For posterity sake

Translated versions of popular literature by the likes of Mark Twain, Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were brought closer to Telugu readers in the past. On the brighter side, today, rare books are preserved as PDF files

There are many languages in the world and many of those languages have their literatures. No language can remain independent and no literature can escape from being influenced by the others. Everyone should try to retain the originality of their language but every literature should try to imbibe the merits of the other and translation is the only way to achieve that goal.

The distinguishing feature of Telugu literature is that it has proved how great a translation can be in the beginning itself. The very first work of it, Madandra Mahabharatham set an excellent example for translation by being a great trans-creation thereby being arguably better than the original and making it endearing to the Telugu people than the remaining languages of India as they don’t have such a great version of it.

The pioneers of modern Telugu literature were not only ardent scholars of Telugu and Sanskrit literatures but also avid students of the western literature from which they borrowed modern genres, short story and the novel.

But the same Telugu literature has the dubious distinction of lagging behind in the realm of translation in recent times. A few years back I attended the marvelous Thunchan Festival in Thrisur, where I saw a Malayalam Book Fair in which I found the Malayalam translations of great western writers ranging from Charles Dickens to Garcia Marquez. We have to remember that translations were carried out as a mission during the 1950s and ‘60s.

The famous Andhra Grandhamala of Vijayawada rendered a great service to Telugu by getting the great classics of the West translated and publishing them. The marvelous translations of Victor Hugo’s ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame’ and Alexander Dumas’ ‘Count of Monte Christo’ by Surampudi Sitharam proved how idiomatic, authentic and wonderful a translation can be.

Rentala Gopalakrishna has translated scores of western novels which includes Kuprin’s ‘Yama the Pit’. Thenneti Suri’s translation of Dickens’s ‘Tale of Two Cities’ is also a commendable work. Nanduri Ramamohana Rao brought Mark Twain closer to the Telugu readers by translating ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’, ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’, ‘Prince and the Pauper’ and so on.

The service rendered by Raduga and Pragathi Prachuranalayams of Moscow cannot be exaggerated. They have translated and published most of the Russian classics which include those of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Pushkin, Kuprin and Gorky. They were elegantly printed and sold for subsidiary rates. RVR (R Venkateswara Rao) seemed to have translated around 100 works and Rachamallu Ramachandrareddy and Uppala Lakshmana Rao also translated many of the Russian classics.

The one man whom the Telugu people have to remember at every dawn is Bondalapati Sivaramakrishna (Desi Prachuranalu) who translated all the works of Sarathchandra Chatterji and made Sarathbabu a Telugu household name. KV Ramana Reddy and Bejawada Gopalareddy translated some of the works of Rabindranath Tagore.

This list is simply haphazard and cursory but it is enough to illustrate the grand way in which the translation work was carried out in the beginning. Johnson Choragudi, a noted Telugu writer wrote a beautiful story, (Ee Pathasoftware Panikosthundi) in which he describes how Vijayawada was a hub of translations in the past and how Gadde Lingaiah,

the illustrious publisher of Andhra Grandhamala, secretly printed the forms of Gorky’s Mother in a press, got them bound in a boat and sold those 1000 copies in a week though there was a ban on that book during that time. The influence of these Western classics on the Telugu writers through the translations is quite obvious.

Great masters of Telugu fiction assimilated those techniques and even created an indigenous native tradition.
But it’s the story of the past as that momentum of the translations is lost afterwards. National bodies of literature like Sahithya Akademi and National Book Trust are confined to Indian literature alone and the translations published by the latter in recent decades is meagre.

Almost all the old copies of the translations in the old libraries were dilapidated and disposed of. Moreover, the translated works of the past are not reprinted and many valuable translations are facing the danger of obliteration. After the fall of the Russian empire, the popular publishers of Moscow closed shop and so the reprinting of those Russian classics was out of question. Because of the lack of encouragement, the number of translators has been dwindling.

It has become customary for the connoisseurs of literature to go to the old book shops of Vijayawada searching for the old copies of those translations. But only a few could be procured as others disappeared to the oblivion.

Anil Bathula, an IT engineer, began to procure those old books, got them scanned, prepared the PDF files and preserved them besides sharing them with some interested readers. When I wanted to read Gorky’s autobiographical works, he sent them to me by email. Soon, he took interest in all the publications of the bygone Russian publishers, collected many of them and held an exhibition of it in Hyderabad.

He began to collect all rare books and tried to preserve them for posterity at least as PDF files. My father translated some Tamil books into Telugu and Jayakanthan’s Stories is one among them. It is one of the popular books and I get requests from people frequently for the copies. It was a National Book Trust Publication and I asked them to reprint it again but in vain. I had to follow the method of Anil Bathula to preserve it.

Recently, Nagasuri Venugopal, the science-journalist, biographer and a programme executive of All India Radio wrote an article on Vidwan Viswam in which he mentioned that Vidwan Viswam translated John Steinbeck’s novelette ‘Moon is Down’. I procured a photocopy of it from him. It was published in 1943 by Navya Sahithyamala in Anantapur.

As per the advertisement in that old book, the same publisher published 17 such translated books. It made me to wonder - where and how we began and where we are now. If we have to progress a step further, we have to use the entire past as our foundation. We should realise that literature is one and the same but it is expressed in different languages.