Talking of Rushdie brings one to New Writing 8 (Vintage in association with The British Council), eighth volume of an annual anthology, mainly intended for the overseas reader to acquaint him/her with contemporary English language writing in Britain. A look at the contents and biographical notes indicates the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic status of British literature today, though one gets the impression that the contribution of the ``other'' has been played down in this anthology, judging from the inclusion of comparatively better known writers like Rushdie and Kureishi, rather than new ones likeGurinder Chadha. By and large, this volume of New Writing reads better than the last one. `Stalker' by Patricia Duncker is a frightening, at the same time fascinating, story of a psychopathic serial killer as perceived by one of his mesmerised victims, who actually desires him and waits for him, provocatively dressed.

There is an element of desperate escapism in some of the stories as if the characters want to run away from the routine, often drab realities of everyday life. The poems are somewhat colourless. Looking at the ones on golf and football, one wonders why there are none on cricket.

The three pieces categorised as ``texts'' are puzzling and one does not know what to make of them or what yardsticks to adopt in judging them as literature. They appear to be a collage of word images, sometimes unrelated, sometimes with a slender link running through them. `The God of His Idolatry' by Ian McIntyre, a short extract from a biography of David Garrick (the well-known stage actor of the 18th century knownfor his acting in Shakespeare's plays), to be published later this year by Penguin, is very interesting as it portrays not just the individual, but an entire period-the 18th century. Incidentally, the anthology does not include a short play or an extract from a long one. One wonders why. I think the best way to approach such an anthology is to juxtapose it with a similar one on, say, contemporary Indian writing in English or contemporary writing in America. Perhaps the word ``contemporary'' or ``recent'' could be substituted for ``new'' in anthologies to come.

From recent writings in Britain to those in India, specifically in Indian languages, a landmark text now available in English translation is Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyaya's Aparajito The Unvanquished (Harper Collins), which Gopa Majumdar has translated into English. Many English language readers have seen Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy--Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Apur Sansar--on screen and have longed to read the novels. While Pather Panchali wastranslated into English by T W Clark and Tarapada Mukherjee in 1968, Aparajito had not been translated all these years.

Gopa Majumdar's English rendering of the novel tightens the original text by condensing it, at the same time retaining the lyrical quality of the language of the original, which Satyajit Ray has aesthetically transmitted to the screen in his films.

Though some of the beauty of the original has been inevitably lost in translation, it goes to the credit of the translator that she has retained much of it in the target language text. One needs more such translations to combat Rushdie's slighting remark about Indian literature (he uses the colonial term ``vernacular'') lacking quality.