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The twirls of life

Photo: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar

Giving voice to the vernacular Nandini Guha in New Delhi

So many times, many a great literary work remains dead to us because of its language. That language can be a barrier to literature is particularly true in a country like ours, divided by different tongues. This is what makes the role of translators important in our literature. But indeed, a translator’s job is not just to present a piece of literary work from one language to another. Line by line. It is to try and make accessible the fine distinction of the language of the original work to the new readers.

Delhi University professor Nandini Guha is aware of these intricacies. “It shouldn’t read like a translation,” she underlines. Guha also agrees that a good translated work can become better if you can bring out the nuances of the original work without fiddling too much with it.

Such consciousness led her to take part in the Katha competition for translated works in 2001. Her entry at the competition was an English translation of “Kharab Chele”, a novel by Bani Basu, a key voice of contemporary Bengali literature. Guha named her work “The Fallen Man”.

“I was so moved by the novel that I felt like translating it into English so that a wider section of readers get to enjoy it too,” says Basu. “The Fallen Man” bagged the Katha award for the best translated work that year. And it gave this professor of English literature the additional career of a translator. “The Fallen Man”, which got published in an anthology of awarded stories by Katha some years ago, has recently been rechristened as “Dark Afternoons” and released separately as a novel by the publishing house.

Guha obviously is excited. “This is my first serious published work as a translator. Before that, I appeared only in college magazines,” she says jocularly. “Dark Afternoons” is a gripping tale about human associations staged in the city of Kolkata. It has quite a few parallel tracks about different lives lived and their relationships with each other but the main track is that of the protagonist Jina, who takes up a job to fill her empty afternoons. It soon transforms her sheltered existence.

But the most lovable character is definitely Jina’s father-in-law, adds Guha. “The way Bani Basu has portrayed this character is admirable. It can change one’s perception about typical fathers-in-law. Very subtly she instils in you the thought that such characters do exist in our society,” explains Guha.

Known for bringing in contemporary happenings to her pages, Bani Basu, in “Kharab Chele”, also deals with the subject of AIDS quite delicately. She questions the role of NGOs working in the field and also ponders whether their vision is any way close to stemming the problem. Basu, known for many impressive novels, has also written “Moom”, in a language that Marwari residents of Kolkata speak, a mix of Bengali and Marwari, used for first time to pen an entire novel.

In “Dark Afternoons”, Guha fills the pages with footnotes that give meanings of different Bengali terms and usages. She explains, “I deliberately left words like ‘kal boishak’ as there can be no English word to give the local effect. I seriously feel that a reader picks a translated work to get the local flavour. So I didn’t want to westernise it too much. The footnotes are for those who don’t follow such words.”

All keyed up, she is on to her next work of translation. It is yet again a Bani Basu novel, “Shwet Pathorer Thhala”. A path-breaking book, it trails the plight of widowhood, where a widow questions the family of her husband why she has to be always in mourning. She asks them, “Am I the only one who lost someone?” The book will be published by Zubaan.

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