Western – A Dying Genre?

            I grew up in Bangladesh, in a land thousands of miles away, and a time period hundreds of years later. So what might explain my intense fascination with Westerns? Books and movies, of course. Sheba Prokashoni (সেবা প্রকাশনী) Westerns, translations of popular novels written by Louis L’Amour, Oliver Strange, Charles R. Pike, and more, were a huge part of my childhood. While I also read translations, by Sheba, of classics such as A Sign of Four, Three Men in a Boat, and Sir Walter Scott’s Talisman, to name a few, a vast majority of the books I read at the time were Westerns. I must have been 11-12 years old at the time. I had just finished reading Ar Kotodur (আর কতদূর), by কাজী মাহবুব হোসেন, a translation of Louis L’Amour’s Down The Long Hills, and I was completely hooked.

The next couple of years, I continued to gobble up one Western translation after the other, notable among them being – Nilgiri (নীলগিরি) (To The Far Blue Mountains), Boshoti (বসতি) (Sacketts: The Daybreakers), Kuhokini (কুহকিনী) (Sacketts: Mohave Crossing), and more. All in the 1980s, and only in 2022 did I finally figure out that they were translations of Louis L’Amour classics. Translations can be a tricky thing though. The Witcher series, for example, is insanely popular, with video games and a Netflix show, but inconsistent translations from the original Polish have affected my enjoyment of the books. These Sheba translations were top notch, and while I will perhaps never know how faithful they were to the originals, I have to give full credit to Kazi Mahbub Hossain, Rowshan Jamil, Shawkat Hossain, and the rest for developing my interest in the Western genre, which continues to this day.

            Speaking of which, I must mention two reasons why 2023 has brought me back to Westerns. I have just recently finished playing Red Dead Redemption 2, and think it just about beats Skyrim and Witcher 3 as the greatest video game I have ever played. While I absolutely love Geralt, Arthur Morgan won my heart as the greatest video game protagonist ever.

My interest in Westerns has been rekindled just in time for Michael K Vaughan’s Western themed booktube event – June on the Range, a month of reading Western classics. I highly recommend you check out his channel, as he also covers classic horror, comics, science fiction and fantasy.

            I selected four books for June on the Range – starting with Sacketts #1 – Sackett’s Land, the first Louis L’Amour book that I’ll be reading in English. I never read the Bengali translation for this one – Jolodosshu (জলদস্যু) – which means Pirate.

The other three books I read were Sudden: Outlawed (Oliver Strange), Fallon (another Louis L’Amour classic, translated as Rupantor (রূপান্তর), a childhood favourite of mine, and finally Shane (Jack Schaefer).

While I have only mentioned classic Western literature so far, movies have perhaps played an ever bigger role in popularizing Westerns on a global scale. Clint Eastwood, in particular, as The Man With No Name in Sergio Leone’s trilogy, and then once again in Unforgiven – movies which I will force my son to watch with me at some point. He’s 11 now, the same age I was when I was completely fascinated by Westerns. Which brings to mind – is he even barely aware of the genre? Do kids these days find it even relevant or interesting anymore? And should we introduce them to this romanticised version of American history, when the reality was as brutal and spine chilling as anything? Something that authors like the recently departed Cormac McCarthy have highlighted so brilliantly?

As I finish writing this piece, I interrupt my son’s studies to ask him if he knows about Westerns. He replies, “You mean sheriffs and cowboys?”

I suppose that’s pretty much all I knew when I held আর কতদূর in my hands, all those years ago, in 1985.