Translating Pishima
Aratrika Das
THE AUNT WHO WOULDN’T DIE by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay Bee Books, 2017, 143 pp., 250
June 2019, volume 43, No 6

Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s Goynar Baksho is a Bengali novel about the ghost of  Pishima. Married at the age of seven, widowed at twelve, Pishima lives in three rooms of her paternal house and owns a jewellery box. The possession of this box after the sudden death of Pishima pushes the plot until the ghost of the dead Pishima forces the innocent newly-wedded bride, Somlata, to hide it in her room. Somlata thereafter is able to set up two shops, and rescue a decadent zamindari-family from the throes of bankruptcy. Set in the decaying feudal household of an East Bengali zamindar, Goynar Baksho traces the trauma of the loss of estates during  Partition, the unfamiliar adjustments of  egoistical men, the economic and social spiralling that landed gentry enters into once they try to learn to trade, and eventually the modern college-educated world of Somlata’s daughter, Boshon.

The Aunt Who Wouldn’t Die is the English-translation of Goynar Baksho. Here the shift from ‘Goynar Baksho’ (the jewellery box) to ‘The Aunt’ (Pishima) in the title is a deliberate signposting of the protagonist in the text—the novel belongs to Pishima, and not to the jewellery box. Pishima desires mutton, shuntki maach (dried fish), men, sexual intimacy, and plots extra-marital affairs of young brides. This is a novel about the ghost of the child-widow who learns to curse, live with, empathize, and terrorize the world of the living. Sinha then is not translating a novel about the zamindari-grandeur, but providing an afterlife to the Pishima who curses with ‘Omaago’, ‘Eeech’, ‘Maagi’, ‘Eyh’. But can Pishima from an East-Bengali mofussil be translated into the pages of an English speaking world?

The word ‘translation’ means anubaad (exact repetition), rupantar (change of form), bhashantara (change into another language), tarjuma (biography), vivartana (transforming), and is never simply an act of retelling, a transaction or an exchange. It is all of these, and a process that itself stands for a certain category of change. Sinha’s English translation attempts to perform each of these roles. This new English version communicates Mukhopadhyay’s story to the global English-speaking reader. Mukhopadhyay’s thoughts on Partition, the decadent men who kept mistresses and lied to their wives, individual and social duties, ethics, and love reach the contemporary facebooking-reader in easy, crisp and lyrical prose. Pishima, Somlata, and Boshon’s personal stories reflect the political histories of their times. The intimate details of conjugality work in tandem with the changing roles of women and feminine spaces. Longing and desire are as much matters of Mukhopadhyay’s plot as trade and commerce.

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