Language/Meaning / 26.03.2013

By Hasan Altaf in The Millions: ScreenHunter_150 Mar. 26 15.40 From the beginning, there was a hint of the surreal to the recent Lahore Literary Festival, but it was difficult to put my finger on the root of that unsettling emotion, especially given the overall aura of triumph. A response to similar events elsewhere in the region – the most famous in Jaipur; the most rivalry-inducing, for the last four years, in Karachi – the festival seemed its own victory party, a massive and successful gambit in Lahore’s bid to reclaim its title as the “cultural capital” of Pakistan. The excitement had Lahore full of visitors, Mall Road festooned with banners, the Alhamra Arts Council packed with people, and in the middle of all that buzz it seemed almost churlish to have the suspicion that something odd was at work.
Language/Meaning / 24.02.2013

By Hasan Altaf Interviewing Chinua Achebe - the author of Things Fall Apart, who has become, through the usual process of reduction, a one-man stand-in for Nigerian when not for African literature - for The Paris Review, in 1994, Jerome Brooks noted that the majority of Achebe's work was in English. He asked about the existence or importance of Igbo translations, and Achebe responded with a story about an Anglican missionary's attempt to standardize his language's many dialects: The way [Archdeacon Dennis] did it was to invite six people from six different dialectal areas. They sat round a table and they took a sentence from the Bible: In the beginning, God created… or whatever. In. What is it in your dialect? And they would take that. The. Yours? Beginning. Yours? And in this way… they created what is called Standard Igbo. The result: unmusical, "wooden," "a terrible tragedy." Standardizing...