Subhash Jaireth

And the Kafka in the end, which makes me laugh,

and made me sad was that suddenly the prison officer tries to try his own body on the machine and he puts, lies down under the stencil machine and his whole body is tattooed and stenciled and then he dies, washed by other prison guards.

Isn't it so Kafka-like?

Because without translation, it's impossible to live now in this so-called world where we communicate with each other.

There are two tendencies happening in our global culture.

One, I call it

A centripetal, another is centrifugal.

The centripetal is the most, most of the world is trying to sort of gather around big languages like English and like French and to some extent, say, Spanish.

But there are other languages which were at the periphery now are

developing and they try to rupture this you could say the centripetal tendency of these languages and big literatures which are produced in these languages and because people have started now speaking more than one languages

it is important that we learn literature.

What is, when I came, literature in other languages, when I came to Australia many, many years ago, I realized that though it is multicultural, but that multiculturalism is only very superficial.

It is only in terms of food, perhaps dresses.

But as far as literature is concerned, it's utterly monolingual, that lots of people don't know about literature written in languages other than English.

And whenever they look outside, they look to American literature or literature produced in UK.

And the rest remains an unknown continent.

For that matter,

the languages and literatures in indigenous languages in Australia also remain unknown.

There is a whole continent of languages in Australia about which lots of Australians don't know anything about.

There were so many wonderful indigenous languages here in Australia and it would be