I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Deˇd

Lal Deˇd

Translated by Ranjit Hoskote

Penguin Books India,

328 pages, R450

A glorious new translation of the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic that strips away a century of ornate translations, Victorian-inflected translations and paraphrases. In a radical break with the established convention of treating Lal Deˇd as a single author, Hoskote proposes the theory that her name stands for a contributory lineage of questors and reciters who followed in her wake.