Out to conquer

Telugu writers writing in English always remained a few. The English translations, by and large, remained individual initiatives to self-publish by the writers over a period of a century. For promoting translations, Kannadigas have a AnuvadaAkademi, which does its business professionally, and while Malayalam and Tamil Societies also progressed in taking their literature into neighboring languages, and mainly into English, it is our Telugu society that has no serious thoughts at all, marred by the demons living in the drawing room, and mindless movies that keep on churning out, a movie a week almost. Most of the media caters considerable print space to their statements, styles and status building exercises, which are at best third rate.

In 1970s came the poetic initiative by Vegunta Mohana Prasad called “The Tense Time”, presenting samplings from a century of Telugu poetry in English. Gunturu Seshendra Sarma through the translations made by Indira Devi Dhanraj Gir, and Sri Sri, made some efforts to translate but not consistently. For Vegunta, the translation remained (after The Tense Time) a matter of personal liking, and efforts by others abroad had some success in recent times. By the 1970s, Telugu short story was replaced by the novels. It was the era of novels, that found ready takers in weeklies, and dailies who serialisedthe fare, to hold the readers together.

A good story needs to be shared in the best possible means with the societies near and far. For this, we need to take the story into as many languages as possible. Of these, by historical reasons, and by assimilating the words from major languages of the world, now English, the global tongue, is a tool one can effectively use to uplift and promote a story by way of translation.Having 22 languages and an Akademi of Letters annually awarding the writers in all these languages and commissioning, sooner or later, the translation of the award winning works, India by now would have developed at least four translation universities, one in each direction. To our dismay, the translation even by the Akademi programme remains an individual resource and there is no time bound translation programme of any award winning work, simply because the translation institutions are non–existent.

Only the contracted individual writers in other languages proven for their skills have to do the translation. But this situation needs to change in the future.In Telugu language, short fiction forays have started way back in 1892 and reached a level of presentation by 1910, and there after at least the traced stories are more than one lakh in number, at present stored in Kathanilayam at Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh (spearheaded by Dr Kalipatnam Ramarao, and sustained by the members of Srikakula Sahiti), one of its kind treasure trove for short story in the world. According to the organisers, there are more than five thousand best short stories in Telugu so far. Well, Telugus need to share their works with the world.

The few translations done and self-published by authors and publishing houses cannot cover bulk of five thousand and morestories available in Telugu, a major south Indian language. To fill that gap and keeping in mind the other aspects like having a handy product that demands less time, of low cost that suits the present day reader, Mosaic group of Visakhapatnam has introduced pocket-seized books of around 80 pages, with a minimum of six stories of important Telugu writers in English under its Mission globalisation. The initiative is christened “Penvoy Series of Short Fiction”, and the first books of the series were released on 18 Januaryat Visakhapatnam by Yarlagaddda Lakshmi Prasad (writer, Kendra Sahitya Akademi winner).

The first series are four books with stories of Gurajada Apparao, LR Swami, ANJagannadha Sharma, and DrChintakindi Srinivasa Rao. Already more than twenty five writers’ stories are picked to be translated, and the number is likely to grow. At least, stories by 150 writers, since the last 100 years, need to be translated, and presented in this handy series.

Efforts have been made to make the books available in the US through PJagannath, Editor-Liaison based in Texas.The community initiative, Penvoy, now needs support from government and book lovers so as to ensure that the coming generations who would be multi- lingual and with global vision will also have the exposure to enriching diversity of local traditions, of which literature is a prime source to give and take.

By Rama Teertha