HERE I AM and other stories-17 (Last Part)

HERE I AM and other stories

(Last Part)

Telugu Original: P.Sathyavathi

Acknowledgements

          Thanks is a pale word for my editor Gita Ramaswamy; but for her interest this book would not have happened. Thanks are also due to Vemana Vasanthalakshmi who has constantly encouraged me to write.

          My heartfelt gratitude to all the friendly translators who responded happily and quickly.

          I am grateful to Dr E. Sailaja, Dr Kiran Vedantam, Bujji and my children for giving me a fresh lease of life.

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Notes on the Translators

SUJATHA GOPAL worked as an academician for twenty-two years and is a freelance language trainer, facilitator and consultant at present. She has published anthologies of stories translated from Telugu into English. Her translated stories have been published in several e-zines, such as Museindia, Jayanti, Ruwiray, Sarasa and Thulika.

LAKSHMI GUDIPATI was born and raised in India. Following her Master’s degree in English, she left India for the USA in 1984 and has settled there. She teaches English and South Asia Studies at the college level in Philadelphia. She believes that translation of fiction from regional languages enriches world literature.

C.L.L. JAYAPRADA retired as Professor of English at Andhra University, Visakhapatnam. She has published extensively, and being a bilingual translator, published several Commonwealth stories in Telugu translation in Indian Literature, Sarasa, Chandrabhaga and Routes. Her translations include He Conquered the Jungle (Macmillan, 1998), Stories of Tenali Raman (Children’s Book Trust, 2001), and Purusha Ahamkaraniki Sawal (Hyderabad Book Trust, 1999). Sahitya Akademi brought out her translation of award-winning Telugu writer Kalipatnam Rama Rao’s stories entitled Yagnam and Other Stories in 2006 (reprinted in 2007).

RAJ KARAMCHEDU was born in Hyderabad and lived there until 1991, when he moved to the USA for graduate studies. Currently, Raj is the publisher of Saaranga Books (www.saarangabooks. com), which publishes Telugu fiction and non-fiction. He works as a Chief Operating Officer at a San Francisco Bay Area hightechnology company called Legend Silicon. He is the author of the high-technology business book, It’s Not About the Technology (2005), The Disconnect Patterns (2012) and All Things Unforgiven (2014).

KESAVA RAO (1937–2015) wrote in Telugu and English and translated Telugu into English. He also wrote poems and short stories in English. His English translation of G.V. Krishna Rao’s famous novel, Kilubommalu, was published as Puppets (Macmillan, 1997). He lived in Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh.

N.S. MURTHY is a poet and translator. Along with the late R.S. Krishna Moorthy, he has translated 100 best short stories from Telugu into English and published these in The Palette and The Easel. The two won the Katha–British Council South Asian Translation Award 2000 for the translation of the late Allam Seshagiri Rao’s short story Mrigatrishna (The Mirage). N.S. Murthy’s The Wakes on the Horizon is a collection of two hundred poems (of eighty poets spanning a century) translated from Telugu into English.

YEDLA PADMAVATHI has been a long-standing activist for women’s and children’s rights. Currently, she is working with Unicef at Katsina in Nigeria.

VADREWU PANDURANGA RAO was a critic of post-colonial literature and a novelist. He wrote the novels, Fowl-Filcher (1985), The Drunk Tantra (1994) and The River is Three Quarters Full (2001) as also a collection of short fiction, An Indian Idyll and Other Stories (1989). He edited two anthologies of Telugu short stories: Classic Telugu Short Stories (1995) and That Man on the Road: Contemporary Telugu Short Fiction (2006) and a critical work, R.K. Narayan, the Novelist and his Art (2017).

Ranga Rao grew up in the coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh and moved to Delhi in 1964. After teaching in Sri Venkateswara College, Delhi University, for 37 years, he returned to his home notes on the translators state to teach in the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, Puttaparthi. He died recently.

RIGOBERTHA PRABHATHA finished his BEd at EFLU, Hyderabad and his MA (English Literature) from Osmania University. He loves to read books, write reviews and watch films. Of late, he has been trying his hand at translation, mainly of stories and interviews from Telugu to English.

GORREPATI SAMYUKTA is a textile designer who works with handloom weavers in Andhra Pradesh. She is the author of Learning the Heart Way (The Other India Books and, now Eklavya), a book on her experiences in an experimental higher education programme. She has also authored a few Telugu short stories, some of which have appeared in Telugu dailies. She currently lives in Hyderabad.

SASHI KUMAR, born in Hyderabad, is interested in the politics of development, technology and conflict resolution. He has been involved with the not-for-profit sector for over twenty years, before which he worked in banking for a decade.

SHYAMASUNDARI works with Dastkar Andhra, a voluntary organization engaged in promoting handloom weaving as a viable rural livelihood. She is interested in working on translations from Telugu to English and vice-versa as she believes that translation is an essential tool for communication and acts as a cultural bridge.

SRIVATSAN is a senior fellow at Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies. His publications include Seva Savior and State (Routledge), History of Development Thought (edited volume, Routledge, 2012), Towards a Critical Medical Practice (co-edited with Anand Zachariah and Susie Tharu, Orient Black Swan, 2010), and Conditions of Visibility (Stree, 2000). Srivatsan translates selectively, focusing on small texts from the Telangana variant of Telugu, given his familiarity with the regional culture. Born in Madras, he has lived most of his life in Hyderabad. 

SUNEETHA was born and brought up in Machilipatnam. Having obtained a Master’s degree and PhD in Political Science from Hyderabad University, she has worked with the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee and later, the Human Rights Forum. She has been with Anveshi, a women’s collective, since 2000. Sunita’s PhD and postdoctoral work dealt with domestic violence. At present, she is working on Muslim politics in Hyderabad. Translation, she believes, is a political activity that will help balance the traffic between the elitist world of English and the subaltern regional languages.

SREELAKSHMI TADEPALLI was born and raised in Kaikalur. A postgraduate in Sociology, she runs the office of Anveshi Research Centre for Women. While she has assisted in several translations earlier, this is her first formal one.

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(The End)