The Hindu : New Delhi News : Tales of ‘milk machines’ and more now in Hindi

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Tales of ‘milk machines’ and more now in Hindi

Kunal Diwan

NEW DELHI: The transition of Norway from an agrarian economy to an industrialised oil-rich economy has not been effected without the inevitable social consequences. Even as its citizens grapple with new-found affluence and modernity, a part of their psyche craves for the simplistic solitude of the days gone by.

It is this quest for tranquillity in an increasingly industrialised setting that forms the crux of 10 Norwegian stories that have been translated into Hindi by poet Teji Grover. A cohesive amalgam of the past and the present, with an eye on what is to come, the translations are an apt description of the Scandinavian milieu.

Anthology of stories

Published by Vani Prakashan, the anthology of short stories will be released at the ongoing World Book Fair at Pragati Maidan here this Thursday.

An art unto itself, translating literature suffers from the pitfall of the translator confining herself to the primary level of “decoding” text at the expense of disregarding its subsurface connotations, ones that essentially form the basis of all true art.

“Since I was translating the stories from their already translated version in English, I wanted to make sure that the multiplicity of translation did not neutralise the essence of what was being conveyed,” says Teji Grover.

The stories encompass a host of human experiences juxtaposed seamlessly with the overpowering inescapability of nature, the vulnerability of silence, the confrontation and acceptance of the fragility of human existence and the relative banality of wanting to evade one’s wife’s gaze and rush into the comforting solitude of the forest.

Man-animal divide

The overpowering desire to get away from it all forms the crux of Herbjorg Wassmo’s “The Motif”.

Venting years of bottled-up atavistic urges from her heart, she writes: “The touch. Like drinking from a water stream before continuing with a metallic taste in the mouth… Of one thousand years of decomposition. Transformed into fresh water….”

Lars Amund Vaage’s “Cows” attempts the Dostoevskian task of perforating the man-animal divide. Ms. Grover says that the young protagonist observes the cows from birth to death as mere milk machines and mountains of meat, devoid of lust and motherhood, of the necessary rituals of licking their newborns and feeding them and in the end deprived too of dying a natural death.

“The calves are always the same. Just as children are still children…It is life that has changed,” writes Vaage.

Past and present

In an inadvertent symbolic representation of this group of writers, Simon Stranger’s “Mnem” deconstructs this strange marriage between laments for the past and the firm acknowledgment of the present’s undeniable vitality: “I was travelling and couldn’t remember where I was when I woke up. The trip by train had gone too fast, that my soul had not kept up and wouldn’t arrive until later.”

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