WRITING ACROSS LANGUAGES & IDEAS.

Gulliver’s Travels

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is often remembered as an adventure story, particularly through its extraordinary lands, tiny people and giants. Yet beneath that familiar surface lies one of the sharpest works of political and social satire in the English language.

My Assamese translation, published by ACCB Publishing in 2017, sought to make the complete work available to Assamese readers rather than merely reproduce the children’s-book version through which Gulliver is often encountered. The original work was published in 1726; the Assamese edition presents Swift’s four-part narrative as the account of Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon and later a ship’s captain.

What attracted me was precisely its continuing relevance. Swift uses imaginary societies to expose the absurdities of real ones: political vanity, intellectual pretension, factionalism, greed and the remarkable human capacity to rationalise folly. The distance created by fantasy makes his criticism more penetrating, not less.

Translation therefore offered an opportunity to introduce not merely a classic story but a way of looking at society. Nearly three centuries after Swift wrote it, the reader can still recognise the inhabitants of his strange countries—sometimes uncomfortably close to home.