Words Apart

Dattatreya Ramachandra Bendre (1896-1981) is considered one of the great Kannada lyric poets, popu­larly called “Da Ra Bendre” and hailed as “varakavi” (heaven-touched). The richness of his language as well as the cultural rootedness of his verse meant that translating these poems was always going to be a challenge. In the recently published volume, The Pollen Waits on Tiptoe (Manipal Universal Press), writer and translator Madhav Ajjampur gives us English-language versions of 26 poems from Bendre’s oeuvre — but there’s a catch. Alongside every poem, there is a QR code on the page; upon scanning it you’re redirected to audio recordings in which Ajjampur recites both English and Kannada-language versions. The idea is that readers should get an idea of the soundscapes of the original work. For example, the title poem begins like this:

“Come, dear bee, come, / why wander so detachedly? / When the call of the fragrance is / sweet, is an invita­tion necessary?”

Upon listening to the original poem, one realises why the polysyllabic rhym­ing between “detachedly” and “neces­sary” was, well, necessary. And as is often the case with smart, accomplished translations, there are a thousand little ways in which the sound of the original leads organically into the translation. The QR code option works well here, and it’s a low-cost way to introduce multimedia enhancements into a work of literature. It’s just one of many ways in which 21st-century writers, artists and publishers have found ways to incorpo­rate multimedia and/or interactive ele­ments in books — often in order to reach an audience that’s saturated with other (especially visual) forms of media.

Talking about his work during a video call, Ajjampur describes how and why sound is so vital. “For a poet like Bendre and a book like The Pollen Waits on Tiptoe, sound becomes all the more important. It is inextricably linked with the emotions or the ideas Bendre is telling the reader about,” Ajjampur says. “With contemporary poets, especially English-language ones, over the last few decades, the emphasis has been on poems designed for the page—so you have typographic innovations like blank pages, concrete poems and so on. But in Kannada we have always had ‘song-poems’. For example, the art form Gamaka where the artists or the gamakis sing a poem or a portion of a poem set to a raga.”

For close to two decades now, publishers have experimented with multimedia elements within books. In India, the 2008 Tranquebar edition of Jeet Thayil’s poetry book These Errors Are Correct included an audio CD with some of Thayil’s musical collaborations with singer Suman Sridhar, original songs as well as lines from the book set to music (not to mention straight recitals). In 2013, the British writer Richard House released The Kills, a 1000-page crime nov­el set amidst the American occupation of Iraq, peopled by warlords, crooked arms dealers, shady military contractors and defence personnel. Back then, The Kills was called a “digitally augmented” novel because the first half, especially, is hyperlinked (in the digital edition) to a series of short films and audio files that add substantially to the plot as well as provide amusing tangents that make us learn more about the central characters.

There have been even more daring interventions, arguably. Eli Horowitz’s 2014 novel The Silent History is a work of speculative fiction, which imagines generations of children born (between 2011-2044) without the ability to use or process language, communicating via an elaborate system of facial gestures and tics. The book included a number of multimedia elements, including voiceovers, short films and even a series of GPS-linked “testimonies” or “Field Reports” that added to the story—and could only be accessed in certain Manhattan neighbourhoods and only via iPhones or iPads.

Richard House wrote in The Guardian, “The Silent History was first developed as an iOS app; sections were uploaded testimony by testimony, alongside other mixed-media elements,” House added. “These digital origins are deep in the design of the book, its structure, its collaborative aspect. The most intriguing element— which has its frustrations—is the possibility for user interaction. Stories by other writ­ers, generally short, have been added as ‘Field Reports’, which can only be read via the app with an iOS device at a specific location. Despite this, the experience is exceptionally rich and frequently moving.”

Why don’t we see more books with multimedia tricks up their sleeves? For one, it’s expensive to produce special editions like these, whether physical or digital. In the audio CD era, too, this was a problem publish­ers kept bumping up against—the cost of the CD added too much to the production costs and so, the eventual product would be quite expen­sive. And today, when publishers are struggling with issues like the rapidly increasing cost of paper, the idea feels all the more challenging.

What makes one book more expensive than another? “The most significant costs are the cost of paper and binding, plus the royalty paid to the author,” says Rahul Dixit, Director of Sales at HarperCollins India. “And with fiction there can be additional costs as well. If the author wants, say, a particular photograph to be used on the book cover, we have to purchase the rights for that. If they have written a story about Kashmir, for example, and if they say, ‘there’s a kind of paper grown in Kashmir that would be perfect for this book’, again that’s a rise in production costs.” In the past, several HarperCollins India titles have experimented with multimedia interventions as well.

“When we published a biography of MS Subbulakshmi a few years ago, there was a QR code at the end of the book, which directed users to an exclusive cu­rated Spotify playlist of Subbulakshmi songs,” Dixit says. “There have been a number of innovations in the children’s books space as well. ‘Touch-and-feel’ books are all the rage these days, where say, a small patch of fibre is attached to a page to let the child feel the touch of a rabbit’s fur, for example. Or there is a lightweight glass panel at the end of the book with something like ‘That’s Me!’ written beneath, so when the child opens the last page, they are happy to see themselves.” The ‘touch-and-feel’ books that Dixit is talking about often have audio buttons these days, so that children can now also listen to the lion’s roar and the hyena’s cackle.

Similarly, ‘board books’, use papercraft to create 3D shapes and ‘flaps’ within books, which the child can then pull up to reveal a new image or texture underneath. T4Tales, a publishing start-up specialising in children’s books that began in 2015, has produced several titles in this vein. Pridhee Kapoor Gupta, a molecular biologist by training, who teaches at an international school in Singapore, started T4Tales in 2015. She was disappointed by the lack of quality children’s books in Indian languag­es and so, she decided to write and publish her own. Like Gol Mol Bol, a collection of popular nursery rhymes in Hindi (like ‘Akkad Bakkad’), which comes with song recordings of the rhymes in question. T4Tales’ website offers the song-versions for free, regard­less of whether you buy the book or not.

“Every time my child would enter a bookstore I would pray, ‘pick something in Hindi’ but every time it would be a bestselling English series like Peppa Pig or Wimpy Kid,” Gupta recalls. “With the recordings, what we were trying to do is to recapture the lullabies that our moth­ers and grandmother sang to us.” Gupta says a few upcoming T4Tales books will include features like ‘glow-in-the-dark pages’, which ask the child to switch the lights off while reading them.

Clearly, there is more than one way to achieve a baseline level of user interac­tion with books. One can see multime­dia extensions being particularly suited to, say genre books. Imagine an edition of The Lord of the Rings that offers you a taste of what the characters sound like (with a little help from the actors from the movies), or an Asimov novel that of­fers you intergalactic maps and visuali­sations. Ultimately, though, all of this is in the hope of developing a reading habit among both children and grown-ups. As Gupta says, “Books are going nowhere, I feel. Technology can help us engage with a text in new and surprising ways but there is no replacing the experience of sitting down with a book.”

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