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Business News/ Opinion / Blogs/  BETWEEN THE LINES: The ten book test
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BETWEEN THE LINES: The ten book test

The battle between local and global continues to haunt Anglophone readers

Blog: A year of reading the world.Premium
Blog: A year of reading the world.

When a friend recently tagged me on Facebook to list 10 books that have stayed with me, I drew up a list that was severely anglophone, in spite of the fact that I read three other languages fairly comfortably, and am acquainted with a decent amount of literature in all of them. That I took just a few minutes to finish this exercise is telling. Asked to name, off the top of my head, books that I remember best, I did not add a single Bengali novel I have read in all these years, though I have consumed dozens of those since the time I became literate and vividly recall many of them.

Most of my timeline was similarly filled with people naming anglo-, or at best euro-centric classics, in spite of being bilingual readers, until someone pointed out the anomaly in this trend, and a few honorable mentions from the regional languages started trickling in at last.

It would be unfair, if not naïve, to make statements about reading habits based on a social media trend, but it is impossible to deny that a majority of bilingual readers who read mostly in one language tend to be afflicted with a form of linguistic amnesia. The reason behind this has less to do with disrespect towards their language and literature and more with practical challenges.

For one, they are less exposed to books other than those written (or translated into) English. And more crucially, their language of daily transaction—with colleagues, family, friends, partners—tends to be English as well. When one stops loving, gossiping and dreaming in a language, it is bound to recede from one’s vital self.

A less poetic explanation for the preponderance of English-language readership can be found in the worldwide dynamics of the publishing industry. Translations from other languages happen to form a very small part of most publishing programmes across the globe. In India, mainstream trade publishers have started addressing this lacuna in recent times by introducing more writing from the regional languages in English.

Globally, most books that get translated and circulated are not free of certain ingrained prejudices and expectations. In an essay in The Financial Times last year, writer Pankaj Mishra surveyed the fate of regional literature in a contemporary context, concluding that the idea of the global novel (a work that ticks off certain boxes) was gradually obscuring vital traditions of writing from Asia and Africa that are rooted to local specificities.

In 2012, British writer Ann Morgan had embarked on an ambitious project to address the gap in her reading. Living in a society where only about 3% of all published books are translations, she decided to spend a year reading a literary work from every country in the world—a decision that was sparked by the Olympics that took place in London that year.

The “world came to London for the Olympics," Morgan wrote in a blog she started to mark this venture, “and I went out to meet it". Morgan chose all 196 independent countries, and one chosen by others, taking the total tally up to a staggering 197 titles. But it was not the number that posed the biggest problem.

Some of the countries (Sao Tome and Principe, for instance) did not have work translated from their literature. With the help of enthusiasts who translated chunks, Morgan read The Shepherd’s House by Olinda Beje. Most of the rest that she read was recommended to her by friends and strangers on social media, but some of the actual work reached her in ways that were simply wonderful: the first book Morgan read, for instance, was from South Sudan, and written especially for her blog.

If we wish to keep our local languages and traditions alive, the global often conspires to help us in our mission.

This fortnightly column talks about readers, writers and publishers of the past, present and future.

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Published: 29 Aug 2014, 07:48 PM IST
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