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Literary Review
TRANSLATION
Swansong
HIMANSU S. MOHAPATRA
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Deconstructing myths about ageing.
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Fear, Love, Marigolds and More: Stories of Growing Old; Kishori Charan Das, Translated by Phyllis Granoff, Indian Writers Series: Bhubaneswar, Grassroots, 2005, Rs. 250.
American translator Phyllis Granoff’s foray into the heartland of Kishori Charan Das resulted in a volume of nine stories in 2000. Titled The Journey (reissued as Inner Voices in India), it showed the Oriya
middle-of-the roaders caught in mid-flight. Recently she has come out with her second collection from the same author. Das wrote these in his sunset years before he died in 2003. Bathed in the twilight glow of those years, the stories are his bittersweet swansong.
Unusual take
The stories deconstruct certain myths about ageing. Some examples of Das’s unusual take on ageing shall suffice. Bishva Bhusan Ray’s attempted return to his roots after years of gallivanting in foreign lands in “Damp Earth” is rendered problematic precisely because he gets caught up in local entanglements. The story captures the ambiguities of the Oriya diaspora. And “Sanctuary” is the all too familiar saga of the Mohantys seeking to dignify their upwardly mobile lives with the icing of religion.
Das does not forget to tell the bitter truth about ageing in the traditional Indian society. In “The Curtain” Panu is cast out on to the veranda of his tiny makeshift hut his son and daughter-in-law. Kunti in “Old Poems” loses her position as the matriarch (despite being fussed over by her daughters-in-law) as she grows old. The saving grace is that she finds herself in the centre of the literary world of a newly canonised poet who immortalised her in his poem.
Crowning glory
Given Das’s lifelong concern with the dynamics of storytelling, “The Last Story” is the crowning glory of this volume. An enigmatic story, placed at the start, it alludes to the milestones in Das’s literary career and to the last story that gives the volume its title. It is about Ganesh Mohanty, the Oriya short story writer, experiencing the writer’s block as he prepares to pen his last story. In the end his writerly self asserts itself as he discovers the shaping joy of writing about the ever-renewable experience of living and loving.
There is only one problem. Peopled by the Mohantys, Rays, Paridas, Chaudhuries and Daspattanaiks, Das’s world seems too clannish in its confinement to the karana caste, despite the author’s tongue-in-cheek portrayal of
their middle class shenanigans.
The translation, though faulty at a few places (“cook myself”, p. 112; “eaten your sherbet”, p. 122; “What do I care if she says”, p. 157; “nothing to afraid of”, p. 160), is nonetheless effective in conveying the vintage irony, understatement and minute character analysis for which Das is so loved and admired. I leave the reader with the following from "Old Poems": "The cucumbers had fanned out. The bitter gourd vine hid her children in the burgeoning folds of her spreading garment" (p. 123). It best brings out Das’s mastery at interiorising the landscape as well as the superior timber of Granoff’s English translation.
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