A bountiful haul at Abids on 19th November …

As if to compensate for letting me return home with an empty bag on the previous Sunday, Abids bestowed a bounty of 8 books on me on Sunday the 19^th … ah well, but I am running ahead of my story …

Vinod had posted a couple of weeks earlier that he found a novel named Chinnery’s Hotel by Jaysinh Birjepatil at Abids (a heartbreaking-lost and serendipitous-found story … read here) and that it was listed by Khushwant Singh as one of the major Indian novels in the last sixty years that left a deep impression on him … and that the author had written two more novels … there was a vague memory of having read about the book when it was released … and also having seen it at Bookpoint here … I checked my online used book sources and was happy to find Chinnery’s Hotel at Abids prices!!  I also found two copies of the author’s other novel The Good Muslim of Jackson Heights … I bought both copies, one copy which I wanted to give Vinod …  

So, off I went to Abids on the 12^th … I called up Vinod to check his whereabouts at Abids and he told me that he is not at Abids and might not be able to make it … aww maan … that was a downer … I couldn’t give the novel to Vinod and I wandered around listlessly trying to see if I could find some books that could lift my spirits … I also had to locate some mathematics workbooks for Mamoon … I found two workbooks, but no novels, no nothing … and I trudged home … really, it was very boring at Abids without Vinod and our chai and chat session and later joint bibliovenating © (ha ha … just like that … I invented/created the word ‘bibliovenator,’ you see … yeah, really … god promise!) with us pointing out books to each other … ah, well … there’s always next Sunday …

But I was not sure because my Appa and Amma were arriving on the next Sunday morning and if I had to visit Abids, it really had to be a flying visit … I checked with Vinod if he would be going to Abids … yes, he said … I checked with Anand if he would be free to take me to Abids and back … he said yes … I told him I’d confirm in the morning … I also alerted Shruti … because this was unprecedented – me going to Abids on two consecutive Sundays!!  All things tied up and I finally decided at 8 in the morning that I’d be going to Abids after all … but I had only an hour’s window for meeting, chatting and bibliovenating …

So, off I went to Abids on the 19^th too … I met Vinod … Umashankar was there too … I gave him The Good Muslim of Jackson Heights … I was happy to see the gleam in his eyes … chalo, main job done … then we had chai and chota samosas … and we chatted for a while … and then we set out … I concentrated only on the ‘20 Rupees’ piles at three places and picked up these 8 books …

In A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters, I found the first novel in a series of ‘medieval whodunit’ novels featuring Brother Cadfael … I started reading this one … very very slowly … and I must say I am happily sucked into this medieval English world of brothers and priors and abbeys and herbariums …  

Another Gulmohar Tree by Aamer Hussein, a Pakistani writer living in London … Aamer Hussein is rather known for his short stories, and this book is a novella that tells a tale of east-west romance …  

I found two books by Elmore Leonard, one of my favourite crime fiction writers … Elmore Leonard wrote a good number of westerns too and Gunsights is one such tale and I haven’t read any westerns by Elmore Leonard, and so this was a good one … and after reading Ron Scheer’s article How to Write like Elmore Leonard: Gunsights (1979), Gunsights appears juicier … 

I have a copy of Elmore Leonard’s City Primeval already, but I picked it up along with Robert B. Parker’s Sudden Mischief, another doubles, for my colleagues … members of the small and informal book reading club for which I lend books from my collection … 

  

I found another Doctorow novel, The Waterworks, to add to my Doctorow collection all exclusively found at Abids … 

When I picked up Tarka the Otter, I thought I was buying a children’s book for Mamoon, and then the usual curiosity bug bit me and I realized that this book has quite some history behind it … Tarka the Otter, written in 1927, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1928, and has never been out of print!  It was not written for children per se, but became popular with young adults and the book was praised by Thomas Hardy and T E Lawrence and has influenced literary figures like Ted Hughes, Roger Deakin, and Rachel Carson and nature writers Kenneth Allsop  and Denys Watkins-Pitchford described it as "the greatest animal story ever written.” 

It was at Abids that I first ran into a David Quantick book, and then found another and I liked what I read … and then I found another one on the 19^th, The Dangerous Book for Middle-Aged Men … 

I was super happy after the haul and more so, afterwards discovering that some of these are real gems ... thank you Abids!!!

A Sherlock Holmes story written in Kannada in 1916 by Kerur Vasudevacharya!! My English translation of it published in Translation Today journal ...

Translation Today in its latest issue (Vol. 11 No. 1, 2017) has published my English translation of Kerur Vasudevacharya’s short story Vismayajanakavada Himseya Kramavu titled An Astonishing Method of Torture.  The Kannada original was written in 1916, a hundred years ago, and this translation, in a sense, is a centenary commemoration of this unique story.

This is the link to the translation on Translation Today’s website … 

http://www.ntm.org.in/download/ttvol/volume11-1/Art_10.pdf  

I had also written a ‘prologue’ to the translation of this story to situate the story in its context and also as a sort of case I made out for why I chose to translate this story.  For reasons of space, probably, the ‘prologue’ was not published along with the translation.  I was informed that the prologue would not be included, but I wanted this unique story to get some sort of limelight.  But without the ‘prologue,’ which provides the rationale, the English translation, as a standalone story, would hardly make any sense.  So, here is a very brief introduction, taken from the ‘prologue.’

This is one of the three ‘Sherlock Holmes’ stories that Kerur Vasudevacharya ‘wrote.’  This Sherlock Holmes story, based on all existing indications, is probably one of the earliest or possibly even the first non-canonical pastiche Sherlock Holmes story (i.e. not written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!) to have been written in any Indian language.  This story was originally written in Kannada in 1916 by Kerur Vasudevacharya and appeared in a Kannada magazine called Sachitra Bharata, under the title Vismayajanakavada Himseya Kramavu. 

Kerur Vasudevacharya

(portrait taken from the cover of Vol. 1 of his collected works
published by Manohara Granthamala in 2007)

Among the short stories that Kerur Vasudevacharya ‘wrote’ are three ‘Sherlock Holmes’ stories.  Two of these are ‘rewritten’ (adapted translations) from their English originals – one of the stories is a rewriting of The Adventures of a Dying Detective, adapted into Kannada as Aparaadhigala Samshodhakanu Maranonmukhanadaddu and the other is a rewriting of Silver Blaze, adapted into Kannada as Belli Chikke.  These two adapted Holmes stories are typical of the translation/adaptation methods (from English) prevalent at that time in Kannada literature.  The original literary work as a whole is Kannad-ised, with everything being ‘trans’ported to Kannada speaking locales, and in both Kannada adaptations the names of the detective and his ‘associate’ are ‘trans’created in such a way that there is close phonetic similarity between the original English names and the adapted Kannada ones. 

A detailed reading of the Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle revealed that Vismayajanakavada Himseya Kramavu is not a translation of any of the canonical Sherlock Holmes stories.  So, from all indications, this story is a non-canonical/pastiche Holmes story, conceived, created, and written by Kerur in Kannada.  Once this fact was established, an Internet research revealed a database of 8865 (till the most recent update; accessed latest on 30-12-2016) non-canonical pastiche Sherlock Holmes stories created by Sherlockian scholar Philip K. Jones of the Amateur Mendicant Society of Detroit, Michigan (http://bakerstreetdozen.com/SHERLOCK.xls). 

This database contains details such as title, author, source/collection, format, media, and principal character/s (other than Sherlock Holmes).  A search within this database, especially in the title section (using many synonyms of the word ‘torture’) and principal character/s section (using the names of main characters, Valentine Digby and Diana Campbell) showed that there was no story with the title that had the same meaning as the one translated and none of the stories had either of these two names as their main characters. 

It is quite possible that Vasudevacharya took a non-canonical pastiche Holmes story available at the time, changed the names of the principal characters and translated it into Kannada.  The other question is, even if Vasudevacharya had translated this story from a ‘hypothetical’ non-canonical Holmes story, what prevented him from localising this story too.  It is slightly intriguing to note that Vasudevacharya, who went to such lengths to give phonetically similar names in Kannada to Holmes and Watson, and created a local flavour and milieu, and added more characters, to recreate, rewrite, and assimilate Silver Blaze and The Adventures of a Dying Detective into Kannada, chose not to change anything except the language, in case of this story, if this story is indeed a translation from an English original.  Is it possible that Vasudevacharya wanted to show he was capable or writing an ‘original’ Holmes story and he wanted to do it as Conan Doyle did it, by keeping everyone and everything where they originally belonged, and not by Kannad-ising them?  Vasudevacharya himself offers no explanation or clue anywhere.

So, read away ... and let me know ... 

More hard-boiled … more ‘Travis McGee’ novels …

Sometimes this idle aimless browsing leaves you in a dilemma … here I was at a loose end and found myself looking for novels by Ross Macdonald … totally unintended … yeah, it is true that secondhand copies of Ross Macdonald’s Archer novels are not that easy to come by … I had located some Archer novels a couple of months ago, and after a lot of to buy or not to buy, and futile resistance, I finally gave up and gave in … it was in the aftermath of the placing of this order and waiting for the books to be delivered that I was typing ‘Macdonald’ in the search boxes … at one of the portals, my search results saw me staring at a list of John D. MacDonald’s ‘Travis McGee’ novels …  I had unexpectedly ‘discovered’ John D. MacDonald and his series of Travis McGee novels in 2015 (while looking for Ross Macdonald novels) and had picked up quite a good number of the novels in the series in two big bursts (described with a great deal of zest and zeal here and here) …

And now, two years later, I was looking at four more Travis McGee novels … prices were reasonable … no reason to dilly or dally … or delay … and the four novels arrived two days back … I just loved the covers … and the blurbs on the covers … and take a look at the titles … each title has a ‘colour,’ no? … all Travis McGee novels have a ‘colour’ word in their titles … it was suggested by John D. MacDonald’s publisher and was supposed to act as a mnemonic device for the reader …

Dress her in Indigo … a slight hint of indigo on the cover … the 11^th in the series … came out in 1969, and this is the 35^th reprint 1991 edition …

The Green Ripper … nice green coloured cover … the 18^th in the series, published in 1979, and this copy is the 1980 edition …

Free Fall in Crimson … crimson coloured cover … the 19^th in the series, published in 1981 … and this copy is a 1981 edition … first edition … hmmmm ….

 

The last novel in the series … The Lonely Silver Rain … you can see the silver in the title letters … came out in 1985, and this is a 1986 edition …

I like these details which makes the whole collecting and reading experience interesting … the other series that innovates with titles is Simon Brett’s Fethering Mysteries … do check out the titles … the novels are also very good ...