http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/03/books/murty-classical-library-catalogs-indian-literature.html
[With lots of links and better read online for that reason.] http://www.murtylibrary.com/ http://www.murtylibrary.com/volumes.php are below. Literature of India, Enshrined in a Series Murty Classical Library Catalogs Indian Literature Sheldon Pollock, a professor of South Asian studies at Columbia University and the general editor of the Murty Classical Library of India. By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER NY Times JANUARY 3, 2015 When the Loeb Classical Library was founded in 1911, it was hailed as a much-needed effort to make the glories of the Greek and Roman classics available to general readers. Virginia Woolf praised the series, which featured reader-friendly English translations and the original text on facing pages, as “a gift of freedom.” Over time, the pocket-size books, now totaling 522 volumes and counting, became both scholarly mainstays and design-geek fetish objects, their elegant green (Greek) and red (Latin) covers spotted everywhere from the pages of Martha Stewart Living to Mr. Burns’s study on “The Simpsons.” Now, Harvard University Press, the publisher of the Loebs, wants to do the same for the far more vast and dizzyingly diverse classical literature of India, in what some are calling one of the most complex scholarly publishing projects ever undertaken. The Murty Classical Library of India, whose first five dual-language volumes will be released next week, will include not only Sanskrit texts but also works in Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Prakrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and other languages. Projected to reach some 500 books over the next century, the series is to encompass poetry and prose, history and philosophy, Buddhist and Muslim texts as well as Hindu ones, and familiar works alongside those that have been all but unavailable to nonspecialists. The Murty will offer “something the world had never seen before, and something that India had never seen before: a series of reliable, accessible, accurate and beautiful books that really open up India’s precolonial past,” said Sheldon Pollock, a professor of South Asian studies at Columbia University and the library’s general editor. That literary heritage can seem daunting in size. While the canon of surviving Greek and Roman classics is fairly small, the literature of India’s multiple classical languages includes thousands upon thousands of texts, many of which, as the writer William Dalrymple recently noted, exist only in manuscripts that are decaying before they can be translated or even cataloged. The Murty Library, Mr. Pollock said, aims to take in the broadest swath of them. “We are a big tent,” he said. “As long as it’s good and interesting and important, it’s going to be in the Murty Classical Library.” The editions, which come wrapped in elegant rose-colored covers, are intended, like the Loebs, “to be around for 100 years,” Mr. Pollock said. But to some scholars, the project also comes as a timely if implicit rebuke to the Hindu nationalists of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, with its promotion of a unitary Indian identity based on selected Sanskrit religious classics. The series “debunks the myth of a Hindu orthodoxy as being the only classicism we have,” said Arshia Sattar, an independent scholar and translator in Bangalore. “In a strange way, the editors are creating a new canon.” The library, which will be celebrated late this month at the Jaipur Literary Festival, arrives at a fraught moment in India’s long-running battles over language and national identity. Last month the country’s foreign minister, Sushma Swaraj, declaredthat the Bhagavad Gita, a Sanskrit religious text, should be designated a “national scripture.” In November, effortsto make the teaching of Sanskrit essentially mandatory in schools for the children of government employees prompted an outcry. Activists, meanwhile, have sought “classical” status for other languages, including Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam, even as once-vibrant Indian scholarship in the older literature of those languages has withered away. When it gained independence in 1947, India had a pioneering generation of homegrown classicists of the first rank. But today, scholars say, its universities produce and retain few classical scholars with the interpretive skills required by a project like the Murty, which has drawn its entire advisory board and most of its translators, South Asian and Western alike, from American and European institutions. “Everyone here will praise this library and talk about the glorious civilization it represents,” said Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, a poet and translator now retired from the University of Allahabad who was not involved with the project. “But then Indians will wake up and realize they’ve done very little to preserve or translate their own texts.” The Murty Library fills a scholarly void. The last comparable project, the Clay Sanskrit Library, a series inaugurated by New York University Press in 2005, closed up shop prematurely after four years and 56 volumes when its benefactor, the financier John Clay, ended his support. (Mr. Clay died in 2013.) After the Clay Library’s demise, Mr. Pollock, who had taken over as its general editor, reconceived the project to extend far beyond Sanskrit. He shopped around in India for a new benefactor, to no avail. He then brought the idea to Sharmila Sen, executive editor at large at Harvard University Press, who connected him withRohan Murty, the son of the Indian technology billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy. (The two men spell their surnames differently.) The younger Mr. Murty, at the time a 26-year-old doctoral student in computer science at Harvard, put up $5.2 million to endow the new library, which will eventually be digitized, in perpetuity. “He really understood the need for it,” Ms. Sen, who acquired the series, said. “We were both educated in the same kind of India, where we knew way more about Shakespeare and Wordsworth than about the classical texts of our own region.” Some works in the first release will be familiar to many Indians even if they have never read them. “Sur’s Ocean,” a 1,000-page anthology of more than 400 poems attributed to the 16th-century Hindi poet Surdas (edited by Kenneth E. Bryant and translated by John Stratton Hawley), includes verses that have deeply penetrated popular oral tradition, while Surdas himself figures in a quiz-show question in the movie “Slumdog Millionaire.” Others are appearing in full translation for the first time. “The Story of Manu,” a 16th-century south Indian epic poem about the first human being (translated from Telugu by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman), has never before been translated into another language, Mr. Pollock said. (Like most of the original-language text in the series, the Telugu script is printed in a custom-designed font.) The inaugural volumes include two works from the Muslim tradition with broad contemporary resonances. The ecstatic Sufi lyrics of the 18th-century Punjabi poetBullhe Shah, translated by Christopher Shackle, have been sung by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and featured in Bollywood movies. The first of multiple projected volumes of Abu’l-Fazl’s “History of Akbar,” translated from Persian by Wheeler M. Thackston, chronicles the early life of a Mughal emperor celebrated today as a unifier who promoted religious pluralism. The initial Murty release also includes theTherigatha, an anthology of verses by and about the earliest ordained Buddhist women, first written down in Sri Lanka more than 2,000 years ago and considered some of the world’s oldest surviving women’s poetry. Those verses, which capture the women’s relief at being free of constricting roles as wives and mothers, have been embraced by modern Buddhists seeking a vision of Buddhism as concerned with the oppressed, the translator, Charles Hallisey, said. But they have yet to claim their rightful place in the broader canon of world literature, in part because of the stiffness of previous translations from Pali, a dead language, he said. “These verses are so vivid,” Mr. Hallisey said. “The challenge was to translate them as poetry, rather than as something more conventionally Buddhist.” The spare poems of the Therigatha, with their longing for transcendence and their glimpses of ordinary life, may travel easily across the millenniums. But to Mr. Pollock, what makes a work a classic is not its familiarity and universality but its utter, irreducible strangeness. The goal of the Murty “is to ensure that everyone can hear these strange voices — not just scholars in their studies, but kids standing at railway kiosks,” he said. “Now, those kids will be able to pull a book down off the shelf and hear these voices, too.” http://www.murtylibrary.com/ “The shaping of India’s future depends on understanding its past, and the Murty Classical Library of India deserves acclaim for making great works from the past widely available.” —Amartya Sen “The Murty Classical Library of India promises an extraordinary intellectual breakthrough with its translations. Our knowledge of India’s literary, philosophical, and political traditions is about to be radically expanded and enriched.” —Pankaj Mishra Our Mission To present the greatest literary works of India from the past two millennia to the largest readership in the world is the mission of the Murty Classical Library of India. The series aims to reintroduce these works, a part of world literature’s treasured heritage, to a new generation. Translated into English by world-class scholars, reflecting the highest standards of contemporary book design, and featuring elegant, newly commissioned typefaces, these volumes are a modern invitation to diverse pre-modern literary worlds in languages such as Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Pali, Panjabi, Persian, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. The series will provide English translations of classical works alongside the Indic originals in the appropriate regional script. New books will be added to the series annually. This series is supported by a generous gift from Rohan Narayana Murty, computer scientist and true friend of the Indian classics. Key Features of Murty Classical Library Books The Murty Classical Library is a facing-page translation series. The original Indic text, in the appropriate script, is accompanied by a modern English translation on the opposite page. Marginal numbers indicating line, paragraph, or verse appear on both pages, helping the reader to compare the translation with the original. Readers familiar with the Indic original will appreciate the authoritative annotated text; for those who cannot read the original, the modern English translation is intended to provide as faithful a version as possible. Our translators are world-class scholars who have devoted many years to the study of the Indic originals and are experts in the fields represented by these texts. Their translations are based on their intimate knowledge of the Indic languages, manuscripts, and traditions—literary, political, and religious—in which these texts are embedded. The series is thus designed to help all readers enhance their appreciation of the original texts and pursue further reading. Additional aids include introductions providing information about the writer and the context and character of the work; annotations elucidating problematic passages both in the original text and the translation; bibliographies offering directions for further exploration; and glossaries listing important epithets and literary conventions. http://www.murtylibrary.com/volumes.php Available Volumes Sufi Lyrics Bullhe Shah, edited and translated by Christopher Shackle The poetry of Bullhe Shah, which drew upon Sufi mysticism, is considered one of the glories of premodern Panjabi literature. His lyrics, famous for their vivid style and outspoken denunciation of artificial religious divisions, have been held in affection by Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, and continue to win audiences today across national boundaries. The History of Akbar, Volume 1 Abu’l-Fazl, edited and translated by Wheeler M. Thackston The History of Akbar, by Abu’l-Fazl, is one of the most important works of Indo-Persian history and a touchstone of prose artistry. It is at once a biography of the Mughal emperor Akbar that includes descriptions of his political and martial feats and cultural achievements, and a chronicle of sixteenth-century India. Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women Translated by Charles Hallisey Therīgāthā is a poetry anthology in the Pali language by and about the first Buddhist women. The poems they left behind are arguably among the most ancient examples of women’s writing in the world and are unmatched for their quality of personal expression and the extraordinary insight they offer into women’s lives in the ancient Indian past. The Story of Manu Allasani Peddana, translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman The Story of Manu, by sixteenth-century poet Allasani Peddana, is the definitive literary monument of Telugu civilization and a powerful embodiment of the culture of Vijayanagara, the last of the great premodern south Indian states. It describes kingship and its exigencies at the time of Krishnadevaraya, Peddana’s close friend and patron. Sur’s Ocean: Poems from the Early Tradition Surdas, edited by Kenneth E. Bryant, translated by John Stratton Hawley Surdas, regarded as the epitome of artistry in Old Hindi religious poetry from the end of the sixteenth century to the present, refashioned the narrative of Krishna and his lover Radha into elegant, approachable lyrics. His popularity led to the proliferation, through an energetic oral tradition, of poems ascribed to him, the Sūrsāgar. Forthcoming works include the Ramayana by Kampan (Tamil), Kiratarjuniya by Bharavi (Sanskrit), Ramcaritmanas by Tulsidas (Hindi), Annadamangal by Bharatchandra Ray (Bangla), Guru Granth Sahib(Panjabi), Ghalib Poetry and Prose (Urdu), and other classical texts in such languages as Apabhramsha, Kannada, Prakrit, and Sindhi. -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
