Product Description
Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Vikram Seth (Hindi: , pronounced ; born June 20, 1952) is an Indian poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist. Seth was born to Leila and Prem Seth in Calcutta (now Kolkata). His family lived in many cities including the Bata Shoe Company town of Batanagar amal, Patna, near Danapur and London. His father was an executive with the Bata India Limited shoe company who migrated to post-Partition India from West Punjab in Pakistan. His mother, Leila was the first woman judge on the Delhi High Court as well as the first woman to become Chief Justice of a state High Court, at Simla. She studied law in London, while she was pregnant with Seth's younger brother, and came first in her bar examinations conducted only weeks after she delivered her second child . His younger brother, Shantum, leads Buddhist meditational tours. His younger sister, Aradhana, is a film-maker married to an Austrian diplomat, and has worked on Deepa Mehta's movies Earth and Fire. (Compare the characters Haresh, Lata, Savita and two of the Chatterji siblings in A Suitable Boy: Seth has been candid in acknowledging that many of his fictional characters are drawn from life; he has said that only the dog Cuddles in A Suitable Boy has his real name "Because he can't sue". Justice Leila Seth has said in her memoir On Balance that other characters in A Suitable Boy are composites but Haresh is a portrait of her husband Prem.) Having lived in London for many years, Seth now maintains residences near Salisbury, England, where he is a participant in local literary and cultural events, having bought and renovated the house of the Anglican poet George Herbert in 1996, and in Delhi, where he lives with his parents and keeps his extensive library... More: http://booksllc.net/?id=335524 ... Read more

Product Description
The three T'ang dynasty poets translated here are among the greatest literary figures of China, or indeed the world.Responding differently to their common times, Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu crystallize the immense variety of China and the Chinese poetic tradition and, across a distance of twelve hundred years, move the reader as it is rare for even poetry to do. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Translated ideas can impress too!
I picked this book primarily because after reading both verse and prose from the author, I know the translation would make a great reading. It did. I liked the poetry, the ideas, and whatever Chinese poets must have thought about was communicated as well as possible in well-compiled text. I cannot read or understand Chinese, but my Chinese friends found the translations to be inadequate and half-hearted representations of what they described as timeless, classic poetry. Knowing the difficulty in faithfully representing a different culture for an author, and the complexity of translation of any verse, cultures, times and metaphors, I think Vikram Seth as always did a commendable job. For real taste of his poetic genius, read The Golden gate or All you who sleep tonight!

Formally correct translations that do not touch the heart
I think there is no task more daunting for a writer than to translate poetry from ancient China. First of all, the poems consist of ideograms, the so-called "characters". Vikram Seth's introduction to his book "Three Chinese Poets" has a good example how a Chinese poem looks in the original characters and in pinyin translation, and how a literal, word-by-word translation would sound: "lonely, close, brushwood, door/ vast, face, falling, light/ cranes, nest, pine, tree, everywhere/ men, visit, wicker, gate, few/ tender, bamboo, hold, new, powder/ red, lotus, shed, old, clothes/ at the ford, lantern, fire, rise/ everywhere, water-chestnut, picker, return home." The freedom given by the lack of grammar stands in stark contrast to the rigid structure of the poem. It consists of eight lines with five Chinese characters in each line. The lines 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8 end with rhyme words. Lines 3 and 4 have an identical grammatical word order, as have lines 5 and 6. Also, the images of the poet are symmetrically arranged. In line 1 a closed door stands in contrast to the vast expanse of line 2; line 3 sets the cranes everywhere in contrast to the few visitors of line 4; line 5 sees new powder against the old clothes of line 6. Only lines 7 and 8 do not contain contrasting images but rather an evening scene that reflects the evening scene of lines 1 and 2. Within this finely crafted structure the poet expresses a feeling: loneliness.

A translator has two options: to stay true to the Chinese characters and the structure of the original poem, or to stay true to what he feels to be the poetic message of the poem. It is essentially the same problem that a piano player faces when interpreting a sonata by Mozart or Beethoven. Seth chooses the conservative path of staying very close to the original, as he explains in his enjoyable introduction: "I should mention that the poems in this book are not intended as transcreations or free translations, in this sense, attempts to use the originals as trampolines from which to bounce off on to poems of my own [great image, by the way, for the arrogance of some translators]. The famous translations of Ezra Pound, compounded as they are of ignorance of Chinese and valiant self-indulgence, have remained before me as a warning of what to shun. I have preferred mentors who ... admit the primacy of the original and attempt fidelity to it."

Fidelity, however, is not all it takes to make a translation succeed. Sometimes the much lamented and maligned "freedom" of a translation yields better results. This is the case here. Let me compare two translations of a poem called "Moonlit Night" by the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu (712 - 770 AD) to illustrate my point.

Seth translates: "In Fuzhou, far away, my wife is watching/ The moon alone tonight, and my thoughts fill/ With sadness for my children, who can't think/ Of me here in Changan; they're too young still./ Her cloud-soft hair is moist with fragrant mist./ In the clear light her white arms sense the chill./ When will we feel the moonlight dry our tears,/ Leaning together on our window-sill?"

For comparison, here the "transcreation" by David Young from his book "Five T'ang Poets" (1990): "Tonight/ in this same moonlight/ my wife is alone at her window// I can hardly bear to think of my children/too young to understand/ why I can't come home to them// her hair must be damp from the mist/ her arms cold jade in the moonlight// when will we stand together/ by those slack curtains/ while the moonlight/ dries the tear-streaks/ on our faces?"

Seth's translation keeps the eight-line structure and the rhyme words in lines 2, 4, 6 and 8. He does not give a pinyin (character-by-character) translation of the original poem. Therefore I cannot judge how true to the original his choice of words is. I would assume Young takes more freedom with the words. Young also breaks up the 8-line structure of the poem into a 3-3-2-5-line structure. In doing so he tries to highlight the train of thought of Du Fu: wife, children, beauty of wife, yearning for reunion.

The success of Young's translation lies in his bringing out the pain and longing of the poet who is separated from wife and children. This is where Seth fails. How pale is the pain of separation in "and my thoughts fill with sadness for my children" in comparison to "I can hardly bear to think of my children"; and how old-fashioned does it sound to end a poem with "leaning together on our window-sill" rather than with the poignant "while the moonlight dries the tear-streaks on our faces".

The best ancient Chinese poems pack a tremendous amount of emotion into a tight and formal structure. In this they can be compared to Shakespeare's sonnets. These Chinese poets are no lesser poets than Shakespeare is. Translating their poems, the success of the translation must be measured by the extent to which the emotion can be released without destroying the sense of structure in the original poem. Seth's translations with their stress on formal structure and literalness stifle the full emotional impact. The translations focus on the original structure rather than the truth about the human condition that the poet wants to convey to the reader. This is where Young's freer translation yields much better results.

The only objection one might raise against Young's translation is that it is reminiscent of a modern poet like William Carlos Williams. But I'd rather have Du Fu's substance in a modern structure than Du Fu's admirable craftsmanship at the expense of the impact his words have on my heart. His emotions are timeless - let them shine through with the help of a little "transcreation". ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: All You Who Sleep Tonight, the Humble Administrator's Garden, Beastly Tales, Mappings. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 17. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: All You Who Sleep Tonight is a 1990 collection of poems written by Vikram Seth.The collection is grouped into five sections: The collection received rave reviews."Certainly not since Byron has anyone been more elegantly and literally amusing in verse." Philadelphia DailyNews All You Who Sleep Tonight All you who sleep tonightFar from the ones you love,No hand to left or rightAnd emptiness above -Know that you aren't aloneThe whole world shares your tears,Some for two nights or one,And some for all their years.British composer Jonathan Dove set eight of the quatrains and five other poems to music for Nuala Willis in a 1996 song cycle of the same name . ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=7303866 ... Read more

Product Description
Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Rohinton Mistry, R. K. Narayan, Arundhati Roy, Shashi Tharoor, Vikram Seth, Jhumpa Lahiri, Indra Sinha, Chetan Bhagat, Raja Rao, Aravind Adiga, Ruskin Bond, Yogesh Chabria, Siddharth Sanghvi, Mulk Raj Anand, Upamanyu Chatterjee, A. K. Ramanujan, Amit Chaudhuri, J. Bhagyalakshmi, Vikram Chandra, David Davidar, Urvashi Butalia, Aruni Kashyap, Kamala Markandaya, Mridula Koshy, Amit Varma, Manohar Malgonkar, Shashi Deshpande, Mitra Phukan, Malathi Rao, Anita Rau Badami, Sirasri, Anita Nair, Dhruba Hazarika, Anjum Hasan, Mamang Dai, Siddhartha Sarma, Kalpana Swaminathan,. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: R. K. Narayan (October 10, 1906 - May 13, 2001), shortened from Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami (Tamil: ) was an Indian author whose works of fiction include a series of books about people and their interactions in an imagined town in India. He is one of three leading figures of early Indian literature in English, along with Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao. He is credited with bringing Indian literature in English to the rest of the world, and is regarded as one of India's greatest English language novelists. Narayan broke through with the help of his mentor and friend, Graham Greene, who was instrumental in getting publishers for Narayan's first four books, including the semi-autobiographical trilogy of Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher. Narayan's works also include The Financial Expert, hailed as one of the most original works of 1951, and Sahitya Akademi Award winner The Guide, which was adapted for films in Hindi and English languages, and for Broadway. The setting for most of Narayan's stories is the fictional town of Malgudi, first introduced in Swami and Friends. His narratives highlight social context and prov...http://booksllc.net/?l=en ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Isaiah Berlin, Robert Bridges, Henry Phillpotts, John Keble, David Miliband, Vikram Seth, William Buckland, Charles Thomas, Rowland Egerton-Warburton, Gail Trimble, Charles Abbott, 1st Baron Tenterden, Mc Lars, J. I. Packer, James Oglethorpe, Stephen Mcintyre, Rajiva Wijesinha, Edward Young, Donald Hankey, Robert Joy, Ed Miliband, C. P. Scott, Alastair Hetherington, Tsatsu Tsikata, John M. Spratt, Jr., Michael Von Clemm, David Curry, Sir Richard Worsley, 7th Baronet, John Ward, 1st Earl of Dudley, William Waldegrave, Baron Waldegrave of North Hill, Clyde Kluckhohn, Brian Sedgemore, Keith Hill, Reginald Edward Stubbs, Peter Lampl, Henry Newbolt, Henry Fairlie, William Scott, 1st Baron Stowell, Samuel Collins, Joseph Alleine, Edward Goschen, David Hartley, Hector Sants, Edwin Sandys, Sir Coplestone Bampfylde, 2nd Baronet, Drury Curzon Drury-Lowe, Charles Perry Stacey, Edward Pococke, Moshoeshoe Ii of Lesotho, Jonathan Glover, Jerry Cornes, David Normington, E. K. Chambers, John Rosewell, Edward Maclysaght, John Aldridge, Richard Taverner, Oliver Elton, Mushtaq Khan, Max Beloff, Baron Beloff, Glenn W. Most, G. E. Berrios, Thomas Burgess, Christopher Rowland, Ralph Robinson, Henry Nettleship, Ben Cannon, Thomas Thistle, David Malcolm Lewis, Felix Cassel, Henry Hardy, Kenelm Edward Digby, Stephen Gosson, Nicholas Wadham, Roger Moorey, Kenneth Kendall, Christopher Bushell, Al Alvarez, Howard Robinson, Francis James Chavasse, John Penrose, Francis Robert Bonham, Richard Finn, James Thursfield, Robert Dimsdale, John Anstis, Younger, John Wells, Jack Copeland, John Taylor Coleridge, William Mordaunt Furneaux, Edward Fowler, Winfrid Oldfield Burrows, James Clyde, Baron Clyde, Edmund Arbuthnott Knox, Angus Charles Graham, Henry Parry, Michael Spencer, Robert Gregory, List of Alumni of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, George Barclay Richardson, Bernard Audley, Robert Matthews, John Arbuthnott, 9th Viscount of Arbuthnott, Thom...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=19339264 ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Sarojini Naidu, Sri Aurobindo, Ranjit Hoskote, Vikram Seth, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Kamala Surayya, Pritish Nandy, Jayanta Mahapatra, Keki N. Daruwalla, Sachin Ketkar, Nissim Ezekiel, Harindranath Chattopadhyay, Smita Agarwal, Dom Moraes, Eunice de Souza, Mani Rao, A. K. Ramanujan, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Jerry Pinto, Toru Dutt, P. Lal, R Parthasarathy, Aruni Kashyap, Vihang Naik, Temsula Ao, Gieve Patel, Arundhathi Subramaniam, G. S. Sharat Chandra, Uddipana Goswami, Robin Ngangom, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Shiv Kumar, Kersy Katrak, Nitoo Das. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 177. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Sri Aurobindo (Aurobindo Ghose) (Bengali: Sri Ôrobindo) (August 15, 1872 December 5, 1950) was an Indian nationalist and freedom fighter, major Indian English poet, philosopher, and yogi. He joined the movement for India's freedom from British rule and for a duration (190510), became one of its most important leaders, before turning to developing his own vision and philosophy of human progress and spiritual evolution. The central theme of Sri Aurobindo's vision is the evolution of life into a "life divine". In his own words: "Man is a transitional being. He is not final. The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner spirit and the logic of Nature's process". The principal writings of Sri Aurobindo include, in prose, The Life Divine, considered his single great work of metaphysics,The Synthesis of Yoga, Secrets of the Vedas, Essays on the Gita, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, Renaissance in India and other essays, Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, The Future Poetry, Thoughts and Aphorisms and several volumes of...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=23475401 ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Vikram Seth, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 3972 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Product Description
Chapters: Ikbal Ali Shah, Vikram Seth, William Dalrymple, Fanny Parkes, Balraj Sahni, Pankaj Mishra, Dilip D'souza, Milind Gunaji, Shekhar Pathak, Dharmendar Kanwar, K. Anantharamu. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 76. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah (born 1894 in Sardhana, India, died 4 November 1969 in Tangier, Morocco) was an Indian-Afghan author and diplomat descended from the Sadaat of Paghman. Educated in India, he came to Britain as a young man to continue his education in Edinburgh, where he married a young Scotswoman. Travelling widely, Ikbal Ali Shah undertook assignments for the British Foreign Office and became a publicist for a number of Eastern statesmen, penning biographies of Kemal Ataturk, the Aga Khan and others. His other writing includes lighter works such as travel narratives and tales of adventure, as well as more serious works on Sufism, Islam and Asian politics. He hoped that Sufism might "form a bridge between the Western and the Eastern ways of thinking"; familiar with both cultures, much of his life and writing was devoted to furthering greater cross-cultural understanding. Ikbal Ali Shah fathered three children, all of whom became notable writers themselves; his son Idries Shah became particularly well known and acclaimed as a writer and teacher of Sufism in the West. When Ikbal Ali Shah's wife died in 1960, he moved from Britain to Morocco, spending the last decade of his life in Tangier. Controversy related to his sons' claims to have a special role in representing Sufism in the West also reflected back on Ikbal Ali Shah; a researcher seeking to discredit his son Idries unearthed Foreign Office records which appeared to cast doubt on Ikbal Ali Shah's honesty, and towards the end of his life he was involved in a literary scandal ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=5447184 ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Rajiv Gandhi, Vikram Seth, the Doon School, Rahul Gandhi, Anish Kapoor, List of Doon School Alumni, Sanjay Gandhi, Karan Singh, Jamsheed Marker, Roshan Seth, Ramachandra Guha, Himani Shivpuri, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Kamal Nath, Naveen Patnaik, Amitav Ghosh, Karan Thapar, Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala, Munir Butt, Amarinder Singh, Jitin Prasada, Kanti Bajpai, Jyotiraditya Madhavrao Scindia, Bunker Roy, Swaminathan Aiyar, Prannoy Roy, L. M. Thapar, Rohit Khosla, Kanwar Bahadur Singh, Rana Hemant Singh, Dinesh Singh, Saurabh Narain Singh, Kalikesh Singh Deo, Vittal Mallya, Dosco Diplomats, Arun Singh, Ajit Narain Haksar, Jitendra Prasad, Jitendra Singh, Ardashir Vakil. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 193. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Rajiv Ratna Gandhi (20 August 1944 21 May 1991), the elder son of Indira Gandhi and Feroze Gandhi, was the 7th Prime Minister of India from his mother's death on 31 October 1984 until his resignation on 2 December 1989 following a general election defeat. He became the youngest Prime Minister of India when he took office (at the age of 40). Rajiv Gandhi was a professional pilot for Indian Airlines before entering politics. While at Cambridge, he met Italian-born Sonia Gandhi whom he later married. He remained aloof from politics despite his mother being the Indian Prime Minister, and it was only following the death of his younger brother Sanjay Gandhi in 1980 that Rajiv entered politics. After the assassination of his mother in 1984 after Operation Blue Star, Indian National Congress party leaders nominated him to be Prime Minister. Rajiv Gandhi led the Congress to a major election victory in 1984 soon after, amassing the largest majority ever in Indian Parliament. The Congress party won 411 seats out of 542. He began dismantling the License Raj...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=26129 ... Read more

Product Description
This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Books by Vikram Seth, Novels by Vikram Seth, Poetry by Vikram Seth, a Suitable Boy, Three Chinese Poets, All You Who Sleep Tonight, the Golden Gate, the Humble Administrator's Garden, Two Lives, an Equal Music, Beastly Tales, Mappings, a Suitable Girl. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=6870390 ... Read more

Product Description
This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: A Suitable Boy, the Golden Gate, an Equal Music, a Suitable Girl. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: A Suitable Boy is a novel by Vikram Seth, released in 1993. At 1349 pages (1488 pages softcover) and 591,552 words, the book is one of the longest novels ever published in a single volume in the English language. A sequel, to be called A Suitable Girl is due for publication in 2013. A Suitable Boy is set in post-independence, post-partition India. The novel follows the story of four families over a period of 18 months as a mother searches for a suitable boy to marry her daughter. The 1349-page novel alternatively offers satirical and earnest examinations of national political issues in the period leading up to the first post-Independence national election of 1952, including inter-sectarian animosity, the status of lower caste peoples such as the jatav, land reform and the eclipse of the feudal princes and landlords, academic affairs, inter- and intra-family relations and a range of further issues of importance to the characters. A suitable boy centres on Mrs. Rupa Mehra's efforts to arrange the marriage of her younger daughter, Lata, with a "suitable boy". At the heart of the novel it is a love story, set in a young, newly independent India. The fictional town, Brahmpur, along with Calcutta, Delhi, Kanpur and other Indian cities, forms a colourful backdrop for the emerging stories. Lata is a 19-year-old college girl, vulnerable, yet determined to have her own way and not be influenced by her strong mother and opinionated brother, Arun. Her story revolves around the choice she is forced to make between her suitors, Kabir, Haresh, and Amit. The novel is not simply based on one story. This epic novel covers the various is...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=6870390 ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Salman Rushdie, Keith Vaz, Vikram Seth, Raman Mundair, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Kenan Malik, Lakshmi Mittal, Anish Kapoor, Swraj Paul, Dhiren Barot, Saeed Jaffrey, Vikram Solanki, Ramesh Kallidai, Ismail Merchant, Aasif Mandvi, Piara Khabra, Prabhu Guptara, Abu Yusuf Riyadh Ul Haq, Dadabhai Naoroji, Buck Ruxton, Yusuf Motala, Dalip Tahil, Virendra Sharma, Karan Bilimoria, Baron Bilimoria, Nina Wadia, Neena Gill, Pamella Bordes, Diljit Rana, Baron Rana, Hemant Lakhani, Ashok Kumar, Suvi Raj Grubb, Shapurji Saklatvala, Mihir Bose, Meghnad Desai, Baron Desai, Gulam Noon, Shayan Italia, Claude Moraes, Kumar Bhattacharyya, Baron Bhattacharyya, Zakaria Badat, Bhikhu Parekh, Baron Parekh, Daljit Neer, Chitrita Banerji, Mancherjee Bhownagree, Manjit Singh, British Tamil, Perween Warsi, Waris Hussein, Archis Tiku, Marsha Singh, Sandip Verma, Baroness Verma, Tunku Varadarajan, Nasreen Munni Kabir, Gulu Lalvani, Ardashir Vakil, Jamil Dehlavi. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 257. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, KBE (English pronunciation: ; born 19 June 1947) is a British-Indian novelist and essayist. He achieved notability with his second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), which won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism mixed with historical fiction, and a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western worlds. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the centre of The Satanic Verses controversy, with protests from Muslims in several countries. Some of the protests were violent, with Rushdie facing death threats and a fatw issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=28722 ... Read more