Question
The Sound of the Kiss, a 16th-century novel from this country, contains many passages that have different meanings in different languages depending on the direction they’re read in. For 10 points each:
[10h] Name this modern-day country where a lost “great narrative” written in the “language of ghouls” provided material for medieval prose works like The Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie and What Ten Young Men Did.
ANSWER: India [or Bhārat; or Republic of India; or Bhārat Gaṇarājya] (The Brihatkathā was supposedly written in a language called Paishachī.)
[10e] Two answers required. Early modern Indian experimental authors often showed off by writing palindrome-like texts that somehow summarize both of these two major epic poems. Both of these epics feature avatars of Vishnu.
ANSWER: Rāmāyaṇam AND Mahābhāratam
[10m] Nandin’s novel What Ten Young Men Did uses this type of constrained writing for a chapter whose narrator can’t pronounce labial consonants. Georges Perec’s A Void is one of these texts.
ANSWER: lipograms [accept word forms like lipogrammatic]
Data
| Team | Opponent | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brown A | Maryland A | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| Chicago B | Ohio State A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Claremont A | McGill A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Columbia A | North Carolina A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Cornell A | Duke A | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| Georgia Tech A | Florida A | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| Illinois A | South Carolina A | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| Imperial A | Florida B | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| MIT A | Indiana A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Michigan A | Columbia B | 10 | 10 | 0 | 20 |
| Minnesota A | Cornell B | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Minnesota B | Houston A | 10 | 10 | 0 | 20 |
| Penn A | Georgia Tech B | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Penn State A | Iowa State A | 10 | 10 | 10 | 30 |
| Purdue A | Vanderbilt A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Rutgers A | Yale B | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| Rutgers B | NYU A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Stanford A | Yale A | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| Texas A | Northwestern A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Toronto A | Harvard A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| UC Berkeley A | Chicago C | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| UC Berkeley B | Johns Hopkins A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Virginia A | WUSTL B | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| WUSTL A | Chicago A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |