Reseña de: Piedad Matas Sánchez, Crónica de un tiempo roto, Iznájar (Córdoba, España): Ayuntamiento de Iznájar, 2011, 288 págs., ISBN 978-84-937543-1-0

La historia social, la narración de las vidas de una sociedad o de una comunidad, puede asumir muchas formas, siendo una de las más llamativas entre ellas el testimonio, o sea la creación de un relato en que el ‘yo’ que narra es idéntico con el ‘yo’ narrado y el lector se deja arrastrar por la identificación directa con vivencias que le son ajenas pero a través de la lectura se le hacen inesperadamente cercanas.

 Así, sale a la luz, merced al Ayuntamiento de la pequeña localidad cordobesa de Iznájar, esta Crónica de un tiempo roto, historia personal y narrativa a pequeña escala situada principalmente en los años de la Guerra Civil (sin olvidar la pre-guerra y la posguerra), de la pluma de Piedad Matas Sánchez, vástago de una familia numerosa (la sexta de once hijos e hijas) de la clase de terratenientes medianos de un rincón de Andalucía que (así lo quiso la Historia) vivió toda la guerra en zona nacional. A pesar de esta ubicación en el tiempo, no estamos ante una cualquier reivindicación partidaria o intervención en el debate sobre la memoria histórica. Se trata, antes, de una visión muy personal de cómo fue el vivir y sobrevivir en tiempos difíciles, en un lugar aislado cuyo cotidiano, cuyas costumbres seguían en pie con o sin la guerra, aunque a veces modificadas por ella, y cuyas creencias tradicionalistas fueron pautando la vida de la narradora, Piedad Matas. Narradora que, a pesar de su condición femenina, de entrada nada favorable al ejercicio de la escritura, consiguió plasmar su día a día en un relato elocuente que habla de la vida de un pueblo, de la Naturaleza que lo rodea, y de las sensaciones interiores de la niña, y, sucesivamente, de la adolescente y de la joven mujer. Aquí podemos señalar la idoneidad del subtítulo que la autora ha dado a su libro: Testimonio de una sencilla mujer andaluza en una época dura y turbulenta.

 Piedad Matas Sánchez (1913-1996) fue también autora de otros manuscritos, uno de los cuales, estudio costumbrista, ya fue publicado, por el mismo Ayuntamiento iznajeño, bajo el título La feria de antaño (1997). Esta nueva crónica póstuma nos llega con un prólogo de Antonio Quintana, cronista de Iznájar y antiguo vecino de la autora, un epílogo de Carmen Galeote Matas, hija de Piedad y hoy residente en Luxemburgo, y una nota final de Eugenio García, poeta español domiciliado en Béziers (Francia). No falta, entonces, documentación para contextualizar las palabras de una joven que, por muy heterodoxo que pareciera su entusiasmo, desde chiquilla siempre quiso leer, escribir, adentrarse en el mundo de la escritura, universo por el cual lograba definirse y situarse.

 El ámbito familiar y comunitario relatado por la autora se revela como duro, cruel y rígido, pero a la vez atravesado por las indestructibles emociones humanas que ni el más férreo tradicionalismo ni las más retrógradas ideologías consiguen extirpar.

 En cierto momento de la guerra, los hermanos de la niña que se encuentran en el frente cuentan en una carta que se vieron obligados a alimentarse de lagartos (110). Hay invasiones incontrolables de piojos, de cucarachas, de ácaros. En la posguerra, a la niña le amenaza el párroco con el pecado mortal y el infierno por haber comido carne en Semana Santa, si bien finalmente le da la penitencia (153-155).

 Las costumbres iznajeñas son desde siempre muy tradicionalistas. La sociedad no tolera a las madres solteras, a las desesperadas que quieren poner fin a un embarazo insostenible. Incluso en los casos menos dramáticos, ‘los noviazgos se realizaban en aquel tiempo delante de los padres, sin poder siquiera darse un beso de bienvenida o despedida’ (113). Y empero,  hasta hallándose la gente en zona nacional, la guerra impone cierta flexibilización. Así, cuando las padres de cierta novia quieren vedarle el visitar a su prometido, combatiente herido, en el hospital, y ella replica, a sabiendas de que una boda católica ‘como debe ser’ la imposibilitan las condiciones de guerra: ‘Nos casamos o nos fugamos’, sus progenitores finalmente acceden a tan atrevida demanda y aceptan un casamiento relámpago, y el lector entiende que existen momentos en que, muy inesperadamente, lo humano consigue no afianzar sino mermar hasta el más acérrimo conservadurismo (113-114).

 En lo general, entre las más ásperas vivencias la escritura ofrece una posibilidad de superación, incluso de terapia, por medio del poder transformador de la palabra. Así, en un momento de la posguerra, a una de las hermanas de Piedad se le ocurre preguntarle a ella: ‘¿Tú que eres tan listilla, por qué no escribes una novela de todo esto?’ (233). Y la ‘listilla’ cumple. El texto que le sale resulta ser no novela sino memoria, pero no menos literario por ello. A través de sus páginas, y allende todas las privaciones y explotaciones que imponen la guerra y la tradición, trasparece una impresionante sensibilidad a la fuerza creadora del  lenguaje, alimentada tal vez menos por la sociedad humana que por la Naturaleza circundante. El ambiente campestre puede ser muy agobiante, y así la autora evoca los ‘veranos, con su asfixiante canícula y sus duros trabajos cosecheros’, si bien, más poéticamente, a la vez ‘el trigo limpio subía a los graneros, hasta rebosar los blancos trojes’ (246). Cuando puede, la joven escritora Piedad busca consuelo en el entorno natural, en pasajes que por su empática dulzura podrían recordar al García Lorca que creció en la Vega granadina, aquel del Libro de Poemas o de las Canciones. Así, cuenta nuestra autora: ‘Volví a los insectos, mis estrellas y luceros, a mi sol radiante con sus rayos acariciantes y luminosos … Montones de paja limpia de residuos, nos esperaban en la era, para recibir nuestro cuerpo en las largas veladas de las noches de plenilunio’ (241).

 Terminada la guerra y extenuándose la posguerra, el lector llega al fin del testimonio de Piedad para darse cuenta de que el mundo rural andaluz perdura y sigue con sus ritmos, pero al mismo tiempo algo ha cambiado para siempre, pues en el pasado y en aquel ambiente, muy difícil hubiera sido que semejante narrativa viera la luz firmada por una mujer, sea cual sea su condición social. Quedan las palabras y los recuerdos de Piedad Matas Sánchez como evidencia de que, incluso a partir de un tiempo roto, por la empeñada crónica, por la escritura encarada como terapia, siempre es posible tejer una visión redentora y recomponer todo un mundo.

This number include studies of Toni Morrison (Mahboobeh Khaleghi), Chinua Achebe (Kiran Thakur; Shamsoddin Royanianand Zeinab Yazdani), R.K. Narayan (J. Jaya Parveen), Jhumpa Lahiri (Nirmal Sharma), Angela Carter (Shima Sadat Mirmousa), and more, as well as original poems and short stories.

Also included is my own article:

Christopher Rollason, ‘Apparently Unbridgeable Gaps of Language’ – Amitav Ghosh’s “RiverofSmoke” and an Emerging Global English’  pp. 8-14 (text on-line at: http://yatrarollason.info/files/GhoshRiverofSmoke.pdf ).

This young journal constitutes a valuable enterprise that deserves supporting.

The volume also includes my own article, “‘The Offices of CERN’: A Reading for the Internet Age of Julio Cortázar’s “ Las caras de la medalla”‘ (pp. 107-119).

That article is available on-line at:

http://yatrarollason.info/files/CortazarTheOfficesofCERNwebversion.pdf

First paragraph:

The Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar (1914-1984) has hitherto been best known as a major modern short-story writer in the fantastic mode and distinguished continuator in that genre of his still rather more famous compatriot Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), as the canonic translator into Spanish of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and as the author of the experimental novel Rayuela (Hopscotch), published in 1963  and noted for the two alternative arrangements of its chapter-sequence and its invitation to readerly participation. Today, however, Cortázar’s work is – in parallel to that of Borges – gaining a whole new lease of life for its remarkable, daring and ambivalent anticipations of the new relational structures that characterise the emerging universe of cyberspace. It is in this context that the present article will examine one particular story by Cortázar, ‘Las caras de la medalla’ (‘The Faces of the Medal’), and attempt to draw some lessons from this pre-Internet text for certain issues of human interaction in today’s brave new cyberworld.

It includes a wide range of articles and reviews in English and Spanish, on subjects relatuing to English Studies (language, literature, culture, translation studies). Among the themes  examined in this issue are:  W.B. Yeats’ plays (Mohammed A. Rawashdeh), Nabokov’s « The Gift » (Nailya Garipova), autobiographical elements in Toni Morrison (Susana Vega-González), and the translation of Walter Scott’s « Ivanhoe’ » into Spanish (Angeles García Calderón).

Also included is my own essay (in Spanish), ‘« Lorca Graves »: Presencias de la literarura hispana en la obra de Bob Dylan’ (pp. 165-185). This article is part of a lecture which I gave at the University of Seville in April 2011. It does not exist in English but can be found on-line at: http://yatrarollason.info/files/DylanLorcaGraves.pdf.

**

Acaba de salir el último número (No 18, 2011) de THE GROVE: WORKING PAPERS ON ENGLISH STUDIES, publicado por la Universidad de Jaén (España) y editado por Jesús López Peláez Casellas.

Incluye una amplia gama de artículos y reseñas, tanto en inglés como en castellano, en temas relacionados con los estudios ingleses (lengua, literatura, cultura, traductología). Entre los temas tratados en este número, señálense: la obra dramática de  W.B. Yeats  (Mohammed A. Rawashdeh), « The Gift » de Nabokov (Nailya Garipova), elementos autobiográficos en la obra de Toni Morrison (Susana Vega-González), y la traducción de « Ivanhoe’ de Walter Scott al castellano (Angeles García Calderón).

También figura mi propio texto (en castellano),  ‘« Lorca Graves »: Presencias de la literarura hispana en la obra de Bob Dylan’ (pp. 165-185). Este artículo forma parte de una conferencia que dicté en la Universidad de Sevilla en abril de 2011. No existe en lengua inglesa,  pero se ubica en línea en: http://yatrarollason.info/files/DylanLorcaGraves.pdf

El mariachi, el más conocido género musical de México, ahora (desde el 27 de noviembre de 2011) está reconocido por UNESCO como elemento de su lista del “patrimonio intangible mundial”, así como viene siendo, ya desde 2008, la cocina mexicana. El mariachi tiene sus orígenes en el estado de Jalisco (alrededor de Guadalajara), y se cree que deriva su nombre de la palabra francesa “mariage” boda).

See (English): http://edition.cnn.com/2011/11/27/world/americas/mexico-mariachi-unesco/index.html

Véase (castellano): http://mexico.cnn.com/entretenimiento/2011/11/27/la-unesco-inscribe-al-mariachi-como-patrimonio-cultural-de-la-humanidad

¡El flamenco y el sitar se crucen! Anoushka Shankar, hija de Ravi Shankar y ella misma ya sitarista de renombre, acaba de lanzar un álbum de fusión flamenco-indio, ‘Traveller’, con la participación de protagonistas del flamenco como Pepe Habichuela y rindiendo homenaje a las raíces gitano-indias del flamenco. Véase el artículo en Vocable (Francia), No 615, 1-14 diciembre 2011, 6-7: J.M. Plaza, ‘Una fusión exitosa’ (previamente publicado en El Mundo).

Christopher Rollason, rollason54@gmail.com

Luxembourg probably has the distinction of being the smallest country ever to host Bob Dylan live. The night of 21 October 2011 was not the first time Dylan has graced the Grand Duchy with his presence, but it was a premiere for Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg’s second city, and the Rockhal, its 6000-capacity venue opened in 2005.  Esch, located in the country’s industrial south almost on the French border, some ten miles from the Grand-Ducal capital, is increasingly positioning itself as a rival to Luxembourg city: the Rockhal is part of a complex which will be home to the new campus of the University of Luxembourg and is built around a former steelworks that now houses an industrial research centre. That titanic hulk must surely have meant something when he saw it to Dylan, brought up in Minnesota’s iron-mine belt, as the iron and steel images that appear in his songs from time to time show he has never forgotten. Tonight, it will be ‘dreams of iron and steel’, to lift a phrase from his 1974 song ‘Never Say Goodbye’. Here, the author of this review should add that it is in Esch-sur-Alzette that he currently lives, so indeed tonight Bob Dylan is … bringing it all back home …

The show is sold out: the standing-room-only hall is at capacity. The man from Duluth is supported on this tour by Mark Knopfler, who as leader of the emblematic band Dire Straits has sold more records than Bob Dylan and, as Dylan followers will remember, backed Dylan on his albums Slow Train Coming (1979) and Infidels (1983). Not all Knopfler’s fans, though, may be so aware of the intimate connection between the songwriting and guitar legends, and tonight’s audience is no doubt a mix of devotees of Dylan, of the British musician  and of both.

The doors open at 6.30; at 8 o’clock sharp, Mark Knopfler begins a 70-minute set. He plays, not Dire Straits stuff but his more recent material, some songs sounding like the classic band and others much more folk-rock or Celtic, with flute, mandolin and violin complementing his famously speaking guitar. He does concede one Dire Straits number, ‘So Far Away’, as an encore. The audience love Knopfler all the way through, and he puts the hall in a dancing mood which will prove the perfect prelude to tonight’s manifestation of the protean Bob Dylan.

At 9.45, as announced (this is a very punctual venue), Dylan and his band come on. The 70-year-old cultural icon appears in a white hat, dark jacket and green shirt, far right on stage. Tonight he looks and feels genial: his presence already suggests this will be an in-form night. He starts off playing guitar, will later switch to keyboard – and will enliven proceedings at regular intervals with his inimitable harmonica. A special treat is in store, too: for the first three numbers and for only the second time on this tour, Mark Knopfler will join Dylan and band on guitar.

The audience is mostly middle-aged or older, with a sprinkling of youth: largely male, though there are a fair number of couples; and, despite Esch’s large black population, almost entirely white. It is hard to tell who is there more for Knopfler and who more for Dylan: both ignite almost everybody, both get the public swaying and dancing – the couple next to me slow-dance through Dylan’s entire set!  One thing for sure: the local press previewed the concert with the usual ‘folk music legend’ and ‘protest icon’ clichés, and anyone coming to see Bob Dylan tonight on that basis is going to be disappointed.

The setlists so far for this tour have not been that varied, and tonight as before, six songs out of fourteen are standard, i.e.: the opener, song number 9 and the last four. For the record, these are, in order: ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, ‘Thunder on the Mountain’, ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ (three of them, be it noted, from 1965 and Highway 61 Revisited, which is beyond any doubt this tour’s default album – and this concert’s too, since tonight we will also get that album’s stellar track, ‘Desolation Row’.

The luck of the draw has it that there is no song older than 1964 and Dylan’s fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home. It really is a folk-free, acoustic-free, protest-free night: so much for the folk troubadour, conscience of a generation, etc, etc. This hasn’t been the case on other nights, but somehow tonight’s song selection does seem to fit the music. The musical discourse is one of hard-hitting, danceable blues-rock almost all the way through, with only a couple of slower numbers and others that are slowish on record speeded up. Dylan’s band are tight, inventive, and right there inside the songs. So too is Dylan himself. Most of the time he barks out the vocals staccato fashion, but one can hear that he also is inside his words and inside his images. Thank goodness, that is not a night of inattention or distraction or lyric-fluffing: Bob Dylan is there with band and audience, and audience and band are there with him. The songs all but segue into each other with scarcely a break: the ninety minutes feel like a seamless whole.

‘Leopard-Skin Pill Box Hat’ starts the proceedings, suitably setting the night’s blues-rock tone, with Dylan’s vocals abrasive as they should be and the song’s heady mix of venom and humour intact, and close to the Blonde on Blonde original. Knopfler is up there in dialogue with Dylan’s own guitar, and will be there for the next two numbers. Next up is a very strong rendering of It’s All Over Now Baby Blue from 1964, the oldest song to be performed tonight, with Dylan spitting out its timeless imagery; and just as good is the third and last song with Mark Knopfler, and the evening’s first newer composition, a jaunty, defiant ‘Things Have Changed’. Here and later, those in the audience who (presumably) don’t know Dylan’s more recent material appear unfazed, and indeed stylistically the later songs gel perfectly with the ‘famous’ 60s classics, with no visible discontinuity: across half a century, the blues are in command.

Next, though, comes one of the evening’s (fortunately few) relative disappointments: ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, speeded up perhaps not that appropriately, and bizarrely reduced from seven stanzas to only four (1, 2, 5 and 7), a pruning that deprives the narrative of part of his sense and hardly seems justified when, as we will see, other and inferior songs are done unlopped. Interesting, even so, is the lyrical recasting in the last stanza, with the ‘truckdrivers’ wives’ who have often been the performance substitutes for the Blood on the Tracks version’s ‘carpenters’ wives’ now becoming ‘doctors’ and lawyers’ wives’, the doctors harking back to the outtake version but the lawyers adding a new and, to my ears, sinister dimension (in Bob Dylan’s world, do you trust lawyers, even if you are married to one?). The following number is ‘Honest With Me’, a number which rocks infectiously but is, surely, not the strongest song from “‘Love and Theft’”, which album tonight it represents alone, and, curiously, has not been trimmed, its five stanzas standing uncut.

Now – ladies and gentlemen, your attention please! – we are regaled with The-Only-Dylan-Song-Ever-To-Be-Recorded-By-Garth-Brooks, none other than ‘Make You Feel My Love’, a song which I am not alone in considering by far the lyrically thinnest on its album, Time Out Of Mind. However, multimillionaire country singers apart, tonight’s slow-blues rendition, with Bob on keyboards, is certainly preferable to the album version, and even acquires a sinister edge, as if it were less a beribboned chocolate-box number than a darkly ambivalent declaration which might have been made by Dylan’s (as I see it) evil Modern Times persona. At which point we segue into a track from that album, ‘The Levee’s Gonna Break’ – frankly not Dylan’s best-ever piece of writing (and one which could have been cut without significant loss), but tonight far more convincing than on the record, with shrieking harmonica and thunderous keyboards courtesy of its composer: altogether, something of a transformation of a decidedly lesser song.

And now, the evening’s highlight: ‘Desolation Row’, the crowning glory of Highway 61 Revisited (this is already song 8 and three of the remaining six will be from that album), and, at least in this writer’s opinion, quite simply the best song Bob Dylan has ever written. Live versions of this song have varied greatly in terms of quality, arrangement and, indeed, length (Dylan might do anything from reproducing all ten stanzas of the original to reducing it to seven, six or even five). Tonight, he’s on keyboards, and performs it fairly slowly to the band’s discreet backing, snarling out the vocals and deep, deep into its characters and images. We get an acceptable eight stanzas, only the fifth (Einstein) and ninth (Nero) ones missing. Scarcely in motion, the audience fixes itself, with more than uncanny unanimity, on the maestro’s delivery. At a moment like this, all of Bob Dylan’s creative genius comes alive and burns alight, and anyone who still doesn’t understand why he is an eternal and (please note) serious Literature Nobel candidate, may I suggest you stop in your tracks and listen to him now, as he performs his greatest song.

After this glorious centrepiece, we are already into the known final sequence, as the band leaps into ‘Highway 61 Revisited’. Here too Dylan’s vocals find him deep inside his song, which he renders complete, including the sometimes dropped fourth stanza. Things then slow down, for ‘Forgetful Heart’, tonight’s newest composition and the evening’s only selection from his most recent album, Together Through Life. Violin – the show’s only appearance of this instrument, contributing a fugitive country feel – accompanies a reflective vocal, confirming this song’s status as a powerful lyric poem and one of Bob’s most successful recent compositions.

After that brief quiet interval, it’s back to no-holds-barred for what are by now familiar as this tour’s expected closing quartet of songs. Out rolls ‘Thunder on the Mountain’: I must confess I have yet to understand why Dylan thinks this Modern Times number is so good that he has to perform it every night, but as with its album companion ‘The Levee’s Gonna Break’, this live version is at least more attention-holding than the original, fits well enough with the evening’s blues ethos, and gets the audience back dancing. Next, Ballad of a Thin Man returns us to 1965, and is as potent and abrasive as ever, though there is a confusing moment in the ‘professors’ stanza, which Dylan starts out singing with sardonic relish (does he know he’s on the future University of Luxembourg site?), only to commit (but I may have misheard ..) what I think is the night’s only serious lyric fluff, stumbling in the middle of the ‘great lawyers’ line (I will of course be happy to be proved wrong on this!). There follows, inevitably, ‘All Along the Watchtower’ – in, less inevitably, a gratifyingly strong version, apocalyptic and spinechilling, with on-the-edge vocals from Bob and coruscating guitar-work from the band.

And now, as it had to be: the song the audience was waiting for: ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. We are used by now to Dylan cutting his signature song from four to three stanzas (tonight, 1, 2 and 4), but more important is the forcefulness of his delivery and the empathy between him and his musicians as, yet again, they bring the evening to a triumphant close with the unforgettable mid-60s classic. This is the one song tonight’s public are actually singing along with, perhaps the one song they have really, really come to hear. How does Bob Dylan manage to make ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, superb song though it is, sound so fresh after executing it a mind-numbing number of times? The only answer can be that it has stood up like this because it is one of the most powerful compositions by one of the greatest creators of our time. There is no encore. The dreams of iron and steel are over. I leave, straightaway but spiritually replenished by tonight’s re-encounter with the artist who has accompanied me together through life, who time out of mind ago said he accepted chaos but did not know if chaos accepted him, and who in our turbulent modern times may, at the age of 70, may definitively declare, yes: even chaos accepts Bob Dylan!

ed. Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández and Antonia Navarro-Tejero, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (England) :Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011,  ISBN 978-1-4438-3289-2,

www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/India-in-the-World1-4438-3289-8.htm

 This volume brings together the contributions to the conference of the same name held at the University of  Córdoba (Spain) in 2007.

 I quote the official description from the publisher’s website:

 ”This volume uniquely gathers scholarly articles dealing with very dissimilar and kaleidoscopic perspectives onIndia. It provides an informative overview of the country, which has wide-ranging influences reaching far fromIndiaitself, since it has criss-crossed connections with many countries around the world. If read as a collection, this volume is witness to an interlocking network of ideas, attitudes and ideologies that emerge from the contemporary social and political world. The book, thus, highlights a variety of issues and the chapters promise to treat them with adequate justice.

 These features mean that this book can be approached by any person interested inIndia, given that it offers a diverse range of interesting topics related to the country. The reader glancing through the book will find themes spanning from the analysis of postcolonial literature written in English by Indian women, to sociological reflections on several diasporic situations, and from crossed influences between Indian culture and that of other countries, to the latest discussion topics in ancient Indian history, to mention a few.”

 **

My own contribution is ‘Poe’s “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” Macaulay and Warren Hastings – From Orientalism to Globalisation?’ (pp. 109-120)

(NOTE ADDED 28 Jan 2012: this article is now on-line, with the editors’ and publishers’ areement, at:

http://yatrarollason.info/files/PoeTRM.pdf)

**

 The full table of contents follows:

 Chapter One……………………………………………………………………………………. 3

The Idea of India in Early Medieval England

Mark Bradshaw Busbee

Chapter Two …………………………………………………………………………………. 17

Exoticism Stops at the Second Hyphen

Elisabeth Damböck

Chapter Three ……………………………………………………………………………….. 39

All the Raj: French-Speaking Comics aboutIndia

Corinne François-Denève

Chapter Four …………………………………………………………………………………. 61

Indian Response to El Quijote

Shyama Prasad Ganguly

Chapter Five …………………………………………………………………………………. 75

From Inscrutable Indians to Asian Africans

Felicity Hand

Chapter Six …………………………………………………………………………………… 87

“Indias in Mind”: The Literary Recovery of AbsentIndia

Juan Ignacio Oliva

Chapter Seven……………………………………………………………………………… 101

The Redefinition of the Concept “Anglo-Indian” in Contemporary

Narrative

Laura Peco González

Chapter Eight………………………………………………………………………………. 109

Poe’s “A Tale of theRagged Mountains,” Macaulay and Warren Hastings—From Orientalism to Globalisation?

Christopher Rollason

Chapter Nine……………………………………………………………………………….. 123

Daughter Forsaken: La Résistance of the Indo-Mauritian Girl Child in Ananda Devi’s Novels

Rohini Bannerjee

Chapter Ten ………………………………………………………………………………… 135

Principles of Sanskrit Poetics in Contemporary Context: The Rasadhvani  Approach to J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man

Bhavna Bhalla

Chapter Eleven ……………………………………………………………………………. 143

Framing Interpersonal Violence in A Married Woman

Olga Blanco-Carrión

Chapter Twelve …………………………………………………………………………… 157

Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández

Chapter Thirteen………………………………………………………………………….. 163

The Search for Female Identity in R. K. Narayan’s The Dark Room

Emma García Sanz

Chapter Fourteen …………………………………………………………………………. 173

“She had been certain the river would sustain her”: Modernist Aestheticism in Anita Desai’s Fiction

Maria J. Lopez

Chapter Fifteen ……………………………………………………………………………. 183

Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters and the Deconstruction of Traditional Binary Oppositions

Javier Martín Párraga

Indiain the World vii

Chapter Sixteen …………………………………………………………………………… 191

Amitav Ghosh’s “Imaginary Homelands”: The Question of Identity in The Shadow Lines

María Elena Martos Hueso

Chapter Seventeen ……………………………………………………………………….. 203

Orpheus and Eurydice as Indian Rock-and-Roll Superstars:  Salman Rushdie’s The Ground beneath Her Feet

Ana Cristina Mendes

Chapter Eighteen …………………………………………………………………………. 211

A Paradise Lost: Kashmir as a Motif of Rift in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown

Maurice O’Connor

Chapter Nineteen …………………………………………………………………………. 223

The Internal Exile of Dalit Women in Andhra Pradesh

Alida Carloni Franca

Chapter Twenty …………………………………………………………………………… 233

About the Role of India in Contemporary Art

Eva Fernández del Campo Barbadillo

Chapter Twenty One…………………………………………………………………….. 247

“City and Non-City”: Political Issues in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones

Joel Kuortti

Chapter Twenty Two ……………………………………………………………………. 257

A Brief Overview on Feminism inIndia

Antonia Navarro-Tejero

Chapter Twenty Three ………………………………………………………………….. 265

Bollywood and South Asian Diasporic Films in the U.K.: Gurinder Chadha’s Female Road Movie

Esperanza Santos Moya

Chapter Twenty Four……………………………………………………………………. 277

Sati: A Construction of Reality in With Krishna’s Eyes

Rosalía Villa Jiménez

Chapter Twenty Five ……………………………………………………………………. 289

Nativism versus Imperialism? Debates and Interpretations in the Ancient History ofIndia

Fernando Wulff Alonso

The award coincides with the publication by Editorial Visor (Madrid) of ‘A mil besos de profundidad’ (‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’), a 2-volume, 800-page anthology of Cohen’s poems and songs, translated by Alberto Manzano.

For more, see the two appreciative articles in EL PAÍS, 20-X-2011 (both on p. 44 of the international edition:

Javier Rodríguez Marcos, ‘Leonard Cohen vestido de príncipe’ (‘Leonard Cohen, dressed like a prince’)  -

www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/Leonard/Cohen/vestido/principe/elpepicul/20111020elpepicul_2/Tes

and:

Diego A. Manrique, ‘Creador agradecido’ (‘A grateful creator’) -

www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/Creador/agradecido/elpepicul/20111020elpepicul_1/Tes

 **

Leonard Cohen, poeta, cantautor y novelista, es el laureado de 2011 del prestigioso galardón español, el Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes (bajo esa rúbrica se otorgan ocho premios cada año, correspondientes a sendas áreas de actividad). El mismo galardón le tocó a Bob Dylan en 1997 (véase: http://yatrarollason.info/files/DylanAsturiasESrev.pdf). El veterano artista canadiense, ya con 77 años, recibirá el premio en persona esta semana en Oviedo, capital del Principado de Asturias.

El premio coincide con la publicación, por Editorial Visor (Madrid), de ‘Mil besos de profundidad’, antología en 2 volúmenes y 800 páginas de poemas y canciones cohenianas, traducidas por Alberto Manzano.

A quien desee saber más se le recomienda acudir a los dos artículos, más que cálidos, que salieron en EL PAÍS del -20X-2011 (ubicándose ambos en la página 44 de la edición internacional):

Javier Rodríguez Marcos, ‘Leonard Cohen vestido de príncipe’  -

www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/Leonard/Cohen/vestido/principe/elpepicul/20111020elpepicul_2/Tes

y:

Diego A. Manrique, ‘Creador agradecido’ -

www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/Creador/agradecido/elpepicul/20111020elpepicul_1/Tes