On the Road to Mandalay

Mya Than Tint (1929-1998) entered Rangoon University in 1948, the year Burma gained independence from Great Britain, and received a degree in philosophy, political science and English literature in 1954. His writing career began in 1949 when his first short novel 'Refugee' was published in Tara Magazine. He published many short and full-length novels, documentaries and translated works in his 50-year writing career. Dataung Ko Kyaw Ywei, Mee Pinle Ko Hpyat Myi (Across the Mountain of Swords and the Sea of Fire) (1973) is considered to be his greatest masterpiece. He also wrote historical documentaries like 'Breeze over Taungthaman Lake'. Also a prolific translator of Western literature into Burmese, Mya Than Tint introduced his readers to world classics like War and Peace, Gone with the Wind, and Dream of the Red Chamber. He won the Myanmar National Literature Award five times for translation. As a political prisoner, Mya Than Tint was jailed from 1963 to 1972 by Ne Win's military regime that seized power from a democratic government in 1962. He was initially incarcerated in Rangoon's notorious Insein Prison, but later transferred with other political prisoners to the Coco Islands penal colony in the Indian Ocean until his release three years later. At the age of 68, he died in his home in Sanchaung Township in Rangoon

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.