True as it is "Every act of communication is a miracle of translation". In fact the skill of doing translation is indeed more challenging, as the doer has to have the insight to penetrate into the originality of the writers thinking and reproducing skills to match the translation in yet another language. Rightly has George Steiner said: "Without Translation we would be living in provinces bordering on silence." This challenging task is dedicatedly fulfilled in by Ram Daryani, professionally a Consulting Engineer. For him it is like reconstructing the old with the new touch of outlook, designed to fulfil the original aura of the existing project. This he handles with grace as he has a flow of flawless touch in his writing skills. The impact of Dada Hari Dilgir, the well known legendary Sindhi Writer is also another good reason for him to inherit the art of writing and reproducing it as translation from Sindhi language to English. Devi Nangrani has been successful at decoding the mind of a woman. When I started reading the stories. the magic started unfolding. I found that almost all her stories were woven around the multiple social issues that surround woman. The greatest question for mankind, rather for men, is to understand a woman's mind. It is the eternal enigma. Men have asked this question throughout the ages but never have they managed to find an answer. But she has well brought out the essence of the women themes. While translating Devi's stories I came across a very interesting expression. In many stories, she uses the expression "Muhinjee Man Ji Maina Chayo..." which literally means "The nightingale in my mind spoke..." She uses this expression often, when she wants to express her own inner feelings at that point of time in the story. In Sindhi, it is a very beautiful expression. I will say in short that Devi is a master storyteller. She keeps the reader's mind completely engaged, and the reader is eager to know, what happened next.
Devi Nangrani, is a well-known author and has been honored in India, Pakistan, and the US by many literary institutions of International repute. She is reputed in the literary circle as 'One of the best contemporary authors of Hindi and Sindhi, and has been appreciated for her prose and poetry alike. Surpassing the limitations of geography, demography, scripts, and languages, she is a global author in the true sense imbibing the Vedic chant that 'Earth is my Mother and I am the child of Mother Earth'. Her multi-dimensional personality, the experience of cultural diversity of sub continental India, and close familiarity with American culture, brings her vision way beyond the limited regions of Indo-Pak, Andhra-Maharashtra, rich-poor, or prose- poetry, and easily and naturally covers the concepts varying from the global village to a global family. Her creativity is not only limited to original writing. Instead, she has worked extensively to build a bridge between Hindi and Sindhi, and between her native land India and her birthplace Sindh through her translation work. I still remember when she translated my Hindi flash fiction 'Ganja' into Sindhi and made it available to Sindhi readers. Transitioning between languages successfully is a rare quality which is natural for a litterateur like Devi Nangrani. In her stories she has covered various aspects of human life, the true side of her stories is the pain of an irreparable loss, a loss which empties the life from all the happiness, it sucks all the liveliness out of one's life, even if it doesn't really kill. The plots and the characters of her fictional work touch the reader's hearts deeply.
Devi Nangrani is a poet, a story writer, a critic and a translator. Two collections of her stories have been published in Sindhi as well as in Hindi. Her stories have been translated into Marathi, Punjabi, Urdu, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and in English. In Devi's stories, the lead characters are mostly women. After reading her stories a question arose in my mind. There is an ongoing discussion in the literary circles whether only a lady writer can understand and portray the issues related to the women? I found that Devi has successfully brought out women's feelings, emotions and her mind-set better than most of the men writers. Therefore Devi is quite capable of writing about the physical and mental attributes of a woman. It is a fact that men have an upper hand over women in the society not only in the developing nations, which are entrapped in customs and rituals but it is true also for the developed nations. In western culture, a woman is treated as the personal property of the man. A positively thinking male writer can present the character of a woman with empathy and understanding, but how far can he succeed in depicting the feelings and emotions of a woman remains a question. This is a point of discussion in Europe and in American literary circles, whether a male writer, through the medium of story and novel, can view effectively the problems and tribulations of a woman? Allen Williamson says, "Certain emotions, certain basic human motives (including narcissistic, display, intense awareness of one's own body, tender self-surrender, vulnerability) are typed or by our culture is feminine. Do the man who experiences them - or especially, who finds them predominant in his psychic, makeup may face a crisis of gender identity."
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