THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2023 45 The story delves into Leona’s childhood as she searches for a way to confront powerful relatives and fix her mistake. Irving Tragen worked at the State Department and USAID for 33 years and spent another 14 at the Organization of American States, including nearly a decade as the executive director of the Inter-American Drug Commission. During his career, Tragen worked in all 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries, focusing on development and the fight against drug trafficking. Tragen holds a B.A. and a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. His autobiography, Two Lifetimes as One: Ele and Me and the Foreign Service, was spotlighted in The Foreign Service Journal in October 2019. Best Served Cold David P. Wagner, Poisoned Pen Press, 2023, $16.99/paperback, e-book available, 256 pages. American Rick Montoya, an interpreter living in Rome, is working on a translation for a police case involving the mafia when an old college friend calls out of the blue. The friend, now a priest, is in Italy for a religious tour of Assisi, but the tour guide has gone missing. Rick agrees to meet his friend and help lead the tour. But when the tour guide is found dead, Rick finds himself helping the local police interview the rich and entitled tour group members—could one of them be the murderer? David Wagner is a retired Foreign Service officer who spent nine years and three tours in Italy, never realizing that he was researching his future mystery novels. Other diplomatic assignments included Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Washington, D.C. He and his wife, Mary, live in Pueblo, Colorado. POETRY Life’s Journey: The Poetry of Life, Love, and Beyond Sherman L. Grandy, independently published, 2023, $18.99/paperback, e-book available, 125 pages. Foreign Service Officer Sherman Grandy has spent the past five decades writing poetry from wherever he’s been in the world. He was inspired to start after a chance encounter with a stranger in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in 1972, and continued to write through marriage, children, and new overseas posts. His wife, Kate, also contributed several poems to the collection. The poems are mostly spiritual in nature—Grandy is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who began his overseas journey with a two-year church mission in Brazil. Sherman Grandy joined the Foreign Service in 2001 and served in Seoul, Baqubah, Baghdad, Islamabad, Manila, and Lagos before retiring in 2019. He is currently a consular fellow in Recife, Brazil. Grandy holds a bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University and master’s degrees from Yale and the National Intelligence University. Tagore’s Gitanjali: A New Translation with the Bengali Originals and the Tagore Translations Prasenjit Gupta, Parabaas, 2023, $24.95/hardcover, print only, 300 pages. The original Gitanjali, a collection of poems by Rabindranath Tagore, was published in Bengali in 1910. Tagore himself translated 53 of the original poems into English in 1912, and while he received the Nobel Prize for Literature for his translation of the collection, some critics noted that his translations were not always accurate. In 2023, retired FSO Prasenjit Gupta published a new translation of the poems alongside the original poems and their original translations. Gupta also includes an afterword about the ethics of translation, arguing that “for a translation from a formerly colonized people’s language, such as Bengali, into the language of the former colonizer, English, it is a significant question whether the translator identifies as a member of the colonizing people or the colonized.” He calls his translation of Gitanjali “an act of political resistance.” Prasenjit Gupta retired from the State Department in 2021 after serving in Chennai, Belfast, Colombo, Hong Kong, Kolkata, and New Delhi. He won a Fulbright Award in 1998 for his translations of Nirmal Verma’s fiction and a U.S. National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for his translations of Ashapurna Debi’s fiction. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Iowa.
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