Remembering the Literary Legacy of Vijaydan Detha. Author Vishes Kothari in Conversation.
And more recently, I was in for a treat as I read the Garden of Tales The Best of Vijaydan Detha which is an assortment of iconic Rajasthani folktales by Vijaydan Detha and translated by Vishes Kothari. With classics such as Asman Jogi, the Father of Sin and The Creed of Crows, the book brings together the best of Detha's work. Masterfully translated, these handpicked stories draw the reader into the complex and quirky world of the common folk of Rajasthan while bringing alive the magic of folklore
Vishes Kothari
@vishes · 2:06
Then there are the stories which are kind of shorter and based around the saying, like a phrase or a particular type of folk saying, and then there's a backstory to it. Then there are the origin myths and so on and so forth. So if one picks out a broad selection of each of the various types of stories, one can come up with sort of a first list of which stories to include and which ones to not
Thank you so much for that. As a collector of folklore, Detha believed in their undying relevance for modern society. And it is to writers like him that Indians today owe our understanding of our rich regional cultures and oral storytelling traditions. So several of Data's work works have been memorably, brought to life on screen. Immortalizing them. In your opinion, what is it about his stories that lends themselves beautifully to dramatization?
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Vishes Kothari
@vishes · 2:34
They are not stories which are meant to be read by the light of a night lamp on the side of one's bed. They're meant to be shared. And I think that lends them very easily to dramatization
Vishes Kothari
@vishes · 2:19
So I feel it is important that readers can see and experience a world which is very often magic, is very often magical, is very often realistic, is very often gritty, is very often macabre, is morbid. But the world has its own set of problems and they are problematic. And this any attempt at presenting a world which is tailored to our needs of appropriateness or to what we feel today is our moral compass, I feel is a misrepresentation
Vishes Kothari
@vishes · 2:22
I don't think there is any translation formula which I know of which has really worked over here other than sort of going really sentence by sentence or phrase by phrase and seeing what works best from say, the mouth of a particular character or what best describes a particular character's actions given what social context they are in, so on and so forth. There is, of course significant clash of cultures clash of cultures or cultural difference, whatever you want to call it
Thank you so much, Vishesh, for this great conversation. I've really enjoyed discussing Detha's work, and I must say that having read your book, I have come to appreciate his work so much more. So thank you for giving us a taste of Detha's work without diluting its essence. I shall go ahead and add the I'm Amazon link to the book here for our listeners to check out
