Yves here. Rajiv Sethi discusses Salman Rushdie, the first novelist who enthralled Sethi, not just via the famed lyricism of Rushie’s writing but also his use of images that were particularly evocative for a fellow subcontinental. While literature-lovers are oriented to see universal themes and images, Sethi reminds us that fiction, particularly novels, are anchored in time and place, and that even skilled authors like Rushdie find it helpful to ‘splain them a bit. But not everything can be well-translated. For instance, consider the great tragedy Medea by Euripides. I doubt I am alone in finding it hard to comprehend how a woman could feel so dishonored that murdering her own children was gratifying.
There are many many examples of the sort of thing Sethi describes, of a deeper sense of meaning being lost on those not from the same culture. For iconic writers like Shakespeare, good instructors and reference books try to compensate and recapture witticisms that would go over contemporary readers’ heads. For instance, reason and raisin rhymed before the great vowel shift.
One of my favorites is:
Golden lads and girls all must
As chimney sweepers
Come to dust.
“Golden lads” were dandelions. “Chimney sweepers” were dandelions gone to seed.
By Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics, Barnard College, Columbia University; External Professor, Santa Fe Institute. Originally published at Imperfect Information
I’ve mentioned in a couple of earlier posts that I spent ten formative years of my life—including all of my teenage years—in England. At some point during that period I developed a love of literature. But it was love at a distance, as one might feel for a starry night or unruly waves crashing into rocks. If there were hidden messages in the words, they were not meant for me, or for anyone with my particular intersection of cultural competences.
That changed suddenly when a friend handed me a copy of Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s second novel. I could see right away that this magnificent book would entrance readers from every corner of the world, but also that some expressions would only be partially grasped by those who didn’t share the author’s linguistic and cultural history.
Consider an example. When I first opened the book and scanned the table of contents, I noticed (among other things) a chapter called “The Buddha.” What came to mind was the ascetic who founded a religion, sitting cross-legged in meditative contemplation. But once the chapter itself was reached almost four hundred pages later, it turned out that the reference was (also) to a different word entirely, much harsher in sound and meaning, an epithet for a decrepit old man. Two words so opposite in tone, united by the limits of transliteration, both suitable nicknames for the book’s protagonist Saleem Sinai at that point in his life’s journey:
O fortunate ambiguity of transliteration! The Urdu word buddha, meaning old man, is pronounced with the Ds hard and plosive. But there is also Buddha, with soft tongued Ds, meaning he who achieved enlightenment under the bodhi tree.
This passage will feel different to those who have spoken and heard both words over the course of their lives. Such a connection between author and reader, trivial as it might seem, meant something to me. I devoured Rushdie’s next two novels, Shame and The Satanic Verses, both masterpieces every bit as entrancing as their predecessor.
Salman Rushdie was at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco earlier this month, in conversation with Poulomi Saha.1 He has recently published a collection of stories, and disclosed at the event that the second of these—The Musician of Kahani—was the first to be written. It’s about eighty pages in length, more a novella than a short story, and according to the author will be the last to be set on the hill in Bombay where he was born. In fact, he says as much in the story itself, which concludes with a parting message to the fictional characters (including Saleem) who once inhabited the same neighborhood.
The Musician of Kahani is the story of a girl with prodigious (and increasingly magical) musical talent, born to two mathematicians—a mother who develops an early search engine that she sells to an American for a hundred million dollars, and a father who is on the verge of publishing a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem when he is “beaten to the punch by a British scholar.” The story is hilarious in parts, horrifying in others, and so beautifully crafted that I felt transported back to those early days of discovery.
Here is one passage:
And her concerts! Our people are not reticent about expressing their appreciation in the presence of greatness. “Wah!” we cry out. “Wow!” And also “Kya baat hai!,” “What a thing!” And we do this during, not at the end of, the performance. Beethoven would not have approved, nor even the giggly showman Mozart (as portrayed in Forman’s Amadeus). Those gents expected to be heard in reverential silence and applauded when they were done. Well too bad Ludwig van, Wolfgang A.! You’re in India now. And here, during is the way. Here the performer and the audience are as one. Each lifts the other higher.
Again, this will land differently on the ears of someone accustomed to hearing (or shouting out) “Bahut Khoob!” during brief pauses between successive Urdu couplets at a dinner party recital.2
The fatwa, and the years of fear and hiding in its wake, had an impact on Rushdie’s writing. How could they not? I certainly felt that no subsequent work of fiction reached the towering heights of his second, third, and fourth novels.3 Until now. The Musician of Kahani is truly magnificent.4 Could it be that what the dagger hanging over his head killed in his fiction was brought back to life by his survival of a brutal stabbing? The idea is absurd, of course, but would not be out of place in a Rushdie story.
1 I’m in the Bay area for the academic year, working on a book tentatively called The Interpretation of Signals. This was my second visit to the theater—the first was to see Arundhati Roy in conversation with Deepa Fernandes, who is also currently a fellow at CASBS. Roy’s latest book Mother Mary Comes To Me is on my reading list for the holidays, as is a recent biography of James Baldwin by Nicholas Boggs that was mentioned by Rushdie during the conversation.
2 I have focused in this post on author-reader ties that are linguistic and cultural in nature, but some of the deepest connections transcend ethnic boundaries.
3 His non-fiction was also affected but in different ways; my favorite Rushdie essay was written shortly after the fatwa was imposed.
4 Here’s another passage I can’t resist quoting. This one describes the path taken by the musician’s father, Raheem Contractor, in seeking a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem (a path that eventually leads him to abandon his family for a religious cult):
Raheem had examined and rejected all attempts to untangle the thorny conundrum, delving into the intricacies of the Yang-Mills equations, the Riemann Hypothesis, the P versus NP problem, the Hodge conjecture, the Navier-Stokes equations, the Poincaré Conjecture, and the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, and found them all wanting. At last, after many long years, he had begun to understand that the answer lay within the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture, subsequently known as the Modularity Theorem and was on the verge of publishing his proof, when he was beaten to the punch by a British scholar, who became famous and was showered with honors and awards, while Raheem Contractor remained anonymous in his university office. He was inconsolable, and his lifelong faith in numbers, and in his ability to use them as the building blocks of a good life, began to dissolve. He became vulnerable to other forms of belief.
This is a typical Rushdie detour from the story at hand. I know next to nothing about these very technical branches of mathematics but am dimly aware that something called the Taniyama-Shimura-Weil Conjecture implies Fermat’s claim, and that this was the path taken by Andrew Wiles in his celebrated proof.
