The Brown Brontë

 You may know that today is International Mother Language Day , but why is it important?      On this day in 1952, in what was then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), Bengali university students were shot and killed by armed police, while protesting for the recognition of Bangla, rather than Urdu, as the official language of East Pakistan. It would be some years before Bangla was officially recognised as the state language of East Pakistan, but this day marked the beginning of the independence movement for a sovereign Bangladesh. People in Bangladesh mark today with a national holiday, songs and poetry recitals, repeating the words “amra tomader bhulbo na.” We will not forget you. monument to the martyrs of the language movement      My parents have always tried to instill in us a sense of the importance of learning Bangla, but for many Bangladeshis in Britain, their mother tongue is not actually the ‘standard’ Bangla but one of the regional dialects from Sylhet, Noakhali, Chittagong o

This Valentine's Day I was excited to read these translations of some of the poems of the famous Persian poet Shamsuddin Muhammad Hafiz. The title -  The Subject Tonight Is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz -  is so fitting for Valentine's Day, although of course Hafiz was not just a romantic poet; his poems can also be read as spiritual, being addressed to the Divine. The poems in this volume certainly give a taste of the spiritual and emotional intensity that Hafiz is known for. By Abolhassan Sadighi - Society for the National Heritage of Iran, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86911865 However, I was disappointed to find that these translations by Daniel Ladinsky, published in 1996, were based not on the original Persian, but on the 1891 English translations of H. Wilberforce Clarke. It might be more accurate to say that they are translations of a translation. Since every act of translation involves a measure of interpretation, this in it

 A lyrical, reflective journey through the course of one London summer, the relationships and encounters that shape a life, and coming to terms with emotional trauma. So often, while reading this book, I felt I was drifting out onto open water on the currents and eddies of Nelson’s beautiful prose. The central current that carries the narrative forward, is the romance at its heart. But swirling and coursing around and beneath it, are stories about pain, about loss, about living an authentic life and seeing yourself as others see you. A couple of stumbling blocks: one was the choice to narrate in the second person. Because the main protagonist shares a lot of characteristics with Nelson himself, I read it as an attempt to put some – but not too much - distance between the narrating persona and the protagonist. However I was never really sure whether the narrator is Nelson speaking to himself, or whether he is addressing a collective young black male entity. The other was that sometime