Hilary Mantel’s legacy, Alan Rickman’s Potter diaries, Sisters of Mokama and more

Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.

Welcome to this edition of  The Hindu on Books Newsletter.

Last week, twice Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel passed away “suddenly yet peacefully” at 70. Her historical fiction sold millions of copies, particularly the  Wolf Hall trilogy, a fictional account of the rise and rise and sudden fall of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII. Set in the 1500s, the first book was published in 2009, where she recounted the story of Henry VIII and his spouses through the life of Cromwell, who became one of his most trusted advisers. Ambitious in its retelling, it went on to win the Booker Prize, as did the follow-up novel,  Bring up the Bodies. In her acceptance speech in 2009, Mantel said she had waited 20 years to tell the story of a blacksmith’s boy who becomes the king’s righthand man, a venture she knew had to interest historians, “amuse the jaded palette of the critical establishment” and capture the “imagination of the general reader.” The third book,  The Mirror & The Light, which was longlisted for the Booker, takes Cromwell to the “heights of power” before tracing his rapid descent in 1540. In an interview after being longlisted for the Booker, she said, “…for the greater part of the book we have a narrative that is expanding, breathing more deeply; then it begins to fold itself away into the space of a burial chamber.” Mantel was also Booker longlisted for her 2005 novel  Beyond Black, which tells the story of Alison Hart, a medium by trade who passes on messages from beloved dead ancestors to her clients. There are consequences of having knowledge about the other world, and this darkly comic, savage novel deals with love, loss, grief and death. Her fiction apart, Mantel will be remembered for her non-fiction work, particularly her searing memoir,  Giving up the Ghost (2003). “I’m used to seeing things that aren’t there,” she writes, and then takes stock: “You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted.” Seizing “the copyright in myself,” she leans on memory – always “shapeshifting” – to recount her childhood, schooling with Catholic nuns and living with pain (she suffered from endometriosis).

In other news, Harry Potter fans have something to look forward to with the soon-to-be-released  Madly, Deeply: the diaries of Alan Rickman in which Professor Severus Snape, the character he portrayed in the Potter universe,  has written about his co-stars. In an excerpt in  The Guardian, he writes in a May, 2003 entry: “Dan Radcliffe is so serious and focused – but with a sense of fun. I still don’t think he’s really an actor but he will undoubtedly direct/produce.” In another entry, he says, “These kids need directing. They don’t know their lines and Emma [Watson]’s diction is this side of Albania at times.” His favourite Potter film? The Alfonso Curaon-directed, third film in the series,  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

We have a new look magazine on Sunday, and the redesigned literary review pages marked Translation Day (September 30) with essays by Saikat Majumdar on classics vs cancel culture, Mini Krishnan on how authors and translators subvert the dominant language from within, Mini Kapoor on why translators must get their due by having their names on the cover alongside the writer and more. We also talk to Jyoti Thottam about her remarkable book  Sisters of Mokama (Penguin Random House).

Saikat Majumdar, whose novels include  The Firebird,  The Scent of God and  The Middle Finger, writes an essay in which he wonders when books from the past upset 21 st century sensibilities, should readers adopt an alternative vision or shun the historically distant text. He cites an example from his experience of translating into English Rabindranath Tagore’s short story  Shubhodrishti as  The First Look. It’s the tale of a young man of a privileged class in colonial Bengal who takes to hunting after the death of his wife. The first challenge was to present a story deeply rooted in time and place to a 21 st century global readership. But he writes that this challenge paled in comparison to the kind of social and environmental violence that seemed to define the protagonist. The hero, in his mid-20s, possibly older, is soon staring at a girl, just about pubescent. Majumdar says that he knows from his extensive reading of Tagore that few male writers are as sensitive to the female mind, yet “how does one find a contemporary idiom and aesthetic to render the celebration of this unexpected romance, even if it appears to be paedophilia to today’s reader?” There are occasions, he concedes, when a disjuncture calls for the cancellation of historically distant texts, but there are other moments “when a classic shakes us with its grating worldview.”

International Translation Day: Classics vs #cancelculture

In her essay for World Translation Day, Mini Krishnan argues that the growth of a hybrid culture calls for much borrowing and adaptation and it is here that translation plays an important role. G. Geetha in translating  Vanna Nilvan recalls that it felt like dancing on a slippery floor with two left feet. But she also said, echoing Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, that she preferred the absurdity of translating to the absurdity of not translating. In  Translating Myself and Others, Jhumpa Lahiri says the word in in Italian for translation,  traduzione, has a second meaning other than the well-known ‘ traduttore, traditore’ (Italian for translator, traitor). It is a bureaucratic term that refers to the transportation of persons who are under suspicion or detained. While moving literature across a language divide is a challenge, it is a risk that has to be taken, says Krishnan. “Reading a translated work is a simultaneous entry through two doors into two rooms. You cannot be in one without being in the other as well.”