Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
or Tamil Nadu. There were still tribal feuds and witches in 1977,
and still are.
My teaching duties were hardly onerous. The job turned out to
be a sinecure arranged by an Indian academic I'd met in England in
order for me to study his country's literature and culture. My lectures
on Shakespeare consisted of my explaining plots and leaping around
acting out scenes. Try summarizing Shakespeare's plots sometime;
half of them don't make sense. I'd overlooked this aspect of his work
when I was studying the plays myself. Staggering coincidences were
often the only way he could come up with any sort of conclusion by
the close of act five. I ended up playing all the parts myself to spare
all of us the agony of Raghunabdhan V.A. (Kannada; Balijiga B.
Co.) or Vasudeva Murthy R. (Telegu; Neygi F.C.) stumbling
through
wouldsts
or
perchances
. We spent an entire hour on 'Thrice
the brinded cat hath mew'd.' No one seemed able to understand
why the greatest writer in the English language did not appear to
write in English at all. When I told them that many words no longer
meant today what they meant in the late sixteenth century, I had the
distinct impression that my students assumed this meant
Shakespeare had been semiliterate. Adding that the Bard
occasionally appeared to make up words, or adapt them, using nouns
as verbs, for instance, and that the dictionary was devised after his
death, confirmed their suspicions about the rudimentary state of
English culture a mere four hundred years ago.
They'd been taught that Indian civilisation had been going strong
for over thirty thousand years now, and many believed Vedic sages
possessed nuclear weapons, radar, and magnetically powered aircraft
equipped with cannons. Translations of the Vedas do in fact contain,
in somewhat obscure stanzas, words that can be translated as
'aeroplane' and 'electricity.' But the translation of Sanskrit, like that
of Egyptian hieroglyphics, seems to be a fairly personal business.
One well-known Bengali scholar eschews the word
translation
altogether, his books stating that they have been 'transcreated' from
the Sanskrit.
'Why is the Shakespeare making these play in five act only?'
asked Subramanian R. (Sanskrit; Brahmin E.C.).
This, too, had never occurred to me before. I told him it was a
