A Winter’s Night and Other Stories is a sleek production of ten stories, supposedly for children. In the ‘Translator’s Note,’ Rakhshanda Jalil makes two irreconcilable remarks. ‘This selection has been made especially for young readers of the age group twelve to fifteen years,’ she says before retracing in the very next sentence ‘… in putting together this collection I did not consciously set out to collect only children’s stories’. These two remarks have been made one after another, and in the same paragraph. So, how does one understand what the translator really wants to do and for whom? One may appreciate the problem she might have faced in selecting stories for children but it must also be plainly said that she needed to be much more critical in making her selections. Premchand wrote many stories for children, his critics tell us, but they are not able to trace them all.
October 2007, volume 31, No 10