A compilation of the English translations of literary giant IB Rai’s 16 short stories—Long Night of Storm (translated by Prawin Adhikari)—was launched amid a function held at the premises of Station 5, in Gairidhara, in the Capital, on Wednesday.

The event saw the presence of several writers and editors, among which writer and critic Khagendra Sangraula, writer Muna Gurung and the translator of the collection, Adhikari, addressed the attendees.

“IB Rai, along with Parijat and BP Koirala, is among one of the greatest literary personalities of the Nepali language,” Sangraula said, “He wrote stories of the common people in their language,” and went on to praise the effort made by Adhikari: “A translator’s work is akin to that of a postman and Adhikari has seamlessly ferried the stories from Nepali to English. When I compared the Nepali with the translation, it was as if IB Rai had written the English himself.”

Speaking at the event, Gurung also lauded the translation, and read aloud excerpts from the book. “A translation is a work of love, and Adhikari has managed to translate the original with emotional accuracy. Finally English readers in Nepal will be able to enjoy a work of a context that they can relate to,” Gurung said.

Translator Adhikari said that IB Rai’s work are “apolitical, while they also manage to give a cultural dimension to the Gorkhaland movement in India,” and then went on to share some aspects of his translation process. “When I began the translation process, I faced a conundrum. Who to serve: the writer, the reader or my interest as a translator? I had to be very careful because I did not want to add extra burdening language, that would only make the stories a kind of a scholarly commentary,” Adhikari said, “I had gone with my editor, Anurag Basnet, to visit IB Rai. After reading some of the translations, he rejected some of the choices I had made. It took several drafts to find a balance in language that conveyed the Nepali context.”

Long Night of Storm is the second English translation of IB Rai’s work to be published by Speaking Tiger, after Manjushree Thapa’s There’s a Carnival Today (a translation of Rai’s seminal novel, Aaja Ramita Chha), which was released in October, 2017.

Speaking to the Post, Adhikari said that the translations are a response to a greater political and cultural dialogue in India. “The richness of a particular culture cannot be understood without access to its literature. So to reveal the depth of Nepali literature, we started searching for writers that could be translated. Since writers like BP Koirala and Parijat have already been translated into several languages, we realised that we had to bring IB Rai to a greater audience.”