The book’s Burmese publisher, who also published a translation of 1984 last year, is happy that Orwell’s books are finally getting wide exposure. Osborne also notes Emma Larkin’s 2005 book, Finding George Orwell in Burma, describing her intriguing argument that Orwell’s three great novels, starting with Burmese Days, “presciently track the development of Burma - a colonial society transformed, through independence and the socialist military coup in 1962, into a version of Animal Farm, and then ‘1984.’” It was a different city, a famously wilder, greener place.

The streets were probably swept free of garbage, and the dogs that swarm through them today would have been taken care of in brutal fashion. Back then, I suppose, on empty Sule Pagoda Road next to the park, gangs of boys did not play soccer under streetlamps, their naked backs glistening with sweat. It is strange to think of a young and unknown Orwell, who was born in India to a father who worked as an overseer of the colonial opium business, perhaps pacing around the ghostly Sule Pagoda 90 years ago and taking in this same view that I often enjoy when walking around the Maha Bandula park late at night. In last weekend’s T Magazine, Lawrence Osborne wrote “ In Myanmar, Retracing George Orwell’s Steps.” There is a burgeoning movement to save Orwell’s house in Katha, which was the inspiration for Kyauktada, the fictional town in Burmese Days, with a small group of artists leading the way. Animal Farm, a satirical retelling of the rise of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union with farmyard animals, was translated and published in Burma in 1951.” “Burmese versions of the British novelist’s internationally famous works have been introduced in Burma since the 1950s. The book tells a tragic story of a British teak merchant who is disenchanted by the superiority of British officials to local Burmese, as well as Indians.”Īccording to the newspaper, Burmese readers are familiar with Orwell.

Phyo Tha writes, “’Burmese Days’ is a portrait of the dark side of the British Raj, as well as a tale from the waning days of British colonialism. Writing Burmese Days, Orwell drew from the five years (from 1922 to 1927) he spent as a police officer in the Indian Imperial Force of Burma, when the country was under British colonial rule. Originally published in 1934, Burmese Days is Orwell’s first book, and has been described as a “scathing portrait of the imperious attitudes of the British.” Writing in The Irrawaddy, Kyaw Phyo Tha reports that the Burmese Ministry of Information named the new translation of Burmese Days the winner of the 2012 National Literary Award’s informative literature (translation) category.

The burmese days