Whenever translator Ms.Mini Krishnan selects a story for her book, she thinks about all the teachers and the children who may read it and discuss it. But this is not the only driving force for her to translate novellas.
Sitting on the couch with Ms.Ritu Menon she admits that length of a work in a fiction is an important aspect.The session was rightly named as Tell me a long, long story because it centred around a book by Krishnan called the same. Krishnan described that a short story is read because of its brevity but novellas are not really read because, in this fast age, stories of the length of 6,000-8,000 words get fewer readers. This also means that they are hardly translated.Krishnan thus focuses on this particular genre more and edited a novella.
The book is a collection of Indian stories from areas like Kashmir, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu. One of the striking stories which need its due importance is a Telugu story about a girl who gets hit by a truck and the driver are empathetic and offer the girl egg, jam and good food till she revives from the injuries but as soon as she gets fine, they leave her.The girl is poor and she doesn’t get that quality of food again so she finally concludes that if she has to get good food then she has to get hit by a truck.If the book has intense stories as mentioned earlier then it also has simple stories like that of a Tamil couple who is simply trying to find a room.This introduces a new train of thought as to why does the author writes those pieces? What is in the mind of a writer before writing a piece? Krishnan being a translator says that age and experience of a writer generally define the type of genre they choose.But also that doesn’t mean that genres are not fluid, a story with a considerable length becomes novella and if you go further, a novel is born.She calls it ‘surprises’ for the writer as well!
About the Author – Kalpita is a Bachelor in English Literature. Her ultimate goal is to fulfill the romantic notion
of changing the world for better and she is pursuing MA in Development from Azim Premji University, Bangalore. She currently writes for Bookstalkist.