In today’s globalized world, the role, focus and worth of translation as the contemporary lingua franca can hardly be overstated. As such, it comes as no wonder that, it is through the translation of his selected works (in English and in some regional languages as well) that Mahabaleshwar Sail, renowned for his fiction across the Konkani literary world, has ventured beyond the boundaries of his language, State and the country. His major translated works are, Kali Ganga (1998), The Kiln (1910), The Forest Saga (2016) and Age of Frenzy (2017), and interestingly all have been translated into English by Vidya Pai. Age of Frenzy, being an abridged translation of Sail’s original Konkani novel Yug Sanvar (2004) cannot be seen in isolation. The source text is an exemplary work in the novelistic genre written by Sail to date. It spans the sub-genres of historical novel, realistic fiction, and an epic narrative of massive proportion—all at once. Not intended as a historical novel in the traditional sense per se, Sail’s magnum opus delves into the hoary past of the Goan community caught in the throes of a brutal colonial conquest in the early decades of the 16th century, but does not embrace the obsolete notions and putative biases of that era.
As the translated text, Age of Frenzy has been considerably trimmed, probably because the source text, Yug Sanvar in its entirety might have sounded elaborate and perhaps somewhat tedious in the target text, English. This is probably due to the very different narrative traditions in the two language cultures. In fact, the mode of narration adopted in the source text, is a combination of the dramatic and the descriptive with a touch of the poignant and the poetic. The home-spun diction of the original is imaginatively appealing, its style captivatingly haunting and its expression, disarmingly simple and refreshingly native.