The book courses through Nepal’s recent history to reflect on modern Nepali literature and the turmoil of the people. The stories and poems have been categorized into four different parts, and these categories, as Thapa says in the introduction, have been made from a “writer’s view of literature, not a scholar’s.” This view makes the process of categorization even more interesting as we see that they are based more on contexts, and thus, closely resembles that of an ordinary Nepali’s than an academician’s: The Perplexity of Living, The Right to Desire, The Imminent Liberation, and Visions.
The Perplexity of Living maps the quandaries that ordinary Nepalis face for the lack of basic necessities such as food, shelter, and healthcare. The poems and stories usually have characters that are faced with situations wherein they must make certain choices that will define their destiny. The subjects included in this first section range from Govinda Giri Prerana’s “Krishna Man: Counter Man,” a short story about a poor hungry man who works in a bank and is caught between poverty and greed, to Rajav’s poem, “A life-threatening cold.”The second section, Right to Desire, puts together works that are about “desire and its thwarting.” The stories and poems here encompass the vast meaning of desire from intimacy and sexual longing to the need to free the idea of love from its “traditional confines of class, caste, ethnic nationality, creed and inherited identity.” Here, too, the selected pieces focus on some surprising works, such as Avinash Shrestha’s “A Negro woman: In my dreams,” to Khagendra Sangraula’s simple but poignant “Sete’s mother sends a letter to her husband in India.”
Sangraula’s work is very pertinent to the situation of many ordinary Nepali women whose husbands have left the country in search of better employment and earning opportunities. Thapa has done well in translating the halting Nepali of a woman who isn’t well-versed in writing letters. However, the translation process reveals stark gender roles that are assigned in marriage through the Nepali language. For instance, Sete’s mother’s salutation “Sacred master at my head, I lower my head and bow down to you” can come as quite a shock in English even though we glide over it in Nepali.
The third section, The Imminent Liberation, is intense in its expression of Nepali politics, and how it has affected the people, and is also perhaps the strongest section of this book. The poems and stories included here are rich in irony, satire, and experimentation of forms and images. Sulochana Manandhar’s “Jajarkot” is a powerful piece that sums up what was going through the minds of Nepalis when the June 2000 incident was reported. Kishore Pahadi’s “Representation and Representatives” is a sharp portrayal of the people’s disillusionment and fast disintegrating belief in politics and political representatives.
However, the last and final section takes all the turmoil expressed in the previous three and leaves the reader with hope. Titled “Visions,” the selected works in this category is a manifestation of the resilience in a Nepali’s soul, and a person’s need or instinct to believe that things will be better. They even point to a better path and offer alternatives that might lead to a more certain resolution. One of them is Sarubhakta’s poem “Decentralization” which is a contemporary, experimental free verse that uses dialogue to its advantage, manipulating science and geography to emphasize the need for decentralization. “This isn’t just for Nepalis/It’s the first law of Brahma’s creation, Daughter!” ends the poem before tagging more questions in conclusion to leave the reader looking for answers.
Thapa works well within the framework she has set for the book, within which she must work. One cannot really expect to get the rhythm and tone of a particular language to translate into another, but she is able to take the “sense” and form of Nepali poetry into English in works such as Buddha Sayami’s “Let Me Tear Apart Your Seal,” and Manjul’s “Will You Stitch My Heart, Tailor?” In the fiction pieces, she takes the English language and uses the limited malleability it has for translated works to fit the main idea more. Besides the book’s namesake line taken from a poem in the book, probably the most powerful translated pieces are Ahuti’s “The Nine-Hued Pheasant and the Daughter-in-Law of the Poor”, and Indra Bahadur Rai’s “A Window.”
It is very encouraging to see works of contemporary Nepali writers being translated into English because it opens up a veritable vista of expression that were formerly inaccessible to English readers. In “The Country is Yours,” the translated Nepali literary works reveal fascinating experiments that are being done in our language in terms of voice and style.
There are problems in this book, mostly minor ones, such as typos and momentary lapses in sentence structures; but these are easily forgiven because it is such a huge task to undertake.
Literature is an integral part of a nation’s developmental process as it records the people’s voices, thoughts and experiences through the written word which outlasts the people themselves. Manjushree Thapa has put this forward effectively through this collection. With hope, her attempt will encourage other potential translators to explore the possibilities of things that can be accomplished as language medium between Nepali and English.
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