The Aunt Who Wouldn't Die
Page 9
I jumped up from my desk and ran deep into my room. I stood silently in the dark. My eyes were flowing with tears.
The footsteps had stopped at my doorstep. The constant wailing in my heart had disappeared somewhere.
About the Author
SHIRSHENDU MUKHOPADHYAY was born in 1935 in present-day Bangladesh. He earned a master’s degree from Calcutta University and worked for some time as a schoolteacher before becoming a journalist and author. The Aunt Who Wouldn’t Die is a much-loved contemporary classic in Bengali, and it was adapted into the film Goynar Baksho in 2013. The first English translation was published in India in 2017.
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A Note From the Translator
Probably the greatest challenge in translating The Aunt Who Wouldn’t Die was to find a voice in English for the ghost of Pishima, the dead aunt. In the patriarchal tradition-bound joint family in which she spent her living years, anything like a feminist spirit would have been crushed ruthlessly. She had to die in order to acquire some agency and significantly influence events in the family. In death, she acquires a profane tongue and a delightful lack of hesitation in using it. And so, the translation had to capture her intent and spontaneity in deploying swear words and her distinctly vengeful hostility toward the rest of the family, while keeping her character constant after death.
At one level, using scatology to achieve all of this was a delicious enterprise. It’s not every day that a translator can dip into the gutter running through their heads in search of suitable words while performing a literary enterprise. But it was also a matter of making cultural choices in a language that the character in question would probably never have used in her life. Adding to the piquancy of the problem was the fact that the Bengali sensibility does not allude to sex directly, working instead through metaphor and innuendo.
In many senses, this cultural gap pervades all translations from Bengali into English, the language of the colonial masters of earlier generations of Bengali-speaking people. English is still considered a language of power compared to Bengali and, in some way, transferring a Bengali text into English is to automatically place its entire structure in a different position in the power hierarchy. Of course, this is something that only affects the India reader, since most readers around the world are not aware of the historical relationship between these languages. Still, it is an intellectually nagging factor for the translator, and it is important not to allow this discomfort to color the actual translation.
—Arunava Sinha
Here ends Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s
The Aunt Who Wouldn’t Die.
The first edition of this book was printed and
bound at LSC Communications in
Harrisonburg, Virginia, July 2020.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
The text of this novel was set in Perpetua, a serif typeface designed by Eric Gill, an English sculptor and printmaker associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. It was commissioned by Stanley Morison, the highly influential typography advisor of the British Monotype Corporation. Unlike many other designs of that period, which were adaptations of classical typefaces, Perpetua was intended as a contemporary type based entirely upon the needs and conventions of modern England. Several of its features derive from Gill’s experience of carving letters on stone monuments. It was released to the printing trade in 1932 and has proved a design of enduring quality and utility.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE AUNT WHO WOULDN’T DIE. Copyright © 2020 by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First published in 1993 in Bengali as Goynar Baksho by Ananda Publishers, Kolkata, India.
First published in 2017 in English as The Aunt Who Wouldn’t Die by BEE Books, Kolkata, India.
FIRST EDITION
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mukhopadhyay, Sirshendu, 1935- author. | Sinha, Arunava, translator.
Title: The aunt who wouldn’t die : a novel / Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay; translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha.
Other titles: Goynar baksho. English | Aunt who would not die
Description: First edition. | New York : HarperVia, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019060226 (print) | LCCN 2019060227 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062976321 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062976345 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780062976338 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PK1730.29.U463 G6913 2020 (print) | LCC PK1730.29.U463 (ebook) | DDC 891.4/4371—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019060226
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019060227
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Digital Edition MAY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-297633-8
Version 05212020
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-297632-1
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