Posts filed under 'revenge'

What’s New in Translation: February 2024

February 12, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad, Christina Chatzitheodorou, and René Esaú Sánchez

New writing from Etel Adnan, Satish Alekar, and Djamila Morani!

This month, our selected titles of new publications carry wisdom, mystery, and humour. Below, find reviews of plays by one of India’s most accomplished and innovative playwrights; a compilation of interview with the inimitable Etel Adnan, conducted by Laure Adler; and a PEN Translates Award-winning novel of revenge and self-discovery, set in the Abbasid period.

alekar

Two Plays: The Grand Exit and A Conversation with Dolly by Satish Alekar, translated from the Marathi by Shanta Gokhale, Seagull Books, 2024

 Review by Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large for India

This nifty volume of plays collects two of Alekar’s works, “Mahanirvan” and “Thakishi Samvad”, written forty-six years apart—Born in 1949, Satish Vasant Alekar is a Marathi playwright, actor, theatre director. He was a founding member of the Theatre Academy of Pune and is well-known plays such as for Mahapoor, Begum Barve, Atirekee, and Pidhijat. He is considered among the most significant playwrights in modern Marathi and Indian theatre, along with Mahesh Elkunchwar and Vijay Tendulkar, and lately, he has come to be recognised for his acting in Marathi and Hindi feature films.

“Mahanirvan” or “The Grand Exit” was first performed in 1974, and is a play where a dead man has more dialogue than any living character. The description on the cover is not wrong to equate the character with Sophocles’ Antigone, for he also strongly insists on the method of his last rites; Bhaurao wants to be traditionally cremated at the shamshan ghat, but the cremation ground is in the process of being privatised. Thus, the dead—or rather their relatives—are now being redirected to a new facility which uses electrical incineration.

So Bhaurao lingers around as his body malingers, rotting and fly-infested, while his wife Ramaa grieves intensely, coming to terms with the sudden loss, and his son, Nana, tries to convince him to just go ahead with the cremation, and pass on. While working on the play, Alekar had realised that a dead man cannot speak prose, so Bhau’s dialogues instead take the poetic form—one resembling keertans (religious recitations). READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “General Treatise on Counter-attacks” by Aniela Rodríguez

December 1, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Elizabeth Bryer

I preferred to make my own way. To let the world know how much is lost with a poor pass, and how much is gained with a good shot.

An aspiring footballer’s obsession with his former hero becomes an all-consuming quest for revenge in Aniela Rodríguez’s cerebral short story “A General Treatise on Counter-attacks,” our pick for this week’s Translation Tuesday. Our narrator is a small-town youth who idolizes football star Güero Hidalgo, but what begins as adoration quickly turns to loathing after a tragic accident. Years pass, Hidalgo’s greatness falters, yet our protagonist never strays from his mission to murder the disgraced footballer, a task that becomes less a heroic act of justice and more an unmerciful act of a disappointed fanatic. Rodríguez’s mature and emotionally complex subversion of the revenge genre forces us to connect the meaning of “pathos” with the varied meanings of “pathetic,” demonstrating the dangers of meeting your heroes—and the dangers of meeting your fans.

In this story Güero Hidalgo dies. I told my mother when I started writing, but she didn’t believe me: she rolled her eyes and looked at the ceiling, wondering aloud when she should turn off the soup. What a shame, she said, indifferent, and kept moving the spoon in circles. Nobody wants to hear a story in which the biggest football star that this country had ever produced is stabbed to death with an old knife blade.

In the story, Güero crashes his Cadillac into a bus full of passengers, delaying a good number of people. The bus has come from la Merced; atop it ride vendors who head for Chiapas every week in search of Zoque handicrafts at the best prices. So, the best part: Güero gets out of his impeccable latest model, expecting to fix everything with an autograph. But that’s not how it goes down. He has words with the driver and in amidst the irate vendors the commotion gets serious. Tempers flare, women shout. A man in a leather jacket steps forward. Nobody pays attention. He walks towards Güero, looks him in the eye and plunges a dagger into his chest. Nobody does anything. Silence. Before sticking the knife into him, the man says: Thanks for the penalty, moron. Güero lies face up on the ground, trying not to hear the words that will curtail his existence forever. The story ends like this, with my mother reaching for the wooden spoon to stir the noodle soup. But this story isn’t about Güero Hildalgo now, is it?

READ MORE…