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Translation and the Classic Edited by Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda Zajko Price: £75.00 (Hardback) Estimated publication date: August 2008
Contemporary translation studies have explored translation not as a means of recovering a source text, but as a process of interpretation and production of literary meaning and value. utilizes this idea to discuss the relationship between translation and the classic text. It proposes a framework in which 'the classic' figures less as an autonomous entity than as the result of the interplay between source text and translation practice and examines the consequences of this hypothesis for questioning established definitions of the classic: how does translation mediate the social, political and national uses of 'the classics' in the contemporary global context of changing canons and traditions? The volume contains a total of eighteen original essays, plus an introduction, written by scholars working in classics and classical reception, translation studies, literary theory, comparative literature, theatre and performance studies, history and philosophy and makes a potent contribution to pressing debates in all of these areas.
Translation and the Poet's Life Paul
Davis
Price:
£50.00 (Hardback) Estimated
publication date: September 2008
Between the Civil War and the early decades of the
eighteenth century, English poets of the first rank devoted more of
their time and creative energies to translating than they had ever
done before or have ever done since. Paul Davis's Translation and
the Poet's Life is the first study to range across the entirety of
this golden age of poetic translation in <, taking as its
organizing principle and object of inquiry the significances of
translating itself as a distinctive mode of imaginative conduct.
Composed of case studies of the five leading poet-translators of the
age - John Denham, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, and
Alexander Pope - it explores the part translation played in their
lives as poets and thence in modelling 'the poet's life' during what
was a period of transition between early-modern and modern
constructions of it.
Ramanujar Author:Indira Parthasarathy translator: T.Sriraman Rs. 495 December 2007
An
important preceptor of medieval India> and the proponent of the Visishtadvaita school of
thought, Ramanuja established the supremacy of the Sri Vaishnava dimension of
Hinduism.
Indira Parthasarathy’s play, originally written in Tamil and published in 1997,
is based on the life, ideas, and beliefs of Ramanuja. Retrieving its subject
from the shackles of establishment, the play foregrounds Ramanuja’s
open-mindedness and spiritual equality. The ideas and beliefs of Ramanuja hold
ground even after 900 years, and the play brings to light one of his most
progressive social measures—initiate everyone into spiritual knowledge.
Naalukettu
Author: M.T.Vasudevan Nair Translator: Gita Krishanakutty Price: Rs. 395
Naalukettu (1958) is the story of a young boy, Appunni, set in a joint family (a tharavad) of the Nair caste in the author’s native village, Kudallur. Growing up without a father and away from the prestige and protection of the matrilineal home to which he belongs, Appunni spends his childhood in extreme social misery.
Naalukettu sensitively captures the traumas and psychological graph of Appunni, caught as he is in the throes of a transitional period in Malabar, a phase marked by the gradual disintegration of the feudal structures of the matrilineal joint family system and the rise of the Nair’s sense of personal identity. The novel, a fascinating read, and the perceptive introduction by the translator herself, will appeal to students and scholars of regional Indian literature in translation, comparative literature, sociology and cultural studies, as well as general readers. The first novel of a writer who began publishing at 14, and who took charge of Malayalam literary fiction nearly half a century ago, Naalukettu (1958) is woven around both real-life legends of Kudallur village and M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s personal history. Currently in its eighteenth reprint, the Malayalam original has sold half a million copies and has been translated into fourteen languages.
The Diary of a Maidservant
Author: Krishna Baldev Vaid Price: Rs. 395 July 2007
The
Diary of a Maidservant is
a masterly representation of a sensitive young domestic servant and her world.
Originally written in Hindi (Ek Naukrani Ki Diary), the novel sparkles
with ironic humour, subtle insights, social relevance, and narrative
brilliance.
Shano, the teenager protagonist, drops out of school to work as a domestic so
that her indigent family can survive. At a casual suggestion from a sympathetic
Biji, she begins to keep a record of her musings and doings. Gradually, she
gets addicted to this habit and begins to enjoy probing her own mind and the
motives of her various employers and fellow domestics. She begins to introspect
and develop a deeper relationship with her own self in addition to analysing
her experience of the external world. The reader watches the growth of a fine
consciousness into self-awareness as well as the emergence of an entire milieu,
seen from the point of a view of a precocious adolescent. Shanti alias Shano is
an engaging addition to the gallery of great fictional heroines.
I, Durga Khote
Author: Durga Khote Translator: Shanta Gokhale Price: Rs. 195 July 2007
I, Durga Khote is the firsthand account of the life and times of a leading actress of Hindi and Marathi cinema—Durga Khote. Catapulted into the film industry by early marriage and premature widowhood, the autobiography reveals Khote’s grit in the face of tragedy, her determination to be independent, and her constant desire to learn. This nuanced translation from the original Marathi by Shanta Gokhale and the introduction, discussing the place of personal writing in Marathi literature, by Gayatri Chatterjee will appeal to readers of Indian literature in translation, autobiographies, and Indian cinema.
Three
Sides of Life
Translator: Sumitra Chakravarty Price: Rs. 350 February 2007
This
selection of fifteen stories by five exceptional Bengali women writers looks at the lives
of women who are neither stars nor martyrs in the feminist cause. They are
voices, individual and particular, of women leading their everyday lives,
nursing their joys and sorrows. These women write out of their bodies and the
intimate spaces around them; they write the history and mathematics of their
lives; they compose a deeper reality; they give us an atmosphere, a sky, and a
house with many doorways helping us to reclaim their original energy and
wonderful clarity.
The
manushi created by the woman writer speaks in several voices and
addresses issues, emotional and psychological, that affect their lives and control
their decisions: from the low-caste woman of Mahasweta Devi’s story to the
teenage immigrant in America of Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s, from the girl child
battling humiliation in Bani Basu’s to the victim of marital exploitation in
Ashapurna Devi’s, and the women of the old-age home in Suchitra Bhattacharya’s
tale. These women form a small strong chorus, which testifies that women’s
writing is more than a literary act—it is imagining a world into being. |
