Minneapolis, Delhi, TLS of London

Into the TLS office each day come recommendations from writers and readers about what we should review, who should be the reviewers, what our readers might prefer to the books we have selected and who should never, under any circumstance, be allowed to write for the TLS again.

We welcome them all.

We don't act on them all. In some weeks we might act on none of them. But we are a paper which has traditionally fed from widespread roots rather than preaching any single critical doctrine from the top of our tree.

'Not long ago', writes Bill Carpenter from Minneapolis, 'you had a substantial article on translations of the Indian epics.  As worthy an undertaking as those translations represent, I suspect that many of your readers would gain more satisfaction from the “transcreations” of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata by the Indian scholar, Dr. Purushottama Lal.'

We did indeed have an excellent piece on the publishing series that aims to be the Loeb Classical Library of Asia. It was our 'lead piece' and  many readers thanked us for it.

Bill Carpenter suggests that the work of Dr Lal would do us all even more good. 'He is an excellent Indian English poet who knows how to select from the originals to make effective and readable English poems.  Not only that, in his eighties, he is still giving weekly readings of his full-length transcreation (still in progress) of the Mahabharata.  Not only that, but his publications, with their hand-woven cloth bindings, are a very good bargain—except for the shipping costs from India.  Learn more about his remarkable “Writers Workshop” enterprise in Calcutta, which publishes his transcreations, on this website'.

Sometimes we get recommendations from those who have a commercial or personal interest in what they recommend - and, if that is declared, we mind that not at all. Publishers must sell their wares - and if a brother or sister or former tutor can help, why not, as long as we know who they are.

Sometimes, indeed very often at the TLS, an editor sniffs a genuinely independent suggestion. And Mr Carpenter's seems to be one of those.

Only the most cynical (and at the TLS we try not to merit that description) would asssume that a distinguished corporate lawyer from the Minnesota Bar, specialising in company mergers, real-estate and anti-trust issues, had anything other than the finest motives for introducing us to Dr Lal.

So, thanks to Bill Carpenter. And thanks, by proxy, to all the thousands of others who give us the benefit of their best advice.

Next time I need to consider the Mahabharata, I know where I will be looking.

Comments

[Candadai Tirumalai]

"The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" are of course central to the Western tradition; the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are even more so to the Indian tradition. And while the religious practices recorded in Homer have ben laid aside, the Indian epics (by two different authors) are still an active part of the religious ethos of India, sometimes, alas, in a fanatical way.
I am sure Mr.Lal's "transcreations" are very worthy ones.

[Bill Carpenter]

Dear Friends,
No need to print this, but I would like to thank the Editor for his generous response to my suggestion regarding Prof. Lal's condensed Ramayana and Mahabharata, each available hardbound from the Writers Workshop in Calcutta for only 400 Rps. I will be emboldened to make other disinterested suggestions as your articles suggest them to me, and I won't have any expectation of a reply.
Best wishes,
Bill Carpenter
Minneapolis

[Ramesh Raghuvanshi]

You may review or not that one is your right but I must tell Pro. Lal is devoted writer and spend his entire life for literature.
Mahabharata is excellent classic and I think one gentleman[I forget his name] made a English film of this book and showed all over the world I think there is no need to reintroduced this great epic to readers.