Saturday, February 23, 2008

The longest books I have ever red: "Anatomy of Hatha Yoga" - the emerging hope

In this last entry of the series about long and tricky books that engage your time in such a degree, that it changes the course of your life, I wanted to tell about my recently finished translating project.

The book "Anatomy of Hatha Yoga" by H. David Coulter, was one of the positions, that I got interested in during the four years in which I visited several times (staying for longer or shorter periods) the Finnish capital Helsinki. As you can probably imagine, at that time I was already acknowledged to a large degree with the practices of hatha yoga, so I decided to check for myself how is the yoga in this small but interesting city. I was not at all disappointed, I got to admit. And I discovered a tiny shop with yoga books and artifacts. There it was, when I bought some missing books by B.K.S. Iyengar, and there was when my attention was drowned by this one written by dr Coulter. Of course, I havn't got any idea about how difficult it was to read...

And so it was how it started: when I showed this book to my old friend - also a yoga passionate - he, almost at once, proposed me to translate the book into Polish. I thought - why not? After all, it was an opportunity to better understand this extremely difficult, but also very important book. Today, when even the book's cover is done, and we are all waiting for the last few amends to take it to the printing house, I don't regret any second spent on translating it, but it took me an entire year and a month of work (starting January the 1st 2007, until the end of January 2008) , day by day, more than 10 hours a day, on weekends, with no vacation, to turn this:


into this:




Now that everything is ready and heating the engines at the printing house, we just start to feel how important is this project for us, and for the whole yoga in Poland. We hope that it's power will enable a new point of view on the old problems, and turn many new faces to the light of yoga..

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