Short remarks on A Handful of Sesame

I recently finished A Handful of Sesame, an english translation by Maithreyi Karnoor of Srinivas Vaidya’s 1988 kannada novel, Halla Bantu Halla. It tells an interesting enough story that’s worth a read. I don’t have anything deep or extensive to say about it so I will confine myself to three broad remarks about the novel itself, the translation, and the printing.

The novel is essentially the story of a single family in northern Karnataka from 1857 to 1948. Following the lives of the various family members across this historical span makes for an immersive and enjoyable read. It is also well written in many parts. Some of the metaphors used to describe the moonlit rural scenes, which if the translation is true to the original, are beautiful. The frequent slow build ups of dramatic tension which are then abruptly concluded with a tragedy reminded me of Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

However, the plot is also hard to read in many ways. Although it seems as if the depiction of rural life is meant to be idyllic, it in fact shows the hellish nature of a life ruled by brahmin rituals. The obsessions with ‘purity’ and caste hierarchy are suffocating and highlight the benefit of the urbanism that took over India in the twentieth century.

There is also a distinct undercurrent of inertia to the characters that makes it frustrating in parts. In instances where social norms are clearly broken (eg. children dying under suspicious circumstances, relatives mistreating one another), characters fail to do anything about it. This disputes or creates a fundamental tension in the way the characters place so much importance on the social norms as essential for a righteous and holy life.

The translation is unfortunately very poor. At its core a translation should not merely swap words and reorder them. It should convey a faithful translation of the entire sentence so it conveys the purpose of it within a piece of exposition or dialogue. The text here suffers from translating many unnecessary adjectives and adverbs, and attempts to directly translate phrases such as “natal home” instead of translating the meaning of the phrase into the appropriate concepts in english. The same problem exists in many places where kannada colloquialisms are not translated at all and so would be completely lost on the english reader.¹

The translation also suffers from many grammatical mistakes², dialogue not being correctly formatted³, and most egregiously shifts from past to present tense⁴. These shifts in tense occur repeatedly when a character’s internal thoughts are recounted. But this is precisely the problem: they should be recounted. Rather they are conveyed as if the character is thinking them at the same time the narrative voice of the plot is recounting the story.

The copy I read was a print to order copy from Amazon. Unfortunately the quality of the typesetting is very poor. There are cases where halves of words have been left in italics⁵ and an entire footnote is printed in a different font to the rest of the text⁶. The margins are also not offset from the center which makes the text sink into the spine.

Overall, the novel is in need of a second edition with some of the translation cleaned up and a better printing.