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Literary Review
Substance to shadows
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The two books illustrate divergent approaches to the presentation of fiction in translation, while documenting successive phases in Verma's writing, says RUPERT SNELL.
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NIRMAL VERMA senses the auras around people, and his fiction lends substance to shadows: phantoms become real, and real people ephemeral. Many different kinds of reality and fantasy interplay in these two very welcome but also very different new books: Indian Errant presents 14 Verma stories from four decades in Hindi and in English translation, and The Last Wilderness is a wonderfully fluent translation of Verma's latest novel Antim Aranya. The two books illustrate two divergent approaches to the presentation of fiction in translation, while also documenting various successive phases in Verma's writing.
The title, Indian Errant, alludes to Verma's fondness for the words bhram and bhraman, and to his many years spent in Europe, the location for most of the stories included here. This is one of many clarifications offered by Prasenjit Gupta's extensive introduction, which gives the reader an engaging crash course in "postcoloniality" before offering some brief comments on some (but only some) of the stories themselves. Gupta's lengthy bhraman forces the reader to approach the stories as an exercise in postcolonial translation rather than straightforwardly as the work of the man awkwardly dubbed here as "one of the few best-known writers outside India". Though Gupta's contribution to the translation debate deserves to be heard, his thesis-like approach seems overbearingly didactic in this context, and the introduction might have been more sensitively conceived as a less intrusive "afterword".
All but one of the stories selected by Gupta have been translated before, and his versions compare favourably with those earlier rivals, even if the bones of the Hindi are often too visible through the skin of his English ("She was a girl of short stature"; "so long as sleep didn't come, I kept watching the theater of the street"; "he looked around with fearful, anxious eyes"; "how are you here?"). The inclusion of the English and Hindi texts together is a rare boon, though the publisher should have his knuckles rapped for the appallingly inaccurate typesetting of the Hindi.
The Errant stories are not for the faint-hearted: Verma's European settings tend to be crepuscular and malevolent, not to say apocalyptic, while their exoticism can border on the imaginary — does Venice really have "pubs", and do her gondoliers really oil their hair with "Vaseline"? The streets of Verma's more northerly cities, especially in the stories dating from the 1960s, are characterised by a "cold alienness" and are awash with every kind of beery unpleasantness, including desperate couplings in dark corners (yet Gupta's introduction manages to talk without irony of an opposite caricature, the "Orientalist stereotype" of Western images of India!). The later stories, such as the superb "Guest for a Day" ("Ek din ka mehman") manage to convey a similarly intense experience of alienation with much lighter brush-strokes. Either way, such powerful portrayals of the outsider's experience are quite devastating, and even if the "exile" trope tends to throw a long shadow of self-pity and is too easily appropriated for mere literary effect, nobody has ever felt further from home than the reader of these stories.
In The Last Wilderness, the errant author returns to a Himalayan setting reminiscent of his own birthplace, Simla. The book is physically almost as beautiful as the original Hindi Antim Aranya, so immaculately published by Rajkamal in 2000. Though one could discuss at length the inferences of the English title (unwittingly suggestive of an ecological tract), Pratik Kanjilal's translation is a delight: it moulds itself naturally to the contours of the narrative and allows us the luxury of forgetting that this engrossing novel has traversed a bridge between two languages. Only occasionally does some imperfection intrude, as when the wrong English register is chosen for the humble servant Murlidhar — neither he nor his economically synonymous son Bansidhar would really say "She's changed somewhat since Ammaji's passing".
The Himalayan aranya, a far more layered and ambiguous setting than those dread European streets of the earlier stories, supplies a backdrop to encounters between a set of finely-drawn characters. The narrative is haunted by the swirling mists of spectral presences which beguile the living, and which occasionally threaten to stifle the writing with too much swirling mystery; but fortunately Verma's characters have been given real muscle and sinew with which to carry the tale efficiently up and down the pine-clad slopes, saving the novel from a ghostly obsession with the contents of the cemetery. The narrator is amanuensis and companion to Mehra Sahib, a retired civil servant who is the somewhat unwilling focus of a group of highly individual individuals ... but merely to tell the story would be to sell the novel short, for just as grammar relies on mood as much as tense, so The Last Wilderness relies on an interrogative moodiness as much as on narrative tension. The interrogative voice dominates many a paragraph, reaching fever-pitch in the thicket of 11 question-marks on page 175; but generally it conveys with proper subtlety that circumspect suggestiveness which characterises Verma's developed writing style.
The small number of Hindi novels so far translated into readable English could be counted on the fingers of one hand; Pratik Kanjilal is perhaps the first translator to do justice to the limpid subtleties of Nirmal Verma's prose, and we must open a second hand with which to welcome him. The last wilderness? Let's hope not. We need more.
Indian Errant: Selected Stories of Nirmal Verma, Nirmal Verma, translated from Hindi by Prasenjit Gupta, Indialog Publications, 2002.
The Last Wilderness, Nirmal Verma, translated by Pratik Kanjilal, Indigo Books, 2002.
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