TRANSLATION
A piece of the moon
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"Dots and Lines is a `fine' book, one of the finest books I read this year and in all the years that I've been reading books."
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Every life, he realised, shares a piece of the moon. If one piece just touches another, it is enough. A new piece is born.
IN "Why Does the Moon Run?" Parthiv Sharma, dropped off on 100 feet road in Mulund West by the factory bus after night shift, is attempting to cross the road when he is knocked down by an unseen vehicle. As he lies there, the author has Parthiv go through a dreamy-surrealistic experience, in which many things appear to happen around him, we don't really know whether they are wholly real or only partly imagined, but in which we can identify the author's humane, compassionate vision of the human world.
Humane vision
Lying there on 100 feet road, Parthiv's mind is travelling through the tortured terrain of his "real" life in which he suffers endlessly the absence of his only son, who his ambitious, embittered wife, has insisted on sending off to boarding school for fear that he will become as unworldly as his father.
At the same time, Parthiv's body appears to get up and walk along the equally real space of the familiar 100 feet road. We don't know if it actually does. But what we do know is that at the end of this, there is an extended epiphany for both Parthiv as well as the reader; Parthiv realises that a new life has begun for him; the reader partakes of the author's vision that all human beings share a piece of the moon and all it takes is for one piece to touch another for a new piece to be born.
This piece of moon appears in all the 14 stories in Jayant Kaikini's Dots and Lines, translated into English by various writers from the Kannada original, Amritaballi Kashaaya. In these 14 stories, human beings touch each other through all their pains and sorrows and disillusions and absurdities and pettiness and more and more pieces of moon are born.
Things as they are
The writer's humane vision does not come from leaving out anything or by suggesting that good should, or even could, win over bad but rather comes after looking at everything and everybody exactly as they are; this full screen view takes the reader into the world's dark corners, sleazy lanes and cruel ways as much as through its wide open, sunny, breezy fields in which humans run without guile. It looks at life as an inseparable, sometimes tacky, weave of good, bad and indifferent and then picks out the moments where old pieces of moon shine and new pieces are born through human interaction.
A good translation awakens a different self or at least a different part of self as reader — the self that reads and makes meaning in the English language is transformed when it reads a vernacular experience of the world and the word as told in English in the voice of one unfettered by its usage outside the vernacular way of life and way of speech. And this quality in the stories makes Dots and Lines astonishingly easy and pleasing to read. The stories permit the translator to turn, as someone said, English into Kannada rather than Kannada into English. There is a remarkable quality in Jayant Kaikini's stories in Dots and Lines, which I can think of only as a kind of modern, though not modernistic, vernacularity that takes into its grasp the modern world and its signifiers but continues to remain vernacular.
Noble and authentic
I was struck by this quality while trying to decide on a word, which I would be happy to use to describe the 14 stories in Dots and Lines. Several adjectives including "exquisite", "absorbing" and "well crafted " made me vaguely uneasy, though I could not say why till the word "fine" fell onto my page.
Dots and Lines is a "fine" book, one of the finest books I read this year and in all the years that I've been reading books.
I use the word much in the way that a vernacular speaker — who uses the English language to describe experiences from within the dialectic of the vernacular — would use it to indicate a collection of qualities in which nobility and righteousness have as much place as do the ability to be pleasing and to be authentic.
Dots and Lines was published as a part of a project of Sahitya Goshti (www.sahityagoshti.org), whose "charter is to take Kannada literature to the community and promote active literary interest in Kannada."
In today's world of narrowing language spaces and the conscription of language into identity politics, the roles and function of translation have become more significant than ever before. The efforts of Sahitya Goshti are laudable and readers must surely appreciate their production values; Dots and Lines is a good looking book on beautiful paper, without the errors, typos, and bad printing that we often encounter in translations.
First in a series
Jayant Kaikini is the first author translated under this aegis and we are told in the introduction to the book that this was done after much consideration keeping in mind several criteria: the writer had to be living; the stories had to lend themselves to translation; getting permission for translation had to be not too difficult; the writer had to have made significant contribution to Kannada literature and the stories had to have universal appeal.
Jayant Kaikini's stories, going by the 14 that appear in Dots and Lines do have that "universal" appeal, while remaining distinctive and for those whose Kannada is not good enough to read it in the original and have been scrounging for any available translations, a book like this comes as a boon.
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
Dots and Lines, Jayant Kaikini, translated from the original Amritaballi Kashaaya, edited by Vishvanath Hulikal, Sahitya Goshti, price not stated.
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