Thursday, September 04, 2014

'Animal Farm' connection between India and Ukraine

George Orwell, And The "Beastly" Connection Between India and Ukraine by Nina Martyris (via Akshay Regulaedda). Excerpt:
"Within months of the IRD being set up, an official named Celia Kirwan, who was also a friend of Orwell’s, visited the tubercular writer at his sanatorium to confidentially sound him out on “the best way of furthering our aims in India and Burma.” Kirwan’s report of the meeting, excerpted in Peter Davison’s George Orwell, A Life in Letters, shows Orwell had a nuanced understanding of the ground realities: “He did not think that there was a great deal of scope for propaganda in India and Pakistan, where Communism meant something quite different from what it did in Europe—it meant on the whole, opposition to the ruling class, and he thought that more good would be done by maintaining the closest possible links with these countries, through trade and through the interchange of students.”
Despite these reservations, Orwell assented to the Telugu translation. Janamanci Ramakrsna’s Pasuvula divanam: Uha kalpitameina peddakatha was rushed through in a matter of months. The IRD also financed an Animal Farm cartoon series that was printed in the Times of India Delhi edition and in cities from Hong Kong to Rio......The origins of the Ukrainian translation are refreshingly different. It preceded the IRD’s command performances and was an act of resistance worthy of this allegorical masterpiece. "
And more interesting stuff in the article.

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