How we price an old or rare book
Edition, condition, completeness and demand: the four things that decide what a second-hand book costs at Golpo.
Starting with Bengali writing in translation
Short stories first, then novels: an easy path into a century of Bengali literature for readers who do not read Bengali.
One of the questions we hear most from visitors to Kolkata is where to start with Bengali literature if you cannot read Bengali. The good news is that there is far more available in English translation than most people think. The difficulty is choosing.
We suggest beginning with short stories. Bengali writers of the last century wrote short fiction brilliantly, and a collection lets you sample many voices before committing to one. Look for anthologies that bring together writers from different decades, so you can feel how the language and concerns changed from the colonial period to the Partition years and after. Stories set in Kolkata’s lanes, the villages of the delta or the tea gardens of the north each have a very different mood.
After that, move to a novel by a writer whose story you enjoyed most. Many of the great Bengali novels are long, family-centred and slow at the start, so give a novel fifty pages before deciding. Translations vary a lot in quality and style, and some classics have two or three English versions. Ask us to show you the opening pages of each side by side; reading a paragraph in each will tell you more than any review.
Finally, try a little poetry in a bilingual edition, with Bengali on one page and English on the other. Even if you cannot read the script, seeing the shape of the original helps. About a third of our shop is Bengali, and our translation shelf sits right beside it, so ask at the counter and we will pull out three to compare.
