Glossary or no? The immaculate novel
HarperCollins is publishing softcovers of desi lit with Hindi glossaries, author interviews and ads promoting other books in the back, the so-called ‘P.S. editions.’ A friend and I disagreed over whether the glossary is necessary:
| Manish | Friend |
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The glossary in Sacred Games doesn’t bother me one bit. If I ever get around to reading it I’ll find that tres useful. Translation isn’t just for white people, you know. :) |
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It’s cheesy. On blogs you can hover for definition. Footnotes would be better. No italics. Also, unequal treatment. They don’t translate French or Italian or German for the reader. And I don’t speak French. |
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They should–I actually get annoyed when they don’t (and was annoyed just the other day when some pretentious professor didn’t do that in something I was reading). Make those Europeans work a bit harder to earn their royalties–fine by me. ;) I think that footnotes would break the flow. I agree no italics. And providing glossary online with URL in the book somewhere is also fine with me. But in general I think that educating people to broaden their horizons is never bad per se, it’s all about how it’s done. |
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Why break flow? It’s more in context. Even better would be definitions printed in the width between lines. I’m totally pro-accessibility, but anti-cheese. Ultrabrown does it with a subtle gray underline. Hover for tip with definition. Ebooks rock for this. |
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Well, footnotes would be even more annoying than a glossary for people who already know the words’ meaning–rather than creating a separate resource for people who need it, the entire work is thereby catering to the people who do. It’d be different if it were nonfiction and everything were footnoted anyway, but in fiction it would be jarring. |
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How is looking up ‘chutiya’ any different from looking up ‘deipnosophist’? Why not trust the reader? The point is it adds frippery to the work. Violates its purity and integrity. Like getting an iPod with an envelope of coupons and special offers and bad software and other random crap. |
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I see your point, though definitely not the analogy. But assuming that’s true in degrees, wouldn’t footnotes do that more than a glossary? One might argue in favor of a glossary if the words to be looked up would be harder to find in widely available sources. I actually find it very cumbersome to look up Hindi and Punjabi words when I’m trying to do so. And A. is often emailing/IMing me to ask re: Hindi definitions, which he probably wouldn’t do if he could easily look them up. |
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Yup. An online glossary is a nice compromise. By the way, try Googling “<Hindi word> English”. That sometimes works. |
on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008, 6:21 pm in Literature › 
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Stuff White People Like: Reading books like Sacred Games w/o the glossary, determining the intended meaning of any “foreign” words using context clues (chutiya, for example, was pretty obvious — and actually, I don’t think Chandra wrote anything that I couldn’t understand, at least at the general level), and then bragging about how smart they are.
^__^
Stuff brown people like: an authentic glossary for Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Want. Now.
If you read older books on Indian history written by British writers, even till the 50-60s, they don’t give translations for Greek/Latin passages (eg., describing Alexander’s expedition in India, or Megasthenes’ account of Pataliputra). For some reason I find that very amusing: for who would ever want to read Indian history except old Etonians.
I read the post without distractions now (For the record, academic please do away with endnotes: so much more annoying than footnotes). I would have imagined being so annoyed with footnotes in fiction, but loved the effect and their flippant tone in Oscar Wao. They contextualized the story, and Diaz’s easy cadence and humor dispelled the pedantry one normally associates with serious annotations in literature. Loved the sense of place, and the enormous historical information which was contained in them.
About glossaries: I understand your concern about how glossaries and footnotes turn swishing chiffon nature of the work into a too-ornate banarasi silk. But sometimes you so badly want to know what the characters really mean when they say something, or why a particular turn of phrase is just so in some language. There is this yearning for the literal meaning of the world, and you feel the acute loss of translation, of being excluded from a world which was so intimately known to you a few pages ago. Maybe I am in the minority. I love the music, but I feel so much better when I know the lyrics to a song. For instance, I love Gulzar’s work, but my Hindi is not quite up to the demands of poetry. Feels amazing when I parse the literal meaning of the words, or work out how the imagery corresponds to the emotion he’s writing about.
i know it is more complicated than this, but i always thought glossaries were for text books, meaning monotonous informational encyclopedia-esque regurgitation, meaning not literature.
whatever happened to when people wrote to just tell a story?
and whatever happened to reading novels just to read a story, not to re-enact a 19th century anthropological dig of the “far east” to learn what those heathens are all about?
Wait — Manish, did I just catch that you are pro ebook? ^__^
Sacred Games SHOULD have a glossary. It’s not that you don’t get the meaning from context or enjoy the novel just as much when some words are mysterious (as I think we all enjoyed Enid Blyton without knowing what gnomes pr other unexplained English references were, or what the “bottom of the garden” was). But even for someone like me who grew up in Bombay there’s bhai lingo that we never ever heard, so every now and again if you want to assuage your curiosity you can look in the back. And bambaiyya words are often not understood by non-Bombayites anyway, though some AB movies and recently the Munnabhai ones have made them popular across India. What if you’re reading on a train or something, you can’t always look up things online, that’s even more distracting.
(And yes, endnotes murdabad! How I’ve battled lazy-ass publishing layout people on this. If they’re so concerned about what’s easiest for them, why not just leave out references altogether? It’s not like people actually need to look stuff up or anything. Growl)
I loved The Brief Wondrous Life…, but felt I probably missed half the point due to my lack of knowledge.
I’m pro-glossary. One doesn’t HAVE to use it, and smart readers (ok here’s me being a teacher) will try to use contextual clues. But sometimes you just need to know what the hell that means.
Contextual cues are often graceless and artless, simply repeating the word again in English. And it’s condescending and irritating when you find a curry lit author ‘contextually’ defining commonplace words like puja or bindi. That’s why I’m so in favor of just nakedly defining the word with a tooltip (online) or right above the word (print).
It’s a marketing thing. If the publishers expected anyone but desis to buy, read and appreciate it, a glossary is most certainly necessary. It’s also a traditional sort of way to present foreign terms and jargons. Not the smoothest way of presenting them, I agree, but a standard one (like end notes). A single book sniffing at publishing tradition won’t do too well unless gimmicky.
Italics are also a literary convention. All foreign words are supposed to be italicized except for those that have “officially” made it to the OED, which are myriad. I don’t like it..deciding which to italicize is annoying and cumbersome. Then again, the English language is annoying and cumbersome (not to mention a mongrel tongue with little consistency)…but that’s the way it is. Authors shouldn’t arbitrarily determine how they want to present their material for the sake of superficial ease. [It’s bad enough we have people shrugging dismissively at spelling, punctuation, and grammar routinely and saying, “You know what I mean.” No, in fact, I don’t…]
It’s applied inconsistently and in a way that’s culturally relative.
The rigid old categories of foreign vs. domestic don’t make a whole lot of sense in a multiculti text. Much of Junot Diaz’ appeal is his fluency in multiple languages and cultures.
The OED lags by several years. They didn’t italicize ‘websites.’
I loved Sacred Games, and I read the hardcover, so I didn’t have the glossary, but VC had the online one at his website, which did help from time to time. I’m kind of torn on the idea of glossaries in books too. I can see the argument for having it in SC, but then, “A Clockwork Orange” is filled with all manner of inscrutable Russian slang and it was really hard to penetrate at first, but after a the first few chapters I picked up on what was being said. And I think for a book like ACO it’s important that you don’t quite understand at first but are slowly pulled down to Alex’s level and get deeper and deeper into his head the further along you are in the book.
I don’t know that that’s as necessary in SC.
I like glossary for all books..
Iam reading right now Julia childs “my life in france”..she uses so many french words Iam having a lil bit of hard time..she writes translation to most cooking terms she uses right then and there next to the french word making it easy..I ended up recently buying this easy french and spanish cd because it is hard to read writers using non english words in their writing..be it hindi or french or any language..
so I like having glossary.. But I prefer having it not at the end of the novel but just on the same page at the bottom..
when I was writing my first novel in english using indian words sometimes my writing group collegues who were to critique my novel found it hard..they would write emails to me asking me what does this word mean..as it is it was confusing for them even the names of my indian characters..so having glossary avoids confusion..
one more thing I read this novel Hindi bindi club last year with recipes at the end of each chapter..surprisingly I liked that and thought that was funny and interesting too..
one thing Iam bored of is those mangoes, saree borders, ladies with sarees or ladies with payal on the book covers of indian books..I hope they come up with something new..
one more thing too Iam bored of novels written on arranged marriages, or too womanly stories like mistress of spices..
rest of things like glossary of words, authors interviews, some adv. on good interesting books to read is ok for me..
Iam also looking forward to E books but then I never saw a ebook or read anything from it, so Iam kind of scared to buy one without seeing one or holding one but I love the concept of having 100,000 books in simple easy to carry ebook..