Glynne Walley, translator of classic Japanese novel Hakkenden, joins us on the podcast again to talk about his second translated volume: Hakkenden, Part 2: His Master’s Blade. Unlike Part 1—which is all preamble!—in Part 2 we meet some of the fabled eight dog warriors and the Confucian virtues they represent: Shino, for filial piety; Gakuzo, for duty; Dosetsu, for loyalty. There’s betrayal, drama… and a lot of secret, intertwined family relationships.
Classic
When Mark Twain interviewed the leader of the Mormon Church, Brigham Young, in 1861, he found the religious patriarch mightily preoccupied with the problems of equal treatment for his 56 wives. Young told Twain of gifting a handkerchief or a fan to one woman; before long, all the other wives clamored for similar attentions. Polygamy’s downside provides the starting point for the epic poem, The Theft of a Tree, composed in classical Telegu by Nandi Timmana for Krishnadeveraya, ruler of the 16th century, south Indian, Vijayanagara empire. Surely the maharaja, with three documented consorts, could relate to the problem described by Brigham Young. And surely, he would have been enchanted by the poetic treatment accorded to it by his court poet.
Genghis Khan established the greatest land empire ever known. His heirs saw to it that his accomplishments be remembered in a number of now classic works, like the Secret Histories of the Mongols, the Compendium of Histories by Rashiduddin, and Juvayni’s History of the World Conqueror. But souvenirs of Genghis Khan also survived in folk tales of the Tatar peoples, where they were transformed for cultural and political purposes, as shown in Mária Ivanics’s masterful editing of The Činggis Legend.
One of the great works of Chinese literature, Kingdoms in Peril is an epic historical novel charting the five hundred years leading to the unification of the country in 221 BCE under the rule of the legendary First Emperor. Writing some fourteen hundred years later, the Ming-era author Feng Menglong drew on a vast trove of literary and historical documents to compose a gripping narrative account of how China was forged.
Needle at the Bottom of the Sea, five Bengali romances from the 17th to 19th centuries in English translation, reflect on the folkloric world of the Sunderbans “where tigers talk, rocks float and waters part, and faeries carry a sleeping Sufi holy man into the bedroom of a Hindu princess with whom the god of fate, Bidhata, has ordained his marriage.” Named after the local “Sundari” tree, the Sunderbans, locally known as atharobhati or the land of the eighteen tides, is the planet’s largest delta, formed by the merging of large rivers: the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna in the Bay of Bengal region of India and Bangladesh.
In 1856, the East India Company imposed the Hindu Widow Remarriage Act, allowing widows to remarry after their husband’s death. The Act was controversial at the time: Hindu traditionalists, particularly in higher castes, prevented widows from remarrying to protect the family’s honor, and even teenage and child widows were expected to live lives of austerity.
There once was a tradition of storytelling that enthralled kings and beggars, mixing simple language and lofty poetry, while deploying ingenious tricks to retain the audience’s attention. Usually there were three or four stories embedded one within another, like a Russian doll. Just when you thought you were coming to a denouement, a new story began—more amazing and amusing than the last, and so you listened, fought off sleep or wine, and tried not to miss a word of the storyteller’s tale. The home of many of these fabulous tales is India, which gave the world the Panchatantra, and later inspired Rudyard Kipling’s Just So and the Jungle Book.