‘Selected Short Stories of Madhav Kaushik’, translated by Sonika Sethi, are frozen in time
The stories trace the landscape of a middle class which has withered away from the collective memory
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Book Title: Selected Short Stories of Madhav Kaushik
Author: Translated by Sonika Sethi
The mainspring of translation is to make a text accessible to the readers of another linguistic community, while revisiting it through the linguistic register (distinct use of language in accordance with specifics of context, situation, communicative purposes) of another language, to up the ante on multivalency in the original writing.
Short stories are immensely amenable to these intentions of translation. The International Booker Prize being awarded to a collection of short stories (in Kannada) by Banu Mushtaq, translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi, is a celebration of this premise. ‘Selected Short Stories of Madhav Kaushik’, 25 of them, which nestle on a precarious brink, frozen in time, etching the stifling throes of life, have been translated by Sonika Sethi.
The overarching theme of exploring interiority of the characters precipitates an unintended outcome in this set of stories. When read in progression, all the protagonists of the stories segue, like in a montage, into a male figure commanding a single point of view — reluctant to accept change, oscillating between a lived reality and distant past, afflicted by extreme emotions, vulnerable to the core.
This figure has proclivity towards a wistful nostalgia, while dwelling on loss with a languid hope of recovery, forever reminiscing a golden bygone era and regretting the contemporary unscrupulous society. And simultaneously, surrendering and helpless against circumstances, yet fomenting a faint resistance, even if subliminally.
However, the attempts to explore interiority have devolved into granulated reportage, saturated with picayune details, which read like a storyboard with instructions or a cinematically treated screenplay, not rendered into a film yet. The characters appear to be embossed onto the narrative, instead of leaping out of pages, to become life-like. This, painfully, obfuscates the narrative flow, chokes the cause and effect, impedes emotional connection even when a plaintive, “our helplessness should never be visible”(‘The Sunlit Window’), hits the conscience.
The translations, with preponderance on the past perfect tense, and redundancies (“for the first time” appears at least 14 times across the collection) which creep in due to inattentive transliterations or limited use of vocabulary, do not help the reading process. The literary style in Hindi, filled with similes, metaphors, repetitions and particular syntax, requires rigorous translative churning to render it meaningfully rich and effective in English. Lack of differentiation even between a hyphen and a dash, pages after pages, tests the patience of even a committed reader.
However, where the translations are not riddled with these gaffes, the narrative flows and characters leap from the pages to interact with readers. The deeply personal, perhaps even autobiographical, ‘In this Life’ becomes animated with epiphanies about how the politics of publishing and market forces drive the styles in literary writing.
The luminescent ‘The Sunlit Window’ comes alive with characters evincing unconditional affection. And, Babu Panna Lal’s unlikely fellowship with Ruliya becomes believable in ‘Against the Silence’ owing to the sincerity of depiction.
‘F.I.R’, ‘The Option’, ‘Dangal’, ‘The Campaign’, ‘The Officers Club’ pulsate with wry political humour, without which the harshness of eroding values and atrophy in sensibilities of the middle class would become too agonising to even comprehend. Vacillating between Charles Dickens-ian multitude of characters, and Mohan Rakesh-like peering into the interior essence of people, these stories trace the landscape of a middle class which has withered away from the collective memory.
— The reviewer teaches in Department of English and Cultural Studies, PU
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