Himalayan Voices: An Introduction to Modern Nepali Literature.

• Author: Smith, W.L.

Nepali is one of the smaller NIA languages, spoken by approximately 17 million people, around the same number as speak Assamese, and its literature is neither well known nor very old. The "founder-poet," adi-kavi, of Nepali literature, Bhanubhakta Acharya, died in 1868, and a half century later Chandra Shamsher complained that there was still almost nothing to read besides Bhanubhakta and so founded the Gorkha Language Publication Committee to remedy the situation. As Himalayan Voices attests, the initiatives of Shamsher and other pioneers were crowned with great success. In the next 75 years Nepali writers created a literature of world stature. This was achieved despite the fact that Nepal was more or less isolated from the foreign influences that stimulated the development of modern literatures in other NIA languages, and, until the revolution of 1951, the land was ruled by the censorious Ranas, who threw more than one writer into prison. Censorship was only effectively ended with the lifting of the ban on political parties in 1990, the year this volume went to press.

Himalayan Voices is an anthology of Nepali poetry and short stories in English translation, and contains eighty poems by twenty-one poets and twenty short stories by sixteen different authors. The emphasis is on poetry, the most highly developed genre in Nepali literature, and the stress is on writers from Nepal rather than those from India. The various sections of the book are prefaced by introductory material which adds considerably to its value. This provides not only the usual biographical information about the authors but includes...