On the Road to Mandalay

Description

Inspired by Chicago journalist Studs Terkel's accounts of the hopes and dreams of ordinary Americans, Rangoon-based writer Mya Than Tint introduces us to 34 of Burma's fifty four million 'ordinary people', the a-nya-ta-ra. As he travelled through Burma on literary lecture tours in the late 1980s, he encountered porters, sailors, fortune-tellers, waitresses, artists and petty criminals 'on the road to Mandalay'. Their stories were published in Burma in Kalya magazine. Himself a prolific translator into Burmese of eastern and western classical works of literature, this is Mya Than Tint's first major work to have been translated into English–an inspiring read and itself now a classic.