Dr Naina Dey is Associate Professor at Maharaja Manindra Chandra College (University of Calcutta). She is a critic, translator and a widely anthologized creative writer. Her books include Macbeth Critical Essays, Edward the Second Critical Studies, Real and Imagined Women: The Feminist Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Fay Weldon, Representations of Women in George Eliot's Fiction, Macbeth. Exploring Genealogies and a book of poems Snapshots from Space and Other Poems. She has attended a number of translation workshops held in various institutions including Sahitya Akademi and Jadavpur University. She has participated in a ten-week online Translators Lab exchange titled ""Writing Places"" organised by Writers' Centre Norwich in collaboration with British Centre for Literary Translation, Seagull Books, CENTIL and the Kolkata Literary Meet, 2017-18 and is a part of CENTIL's Project Anuvad. Her latest publication is a translation of Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury's Gupi Gain O Bagha Bain.
The short story as a literary genre showcases concision and competence in the crafting of a narrative that can linger in the reader's mind for a very long time, though the actual reading time of a short story could well have been much less than a single hour. The American fictionist Eudora Welty had described the short story in succinct if not pedagogic terms when she wrote, 'A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood. And you can try more ephemeral, more fleeting things in a story- you can work more by suggestion - than in a novel. Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps.'
The lasting impression that a short story can create in the mind of the reader is because of its layered nuances, its either linear or non-linear networks of associations, memories and subjectivities that can collide, clash or simply recede though the traces left behind are indelible as they provoke decoding and challenge the reader to navigate the flow and eddies of the short story.
The translator of the twelve short stories in this collection has exhibited both sense and sensibility in her selection of the short stories originally written in Bengali by some of the best storytellers of Bengali fiction. Naina Dey's training as a literary critic and translator become obvious as the authors, whose short stories that have been selected for translation cover a wide trajectory, ranging from Rabindranath Tagore, who is considered the pioneer of the Bengali short story when it made its presence felt for the first time formally in the literary environment of the late nineteenth century, in colonial Bengal.
Though the short story emerged rather late as a literary genre in the western literary tradition, it flourished with overwhelming impact in the nineteenth century and thereafter. Tagore was an avid reader of western literature, but his short stories rooted in the soil of colonial Bengal tells the reader that though Tagore may have appropriated the form of the short story, the content and the characters prove Tagore's creative skill as a brilliant storyteller. None of the short stories included in this collection, replicate western influence in content or even style. However the Bengali short stories do experiment with both style and content and the narratives engage predicaments and crisis that are often integral to the micro politics of daily living.
The choice of both male and female short story writers in this collection creates a remarkable variation in attitudes, intentions, emotions and feelings in the fictional representations, that can perhaps excite comparative analysis. Naina Dey's translations of the selected short stories by Tagore, Bibhutibhushan, Esha Dey, Suchitra Bhattacharya among others are not just reader-friendly but undoubtedly prove her understanding of the uniqueness of the Bengali short story as a literary genre and the need for translation of Bengali short stories in a dominant language such as English, as a much needed cultural practice.
Years ago at a short story writing workshop organized by Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi and the University of Rajasthan, Hindi author and my mentor for the workshop, Mridula Garg had commented regarding the 'readability' of the short story:
Whatever craft you choose for your story, one essential ingredient of a successful story remains unchanged. That, the reader should be unwilling to let go half way through. The story must impel him to read it till the end. And the whole experience should seem to have taken place at one go. (""Short Story: Craft of Story Writing"", 2005)
Edgar Allan Poe, considered the father of the short story and its first critical theorist had defined what he called 'the prose tale' as a narrative which can be read at one sitting from half an hour to two hours, and is limited to 'a certain unique or single effect' to which every detail is subordinate (Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, 1842).
One dozen stories is a compilation of twelve short stories, each equally gripping in intensity, most of which have been published in various journals and newspapers (cited at the end of each story). However, fresh readings have necessitated further revisions exemplifying the complicated process of translation itself.
Ashapurna Devi's Chinnamasta, the first story in this volume, appeared in 1949 (two years after Independence) in the festival issue of Anandabazar Patrika. The story initially reveals none of the self-destructive violence inherent in the mythological name and begins with a very domestic scene of a widowed mother waiting to welcome her son and his newly-wed wife Gradually the wife's insolence and increasing verbal onslaughts turn the mother-in-law's shock and amazement into suppressed rage which finally finds outlet in the son Bimalendu's fatal accident (which is 'structurally' the climax of the story). The second underlying climax emerges, when after her son's death, the mother suddenly appears sympathetic towards her daughter-in-law and within earshot of the inquisitive neighbours, coaxes the wife to eat the 'potherbs and lentils', the fare of the Hindu widow, which Pratibha the daughter-in-law had once openly scorned as a bride.
The next two stories by Suchitra Bhattacharya, portray further complexities of the human mind. The story/Almaja is a tale of bereavement. The dutiful son while performing his mother's last rites, suddenly finds himself confronting the uncanny truth that his mother's death after a protracted illness has come as a relief to him. Asbabarna centers around the interactions between a patronizing middle-class housewife and a poor boriseller.
Narendranath Mitra's Cher is a chilling tale of a thief who at the end finds his hitherto 'honest' wife turn into a kleptomaniac like himself for she has failed to change her husband for the better.
In the next story Ranabboomi, Anita Agnihotri has deftly woven domestic strife with the larger historical context of the Battle of Plassey and the defeat and subsequent ruthless murder of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah. The wretched mundaneness suffered by Abhiram becomes a modern manifestation of the injured mango tree that had become emblematic of the fall of the Nawab and the annexation of Bengal by the British.
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