The publisher says nothing like it has ever been attempted anywhere before: a single short story translated into 36 languages, 12 of them foreign. Rebati, written by legendary Odia writer Fakir Mohan Senapati back in 1898, has been acknowledged as the first short story in Odia language.
“The idea was to make this iconic specimen of writing in Odia, one of the six Indian classical languages, available to a global readership through high-quality translation,” says Manu Dash, editor of the collection and head of Dhauli Books, which released the anthology this June 14—the 104th death anniversary of the writer. “The idea of such a collection happened at the height of the Covid pandemic last year. Apart from its iconic status, what persuaded me to choose Rebati for this unique experiment was the fact that it was set against the backdrop of an epidemic.”
For the uninitiated, it is a tragic tale in which the dream of self-actualisation of a young girl—the eponymous heroine of the story—comes crashing down because of a rampaging epidemic as well as the mindset of a society deeply hostile to change.
Rebati loses her parents and her suitor to cholera. In a strange and ironic quirk of fate that is as baffling as it is brutal, Rebati is seen—and by no other person than her loving grandmother—as having brought on this tragedy upon her family. Both Rebati and her grandmother die in the end: uncared for and without pity, except perhaps by the reader.
“Getting Rebati translated into 36 languages, including French, German, Russian, Japanese and Spanish, was a herculean task,” says Dash. Apart from finding the right people to do justice to the original, there were multiple other challenges like typesetting, maintaining the font size, printing a volume with 37 different fonts and—last but not the least—marketing a book that had to be pricey for obvious reasons.
Dash, however, is happy that the effort has been worth it. Rebati: Speaking in Tongues has been praised as a truly out-of-the-box idea by critics and litterateurs alike. Among those who have praised the book are David Crystal, author of The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of English Language, and Satya P. Mohanty, professor of English at Cornell University.
By Sandeep Sahu in Bhubaneswar
