The inauguration of the library. (Anindya Shankar Ray)

The Penguin Classics Library has shifted from Delhi’s open-air India Habitat Centre to the Worldview bookstore on Jadavpur University campus in Calcutta. It will be on display for a month from October 23, with titles such as Rudyard Kipling’s The Adventures of Mowgli to Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell or even Francis Bacon’s The Essays and Tagore’s Nationalism.

The library was inaugurated with a reading from the classics by Anjum Katyal, Aparna Chaudhuri and Abhijit Gupta. The selections were from Rudyard Kipling, Attia Hosain and Federico Garcia Lorca. The second day followed with a discussion on ‘Tagore and Beyond: Modern Masters in Translation’ by a panel comprising Sukanta Chaudhuri, Reba Som, Uma Dasgupta and Tathagata Banerjee. Each of them a Penguin author, they talked about translating Bengali authors, from Tagore to Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay and Sukumar Ray. Banerjee spoke of translating culture-specific words, citing a word such as ekadashi.

“How does one communicate the import of ekadashi and all that it implies?” he asked. T.W. Clarke and Tarapada Mukherjee in The Song of the Road, a translation of Pather Panchali, had an entire footnote explaining ekadashi.

While Chaudhuri agreed with Banerjee that “it was easier to translate Tagore because he had a certain urban sophistication”, he added that “Jibanananda was the most difficult to translate because not only did his works have culture-specific terms but also a rural setting that was very evocative in Bengali”. However, all four panelists were unanimous in finding Tagore’s works the easiest to communicate in English.

The month-long library exhibition will have two more programmes by Penguin in November. Besides, there will be attractive discounts and special prices on the Penguin Classics collection.