Lest in these speedy times, we forget, dismiss or just think of Nirmal Verma as a writer of bygone days! These novels published as Modern Classics are timely in showcasing them for new readers, especially for those who cannot read him in Hindi. This also serves as an occasion to revisit them for some of us who read this writer earlier with a blinding youthful awe. The translations read so well that there is a need to remind ourselves of the original language of these novels, Hindi. But then interestingly, writing in Hindi Nirmal Verma is known to easily transgress linguistic borders in spirit!
Language, as is known, carries the context and tone of a culture from which it evolves. The loss in translation into another language then is inevitable if the temper of the two languages varies. There can, however, also be a gain in translation! In the translation of Nirmal Verma’s Hindi novel Ve Din (1964) into English, the well-known Hindi writer Krishna Baldev Vaid succeeds in pulling the ‘foreign’ experience of the city of Prague closer home through his convincing translation of the novel into English. Days of Longing builds upon the essential spirit of alienation and characters – as if in transition – merely passing time and coming together in their strange detachment from some past and a complete dismissal of future. But then, there are also insightful glimpses of the inner world of characters, one quite different from the other!
The magic of Nirmal Verma’s form and style is captured by Vaid in an idiom that easily communicates with the contemporary readership. The story is diasporic: it takes off from a professional meeting between an Indian student and an Austrian woman that triggers into a passionate love affair in Prague in winter, both connecting through a spirit of displacement. This translation was done way back in the early 1970s, a few years after the novel was published in Hindi. To see it surface now in Penguin India’s Modern Classics series is not only a heartening recognition of its value in itself but it is also an evidence of the vast imaginative range and expanse of modern Indian literature.
Nearly a decade after Ve Din , Nirmal Verma published another novel, Laal Tin ki Chhat in 1974 translated in 1997 by Kuldip Singh. A modern classic through which the master craftsman, Nirmal Verma delicately unravels the growing mind of a young girl who comes into adulthood both, physically as well as mentally as soon as she realises she needs to be free. A beautiful self-reflexivity is woven into the novel right from the beginning: “Kaya opened her eyes, then shut them again… she lay rigid in her bed, possessed by a sinister thought that her head had moved round to her feet, towards the door…” Almost Kafkasque! But then Kaya knows “…head and feet couldn’t be together in one place…”
Nirmal Verma, one of the four sturdy pillars of Nayi Kahani (new story), was a modernist who’s stories unfolded as much through content as in the telling. The novel The Red Tin Roof engulfs within itself the mystery of the mountains, the echoes of the valleys, the haunt of dark nights as well as the complexity of human minds. Kaya the little girl grows with the burden of the memory of blood and death. She has to exorcise her mind from it to become an adolescent.
Kuldip Singh, an excellent translator, has managed to retain the ‘poetry’ of The Red Tin Roof in his translation. Known for creating a distinctive ‘atmosphere’ in which nature, people and landscape merge into a single weave, Nirmal Verma has found a sensitive translator in Kuldip Singh, alert to the poetics of translation despite his ‘faithfulness’!
