Translation
Of women's lives
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
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These stories show and hide at the same time, clear and yet ambiguous.
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Gulabi Talkies and Other Stories, Vaidehi, edited by Tejaswini Niranjana, translated by Tejaswini Niranjana, Mrinalini Sebastian, Bageshree S., Nayana Kashyap, Penguin India, 2006, p.256, Rs. 250.
I MUST confess right away that I enjoyed Vaidehi's Gulabi Talkies much more than I had expected to; being unfamiliar with her stories, I naively assumed that since the stories are repeatedly described as arousing "nostalgia", they would be of mythic proportions, with character types rather than individual characters.
While there's no doubt that Vaidehi's world evokes an acute nostalgia, a sort of urgent and intimate slipping into a lost time, recognisable because of familiar signs — like the bunch of red bangles dangling by a length of sack thread, on the book's glossy un-Penguin-like cover — Vaidehi herself is not writing from nostalgia, her stories are not to be read as expressions of longing for that time. One would suggest that it is important to read Vaidehi as in that time and outside it at the same time, as the editor may be doing when she refers to the consequences of labelling Vaidehi as a "natural" writer, thereby neglecting the "layers of mediation in women's worlds" that her writing undertakes.
The 20 stories in this collection are clearly women's stories; the storytellers are women, the stories they tell are about women's lives and the intricate web of their relating: whether it is Ammachchi and her little, tag-along companion (in "Remembering Ammachchi"), or Abha and Samita (in "Abha"), or Achala (in "Pages from the Interior"), or Lillibai of Gulabi Talkies or Rami and Beena (in "Chandale"). Yet, they are also about men — who are passing through, lurking around, occupying spaces — about men as seen by these women whose lives they impact; quite often, the reader's in-view into the hidden spaces of these women's lives/ minds is sharpest at the point where they encounter-negotiate the male presence.
Subtle mediation
Vaidehi's mediation in these worlds is thankfully not annotative, never verbalising, but only moving aside, like a sudden breeze, the curtain from another seemingly ordinary area of that world; what you see depends on how you look. Thus in "Abha", when Samita tells Abha that she "insulted" a poem by not reading it "dispassionately", you should know it means much more than it appears to say. These little asides are quite thrilling. One of my favourites is this conversation between husband and wife in "Just a Box": The husband's "In olden days, what did women have of their own, except the corner they occupied during the menstrual period?" is countered by the wife's "Oh no, the moment you began your argument with `in the olden days', you lost your ground."
As the editor suggests, branding Vaidehi a "natural" writer, one writing without "artifice", is to ignore the incredible deliberation of her craft, the cultivated familiarity with the unruly, sometimes sulky wiles of words, so evident in the way she moulds and fashions incidents, lives, conversations, suggestions, into stories that show and hide at the same time, clear and yet ambiguous.
The introduction also lays out the problems of translation in addition to introducing Vaidehi and explaining the process of translation. Do the four translators, none of whom inhabit the cultural worlds of Vaidehi's characters, bring to the translation of this world, an understanding of the women as victimised? Or do they see them as proto-feminists who attempt to critique the conditions of their living, and does their translation make them either one or the other?
Easy reading
Having more than one person translate the stories is an interesting idea, one doesn't know enough to say if the translators have left their marks on the stories, but whatever that may be, the reading is easy and one feels a sense of the Kannada original!
One must comment on the book's production: it looks good, the print is easy on the eye, and there are none of the awful errors that seem to mark translations.
You can listen to (excerpts of) some of these stories on The South Asian Literary Recordings Project site.
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