I am a great admirer of Manjushree Thapa, so I can only assume that she has been the victim of sloppy sub-editing when I read her say, of Purna Bahadur Vaidya\'s Nepal-bhasa poems that she has translated from Nepali into English, "It is impossible to tell how close they are to the original." Has Nepal-bhasa already gone the way of the Harappan civilization\'s language-lost beyond recovery? Or does she-or Nepali Times-think that none of Kathmandu\'s trilingual intellectuals is capable of discussing the issue with her?

David Gellner,
Oxford