The Satanic Verses

The quotations from the Quran in this book are composites of the English versions of N. J. Dawood in the Penguin edition and of Maulana Muhammad Ali (Lahore, 1973), with a few touches of my own; that from Faiz Ahmad Faiz is a variant of translation by Mahmood Jamal in the Penguin Book of Modern Urdu Poetry. For the description of the Manticore, I’m indebted to Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings, while the material on Argentina derives, in part, from the writings of W. H. Hudson, especially Far Away and Long Ago. I should like to thank Pauline Melville for untangling my plaits from my dreadlocks; and to confess that ‘Gagari’ poems of ‘Bhupen Gandhi’ are, in fact, echoes of Arun Kolatkar’s collection Jejuri. The verses of ‘Living Doll’ are by Lionell Bart (© 1959 Peter Maurice Music Co. Ltd., all rights for the U.S. and Canada administered by Colgems-EMI Music Inc.) and those by Kenneth Tynan in the novel’s final section have been taken from Tynan Right and Left (copyright © Kenneth Tynan, 1967).

The identities of many of the authors from whom I've learned will, I hope, be clear from text; others must remain anonymous, but I thank them, too.