Translational audacity

The other day I received in the mail E.P. Rice's book Kanarese Literature. "Kanarese" is an old word for the south Indian language now called Kannada, spoken in Karnataka state. Kannada is a Dravidian language spoken by around 60 million people as a native language and has one of the oldest and best-respected literatures of any of the Indian languages. When I traveled to India many years ago I stayed in Karnataka and so since then I've harbored an interest in Kannada that lately I decided to do something about - hence the impetus for ordering this book.

The book was published in 1921, and is a mix of history and translated examples of Kannada poetry. I'm reading through the history part, but because poetry excites me, I skipped ahead and read through a lot of the translated passages. This being the 1920s, the poetry has been, hilariously, rendered in strict meter and rhyme in the style of English poetry. It's such an audacious choice that no self-respecting scholar would make today - but it definitely makes the poetry more fun to read. I've included some passages below that particularly struck me, whether for good reasons or bad, with brief little commentaries - I've put them below the cut for convenience sake.

Not every Muslim is a terrorist; not every terrorist is a Muslim

From The Washington Post:

When a series of bomb attacks ripped through Muslim neighborhoods, mosques and shrines in India in recent years, suspicion fell firmly on a familiar culprit: Islamist terror. After each incident, scores of Indian Muslims were rounded up, and many were tortured. Confessions were extracted, the names of various militant “masterminds” leaked to the media and links with Pakistan widely alleged. [...]

But those investigations, and the assumptions behind them, were turned on their head early this year by the confession of a Hindu holy man. Swami Aseemanand told a magistrate that the bomb makers were neither Pakistani nor Muslim but Hindu radicals, bent on revenge for many earlier acts of terrorism across India that had been perpetrated by Muslims.

His statement, subsequently leaked to the media, alleged that a network of radicals stretched right up to senior levels of the country’s Hindu nationalist right wing. It also exposed deep-seated prejudices within the police against the country’s minority Muslim population.

"The Jewel in the Crown" by Paul Scott

When I went to India in Seventh Grade my grandmother and my parents bought me a whole load of books about India, all of them classics - Passage to India, Prince of Tides, a few others, and Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. All of them have sat on my shelves unread for some time. The Raj Quartet books have been on top of my reading list for a while, but due mostly to the fact that there are four of them and they are large and heavy and therefore do not travel well, I did not have much occasion to read them. I finally decided, however, to hunker down and do it. And having finished The Jewel in the Crown, I am extremely, extremely glad I did so.