Newses about Bookses!

Whatever I was going to write in my previous post got updated the very next day!

It looks huge! But the Hindi language edition of HARVEST – translated by Rahul Rai – is a slender little book. From Hachette India. Please ask for it at bookshops. I’ve just received my author copies, so I don’t know if it’s reached Amazon.in yet. This link goes to Hachette India: HARVEST.

And before you ask, no, Hachette does not normally publish in Hindi. They made an exception because they already have the stand-alone version of HARVEST.

Here is a group photo of three editions of Harvest:

The blue-and-black cover is of the very first edition, published in 1998 at lightning speed – barely four months after they received the manuscript – by Kali for Women* at Paul’s Press, an exceptional press owned and run by my dear friend Sunita Paul.

*(a few years later, that wonderful publishing house split into two other and equally wonderful publishing houses, Zubaan and Women Unlimited, owned and managed by Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon respectively)

There are, in fact, a number of versions of Harvest. Aside from the authorised stand-alone version published by Hachette, there’s a reverse-gender version (part of the Hachette edition, featured above, with the white cover), there’s the very slightly re-edited version in Hachette’s collection of my plays called BLOOD AND LAUGHTER. There’s the very first printed version that the Onassis Foundation produced at the time that Harvest was awarded the Onassis Prize, accompanied by a Greek language version – of which I do not have a copy. Plus: an unauthorised edition published in the UK, available on Amazon. I can’t prevent it from being produced so instead I avoid thinking about it.

There have also been any number of clandestine productions and even translations of Harvest into other languages, in India. Sometimes I hear about them, but usually not.

This Hindi translation is, in my opinion, really special: Rahul Rai has allowed the English of the original script to take on a cheeky, spicy, Mumbai-flavour.

As I am not a Hindi speaker, some of you may wonder how I can possibly know what the translation is like? Well, here’s the answer: a team of four brilliant multi-lingual editors and I sat together at Hachette’s office in Gurgaon and did a fabulous table-read. It was a two-day marathon, totalling around fifteen hours. That reading gave me an opportunity to hear the whole play, as well as to understand the nuances of it, in translation.

The result is still very much Rai’s translation, but with inputs from four editors and me, working together. I now believe that this has to be one of the best ways to translate a play – because of the multiple voices, the range of characters and the way that small shifts of meaning in one language can sink into verbal gloop in another language.

As one small example, take the title of the play. It’s the same word in Hindi as it is in English. Why? Because no one felt comfortable with the literal meaning of “harvest” in Hindi. The Hindi word, “phasal” is purely agricultural, whereas in English the secondary meaning (ie, “to remove organs from donors”), is the one most relevant to the play. So, even though we weren’t quite satisfied by the solution, we left it unchanged.

Meanwhile …

My novel TAXI was awarded “Second Runner-up” by the Wise Owl Literary Awards in Chandigarh last week! The organisers weren’t able to inform me in advance and so it was a huge surprise. I first heard of it from a good friend and a couple of days later received the award and a scroll from my hardworking Hachette editor, Sonali Jindal, who attended the ceremony in Ch’garh.

Below, I reveal (for the first time, wheee!) the Sushila Devi Award received at the Bhopal Literary and Arts Festival and also the rather cute Wise Owl award and scroll.