Johny Miranda’s Jeevichirikunnavarkku Vendiyulla Oppees (Requiem for the Living) unfolds like a Marquezian, surrealist dream. On a tiny strip of land in Mattancherry, Kochi, lives Osha Periera, a member of the dwindling Paranki community, who’ve been broadly branded as Anglo-Indian, but in whose blood lies the histories of not just the Portuguese and Dutch settlements, and Kerala’s own caste struggles, but also Javan and Malaccan roots. It is through this confused terrain of identity that Osha flounders through, a metaphorical golden key in hand, searching for the one lock that will finally fit his life’s tale. The Catholic and the occult, the intensely tragic and the mundanely everyday, miracles and myth unravel through his passive eyes that paint, in the process, the untold story of a neglected minority people. This may as well be Kerala’s own Chronicle of a Death Foretold .
Written in 2004, Oppees reached the world beyond Malayalam readers through Oxford’s English translation by Sajai Jose, nearly a decade later. For me, it ripped the veils off a hometown I thought I’d decently known. As the first Kochi-Creole novella in English, Oppees taught me as much about culture, in its sliver of a read-in-one-sitting story, as it did about the politics of language. It is in exactly this space that combines short fiction and translation — the child born of publishing’s two, least-lucrative ventures — that readers, globally, are gradually gaining interest.
My best short, translated reads over the last year have been Sachin Kundalkar’s Cobalt Blue , translated from the Marathi by Jerry Pinto, and Benyamin’s Goat Days , translated from the Malayalam by Joseph Koyippally; both novellas now well-known for shortlists on several award charts. The first lets one into the multi-coloured mosaic of alternate sexuality in Mumbai, and the second into the horrors of immigrant life in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. The beauty of both books lies in that delicate lifting of experiences etched distinctly in the vernacular, into a language deemed cosmopolitan. Neither the Marathi, nor the Malayalam ever fully leaves the English of either work; rather, they breathe intangibly through the new rendering. What I treasured most though, were those moments of deep resonance of common emotion, despite the vast disparities in culture and experience.
And it’s precisely this universality of human experience that Words Without Borders , an e-zine that’s survived a decade in translated short fiction from across the world, and lands in your inbox every month, thrives on. This November, we’re in the Czech Republic, reading short story author Magdalena Platzova writing of lost love crawling back into worth in a cold Czech pub, and Tomas Zmeskal tracing his Congolese father’s roots in the communist Czechoslovakia of 1959, and when in Iraq, we read Muhsin al-Ramli write of a young boy’s glee discovering television mid-war, thanks to Saddam Hussein. WWB consistently thus overturns conventional wisdom, refocusing our vision on the less-known, human shades to mainstream narratives. Closer home, the bilingual Pratilipi magazine has nurtured similar short fiction in both Hindi and English side by side, and short-story e-zine Out of Print too publishes locally translated work occasionally. What these efforts collectively succeed in doing is what poet Meena Kandasamy dreamt of for English in her poem Mulligatawny Dreams : “An English where the magic of black eyes and brown bodies/replaces the glamour of eyes in dishwater blue.”
