The rollicking, folk-based tales of Rajasthani writer Vijaydan Detha have been winning awards in India since the 1970s. Only recently, however, have they been available in English translation.Detha has a gift for selecting the most provocative tales he hears from his fellow villagers and re-creating them in a literary form as engaging and daring as his oral sources. In one tale a ghost uses his powers to change a woman's sex so that she can stay married to the woman she loves. In another-re-created in film by Mani Kaul in the early 1970s as Duvidha and more recently by Bollywood director Amol...

Can the subaltern joke? Christi A. Merrill answers by invoking riddling, oral-based fictions from Hindi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, and Urdu that dare to laugh at what traditions often keep hidden-whether spouse abuse, ethnic violence, or the uncertain legacies of a divinely wrought sex change. Herself a skilled translator, Merrill uses these examples to investigate the expectation that translated work should allow the non-English-speaking subaltern to speak directly to the English-speaking reader. She plays with the trope of speaking to argue against treating a translated text as property, as a...