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Words were not just words for Amrita Pritam
The author’s select collection of writings across genres transcreated in The Ninth Flower by Jyoti Sabharwal to be launched in Chandigarh on Monday
Some of the best writings of the prima donna of new thought and change, handpicked by her in the phase of her illness, has been encased with love and care in transcreation by Jyoti Sabharwal, who had a close relationship with author Amrita Pritam, in a hardbound evocative volume titled, The Ninth Flower, which is offered to words and promises a glance into the best of Amrita’s writings in poetry, essays, novelettes, musings, reflections and orations.
While very little of Amrita has been seen in translation because of copyright restrictions, here comes a rich collection of the writer which will be valuable to readers and academics alike. The making of the book has an interesting story. In 1999, Sabharwal translated the second volume of Amrita’s autobiography Shadows of Words in 1999 and a fond bond sprung between the two.
A few years later ailing and restricted to the bed, Amrita called her over and handed her a pile of books with relevant writings marked and asked Sabharwal to take these hitherto untranslated works forward into English at the earliest and a contract was signed.
“The work was mammoth and I wanted to do justice to it so it could not be completed in the short span of life that was left to her. The contract was renewed with her son who passed away too after a few years,” says Sabharwal.
“I then approached her grandson Aman Kwatra who was hesitant at first but once his mother told him that she was witness to how the books were handed over to her by her for translation he fulfilled his grandmother’s wish like a gentleman and gave me the rights once more,” she adds.
The Covid times and long lockdowns gave Sabharwal the time to turn to this work and which she transcreated from Hindi with gusto, She says: “I am clear about saying that it is transcreation and not translation because the idiom of the two languages are so different.” Lines in one of the poems included in this anthology “At times when even death pens a book/ It comes to see seek a preface scripted by life”.
Such is the soul of this collection that takes the words and thoughts of Amrita to a wider readership. A heart warming prologue by celebrated by Malyali fiction writer M Mukundan says of Amrita: “All through the sixty years of her literary pursuits, she never ceased to be a protian rebel – an existentialist, before we heard of Jean Paul Sartre, and a feminist, before we came across Simone de Beauvoir.”
The Ninth Flower is to be launched by Punjab governor Banwarilal Purohit in the Chandigarh Press Club on September 5 at a function organised by Sahitya Sangam and Stellar Publishers. A panel discussion will follow led by writer-translator Phul Chand Manav.
