Ramsay Wood

Ramsay Wood is the author of two sui generis modern novels which aim – via vernacular spiels within complex frame-story narratives – to popularize the pre-literate, oral story-listening drama of multicultural animal fables mimed and declaimed along the ancient Silk Road. His books blend ''The Jatakas Tales'', ''The Panchatantra'' and the likely (fourth century BCE) role of Alexander the Great's legacy in "bringing the Aesopian tradition to North India and Central Asia" via Hellenization in Central Asia and India. Wood's ''Kalila and Dimna – Selected Fables of Bidpai'' (Vol 1) was published by Knopf in 1980 with an Introduction by Nobel laureate Doris Lessing.

A ''Times Literary Supplement'' (3/3/82) review stated that

"Wood has produced a vigorous modern version . . . overlaid with a racy personal idiom, a witty mixture of archaic grandiloquence, modern slang, and (in some passages) the jargon of sociology, television and local government . . . his version will certainly be much more attractive to modern readers than the older translations, with their drier narratives and unfamiliar oriental hyperbole".

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