Tag Archives: Translations

Gloria Steinem once said, ‘We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.’ In a way, Neela Padmanabhan’s Generations is a response to this aspect of crossing and building new knowledges. The story bridges tradition and modernity as it chronicles…

T Janakiraman’s novel The Crimson Hibiscus is, at one level, the story of an ordinary man prematurely burdened by duties and responsibilities. Equally though, it is the story of an entire era and of that complex eco-system called the joint family. This sensitively translated, beautifully produced novel..

The Tamil Brahmin community has for me been an enigma, mainly because of their rites and rituals that begin or close any event of everyday life. The rich symbolism in lifestyle patterns, the pragmatically intelligent womenfolk, the shrewd menfolk and the sharp children have always piqued…

‘Did he live? Did he die? Was it a search? Or a hunt? When she set him free, did she also succeed in setting herself free?’ In this eclectic collection of thirteen short stories, Ambai’s characters pose existential questions that are intriguing, even disturbing, because they defy mundane answers…

When Prema gets married, little does she know that she will have to toil endlessly and live like a tongue-tied prisoner, listening to the same litany of complaints from her husband every day. Pummelled for three years and ten days, she eventually walks out of her abusive marriage, securing ‘freedom with costs’…

Pain knows no language, but languages do know pain. As first Malayalam and then English lend their scripts to narrate the violence and intensity of a Santhali woman’s pain; out of these narrations are born the images of those whose wounds make languages crumble and words shrink in impoverishment…

It is generally agreed that translation is an act of moving a text from one language to another. Those who have reflected critically on the processes of translation, like John Dryden (1631–1700), concur with this basic definition. Complicating this, possibly in the late eighteenth century England…

Words are like human beings. Behind every living word there are many dead words.’Theeyoor Chronicles  deals primarily with the resilience of human beings in different situations to a certain extent and those who seek refuge in death when they are unable to do so…

Kadambari: The Flower Girl  by Sethu is a work that surprised me on two primary counts. The first is that it is a self-translation, perhaps Sethu’s first attempt. It was originally published in Malayalam as Aaramathe Penkutty (2006). Self-translations are rarely attempted in Malayalam…

The last couple of years have seen a quantum leap in terms of the sheer number and range of books being translated from Indian regional languages into English. While there has been a healthy market for bhasha translations of English works, the process

Letters to Jorina is a collection of eleven letters written by Alok Das, a University Professor from Odisha, to his woman friend Jorina McCarthy, a Guyanese settled in England. The book records Alok’s observations and reflections on home and abroad…

We come to appreciate light only when the sun sets or the lamps are out. Similarly, we really come to know what freedom is when we are in jail. One day in jail would give a detainee much more insight into what freedom is than can be gained reading and listening for a lifetime outside. (p. 177)…

The three plays, introduced with a skilled and analytically detailed discussion, rise above parochialisms of time, space, culture and language.  They resonate with universal themes and emotions like love, duty, guilt and the sheer tedium of existence that saps one’s soul of vibrancy and one’s life of joy.

This novel is really a chronicle, like Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, of a time, and characters who lived in that time, kings, nobles, knights and wizards; what happened to them, the events of which they were part, and how they survived or were destroyed. But that’s where any resemblance fades.

Benyamin’s latest novel in English, Body and Blood, unravels a new kind of politics that interweaves faith and crime as the author deals with the influence of religious dogmatism in the lives of faithful believers. The setting of the novel spreads over a group of Indian cities and the narrative is shaped.

Ship of Sorrows is the English translation of Qurratulain Hyder’s second novel, Safinae Ghame Dil (1952) written during the tumultuous years in Pakistan immediately following the Partition of the country. It is regarded as a sequel to her first novel, Mere Bhi Sanamkhane written.

Writers and poets have always taken note of history. Sometimes, when history is exceptionally brutal and bloody, the poet may fall silent but the prose writer is compelled to pick up his pen, and sometimes it is the reverse. Some events shake the conscience of thinking.

Mukundan’s latest offering in translation is a collection of three novellas—the eponymous long novella and two short ones. But these are not new stories; on the contrary they are pretty old ones written in the late 1960s and early 70s. They have been introduced to the English reading public some fifty years later in an interesting translation by Prema Jayakumar.

The story of being useless + three contexts of a writer is a translation of two Marathi novellas by a young writer, Avadhoot Dongare.

Nadeem Khan who has translated these two novellas into English needs to be congratulated on his choice of the texts as they introduce the readers of English translations of regional.

Few historical epochs of India have drawn as much attention as nineteenth century Bengal. Hailed as the time of birth and growth of Bengali nabajagaran or ‘renaissance’, the period (extending until early twentieth century) unceasingly reminds us, and the Bengalis.