Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense

by Michael Heyman

Welcome to the carnival of nonsense where hankies turn into mischievous cats, a messiah is born with her feet in her mouth, you can fave hun by socking on the ree-raw and your favourite corn cakes are made of . . . are you sure you want to know? For the last eighteen hundred years Indian arts have been seen in terms of strictly classified emotional effects known as the nine rasas. The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense celebrates, for the very first time, what Sukumar Ray called the spirit of whimsy , or the tenth rasa, through the topsy-turvy, irreverent, melodic genre of nonsense literature. This fabulous selection of poetry and prose, brilliantly translated from seventeen Indian languages across India, includes works by Rabindranath Tagore, Sukumar Ray, Vinda Karandikar, Gulzar, Dash Benhur, Manoj Das, Navakanta Barua, Mangesh Padgavkar, Sri Sri, Vaikom Mohammad Basheer, Kunjunni and other known, lesser-known and previously unpublished authors. In forms as varied as stories and songs for children and adults, lullabies, folk tales, Bollywood song lyrics and medieval court verse, the writers open doors to wildly imaginative worlds populated by peculiar characters and fantastical creatures, where only nonsense makes perfect sense. Crackling with wit, wordplay and riotous rhymes, and frequently revelling in pure gibberish, this immensely entertaining collection will delight you from start to finish.

Genres: India, Poetry

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 3, 2007

About the author

Michael Heyman is a Professor of English at Berklee, where he teaches courses on children’s literature, music for children, poetics, multicultural literature, and performance poetry. He is a scholar and writer of literary nonsense and children’s literature and is the head editor of the groundbreaking and best-selling, The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense (Penguin 2007), the first non-Western anthology of literary nonsense in translation in the world. Most recently, he edited This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse, published by Scholastic (2012). This anthology, to which he also contributed poems and stories, is a fully-illustrated anthology of nonsense for children. He continues to lecture in Europe, Asia, and North American on the world phenomenon of literary nonsense. Heyman’s articles and reviews have appeared in The Horn Book Magazine, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, The Five Owls, and Rod McGillis’s Children’s Literature and the Fin de Siécle (2003). He sat on the board of judges for The Lion and the Unicorn Award for North American Poetry from 2009-2012. His poems and short stories for children can be found in The Puffin Book of Bedtime Stories (2005) and The Moustache Maharishi and other unlikely stories (Scholastic 2007) and This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse.

Heyman received his M.Phil from Oxford University in English Romantic Studies and his PhD in nonsense literature from University of Glasgow. He is an alumnus of Berklee, where he studied tenor saxophone. He also plays tabla, flute, guitar, and the diddlemaphone.

Reviews

[Claire S]

blog of author on it: http://tenthrasa.blogspot.com/

and review of it from Sepia Mutiny: http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/arch...

[Manash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Sukumar Ray said, let those who do not get the humour of nonsense keep away from this book. It is not for the unimaginative, nor for the intellectually arrogant. What it is, is an incredibly ambitious attempt to put between two covers the amazing heritage of Indian Nonsense. There are three very erudite (and readable) essays in the book, followed by translated samples from many major Indian languages, which are followed by a detailed appendix.

There's no use going on about what the book contains because the title is self-explanatory. I only wish this book updates itself every couple of years to accommodate new translations and findings, and maybe new essays by experts on the subject. Maybe there can be an annual Nonsense journal? What do the authors say?

[Reading_ Tamishly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pathetic. Boring. Yes, full of nonsense.

[Michael Heyman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, gooollleeeee! It's super! Sphagnum! Pantaloon!

[Supriya Manot · Rating 4 out of 5]

funny :)