refer at will to characters and themes from the Potter books - though a shade problematically if we think of the sixth and seventh, since he is said to have written the commentary on 'The Tale of the Three Brothers' eighteen months before the 'tragic events' of the sixth: as Rowling herself says, 'Dumbledore reveals a little less than he knows - or suspects - about the final story in this book" (Introduction, xv). The reader, meanwhile, knows that the tale has played a major part in the plot of 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows' and has already been multiply interpreted within that book by different characters. All this intertextual and interpretative dimension serves to make the young reader aware that books and stories do not exist in isolation, for we live in a world where all is related to all.

Dumbledore's commentaries also have the function of conveying important notions relating to text and meaning. Of the first story, 'The Wizard and The Hopping-Pot', he immediately states that it is not as innocent as it seems: a apparently 'simple and heart-warming fable' or paean to generosity, it was greeted in its day with hostility by many in the wizarding community because of its 'message of brotherly love for Muggles' at a time of hostility between the two worlds (13). Albus Dumbledore thus alerts readers to the need to be aware of historical context when interpreting a text. Any idea of textual innocence is further undermined in the commentary on the second tale, 'The Fountain of Fair Fortune', when Dumbledore informs us that 'more than one parent has demanded the removal of this particular tale from the Hogwarts library' (39), even quoting a letter on the matter from none other than Lucius Malfoy, the father of Harry's arch-enemy Draco. The young audience is thus confronted with complex issues of censorship and book-banning, and therefore, of interpretation: there are those who would carry their interpretation of a book so far as to eliminate the book itself. Finally, Dumbledore's reading of 'The Tale of the Three Brothers' - necessarily partial, as Rowling had already signalled - should alert us to the provisional nature of any textual interpretation and the need to take account of a given reader's position as interpreter.

The story-telling goes on: stories speak to stories and characters to readers. I will not summarise J.K. Rowling's new fairy-tales here, preferring to leave their discovery to the reader. I hope, though, that these brief comments will have suggested something of the deft and intelligent fashion in which her tale-telling here not only - as we all know - encourages otherwise reluctant young people to read books as such, but is also able to instil habits of reading books well and wisely.  

Now out is the latest issue (Vol. 22, No 2, December 2008) of THE QUEST: A JOURNAL OF INDIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE (Ranchi, Jharkhand state, India; editor, Ravi Nandan Sinha; ISSN 0971-2321). THE QUEST is an English-medium journal which showcases criticism and essays on Indian writing, be it in English or in Indian languages, and creative writing (directly in English or translations).

The current issue features, inter alia:

a comparative study of Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Pablo Neruda (Ashutosh Mohan); a review of Amitav Ghosh’s “The Hungry Tide” (Rituparna Datta Roy); an article on Shashi Tharoor (Ladha Barathan); a study of Anita Desai’s “Journey to Ithaca” (Indu Bhadran); pieces on Indian Poetics (A.K. Awasthi) and Great Indian Literary Theorists (Ravi Nandan Sinha); a Malayalam short story by Moidu Kannankandy, translated by the author; an interview with Punjabi-language writer Gurdial Singh (with Nirverinder Kaur Sandhu).

I am also present, with an interview on “Unearthing of Indian Writing in English” (conducted by Nilanshu Agarwal with Ludmila Volna and myself, pp. 53-63). This interview has also appeared in the on-line journals IMPRESSIONS and MUSEINDIA (for more information and an extract, see blog entry for 24 June 2008). URL for the interview text:

http://impressions.50webs.org/4_intrvw.htm

For THE QUEST, contact: questranchi@rediffmail.com

Now out is the latest issue (No 11, July-December 2008) of the INDIAN JOURNAL OF POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES (Thodupuzha, Kerala, India; editor, Prof. K.V. Dominic, Newman College, Thodupuzha). This journal publishes critical essays and creative writing. I am, as of this issue, a member of the Editorial Advisory Board.

The current issue features, inter alia:

Studies of Anita Desai’s “Fire on the Mountain” (Sr Sophy Perepaddan) and Dravidian Aesthetics in Anita Desai (V. Ramesh); Bapsi Sidhwa (K.V. George); Khushwant Singh’s “I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale” (Bilal A. Shah); Derek Walcott (Shrikrishan Rai); and J.G.M. Le Clézio (Geetha Ganapathy-Doré); a piece on Postcolonial Translation (Hemang A. Desai); reviews of Jaydeep Sarangi and Binod Mishra (eds.), “Explorations in Australian Literature” (Eroulla Demetriou), of A.N. Dwivedi’s volume of poems “Beyond Borders” (Patricia Prine), and of V.V. B. Bama Rao’s “For Our Grandchildren and Other Poems” (Shaleen Singh); and original short stories and poems, among the poets being K.V. Dominic.

Contact: kdominicnewman@gmail.com 

On Friday, 14 November 2008 I had the privilege of being invited to witness
the 'soutenance de thèse' (doctoral viva) of the Brazilian scholar Everton
Machado, at the Maison de la Recherche (attached to the Université de Paris
IV - Sorbonne), in the heart of the Latin Quarter.

Everton Machado's thesis concerns the novel Os Brahmanes (The Brahmans) by
Francisco Luís Gomes (1829-1869). Published in 1866, it is the only novel by
its Goa-born author, who was also a deputy representing Goa in the
Portuguese parliament. The book is currently in print in Portugal and
translations into English and French exist. Set in Lucknow at the time of
the Indian Mutiny, it offers a critique of both British (though, according
to Everton Machado, not Portuguese) colonialism in India and of brahminical
attitudes and the caste system.

The viva was conducted in French, the language of the thesis. The examining
board was chaired by Prof. Pierre Brunel (Paris IV-Sorbonne), the other
members present being Prof. Sandra Margarida Nitrini (São Paulo), Prof.
Nalini Balbir (Paris III), Prof. Daniel-Henri Pageaux (Paris III) and Prof.
Maria Cecília Queiroz de Moraes Pinto (São Paulo).

The intellectual level of the three-and-a-half-hour debate was extremely
high and the candidate justified his positions with all confidence and
aplomb. After the debate, the board withdrew for five minutes and then
returned to congratulate the new doctor.

It is now to be hoped that the award of this doctorate will increase the
visibility of a hitherto neglected area of literature, namely Goan literature
or Indian Literature in Portuguese, which reveals itself to be at least as
old as the much better-known Indian Literature in English. I extend my
thanks and appreciation to Dr Everton Machado for kindly inviting me to this
event!

LINK: For an on-line text (in Portuguese) on Francisco Luis Gomes, by Everton Machado himself, see:

www.supergoa.com/pt/read/news_cronica.asp?c_news=790