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| Professor, writer and journalist Mrs Mini Menon at class |
It is said that the
German philosopher and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx had so much love for
the plays written by William Shakespeare that he would narrate the tales from
them to his children. However, it is unclear whether Marx’s children did
anything on Shakespearean plays in future. But, Mini Menon, an Assistant
professor of Malayalam at Hindusthan College of Arts and Science, has authored
around ten books, after inspired by her communist father Rajan Menon, who used
to narrate her tales from revolutionary literatures like Maxim Gorky’s Mother, Ethel Lilian Voynich’s The Gadfly
and Alexander Dumas’s Three Musketeers, when she was a little school girl.
“I took interest in
translation literature after reading the epic Mahabharatha in Malayalam, a
prose translation that came out in 40 volumes, while I was studying just class
VII in Kerala” recalls the 47 year old Mini Menon, who was also a journalist
once, working as a sub-editor in the Malayalam daily ‘Kerala Kaumudi’ in
Calicut.
“My colleagues, who
are all Tamils, greatly encourage me to translate valuable works into Malayalam.
But, it is painful when they say that they only cannot read my writings” avers
Mini.
Mini informs that as
she hails from a communist family in Kerala, she got interested in translating
left literatures into Malayalam.
She has so far
translated Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina,
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, Mikhail Sholokov’s famous novel And Quite Flows the Don, Alexander Dumas’s The Count of
Monte Cristo
and so on. Her translation works also include Homer’s Illiad, Jenny Marx’s letters,
Biography of Helen Keller, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karmazov and many more. Lauding
her contributions in translation literature, the Kerala Cultural Centre of Coimbatore, has recently
honoured her with an award.
When asked what her
readers, particularly, her students say about her books, Mini’s answer is
optimistic:
“I still remember one of
my students admired me after reading volumes of my books in a short time. But,
at the same time, some even wonder why I should waste time in writing”
Mini does not know to read
Tamil. She has just begun to learn it.
“I have heard Thirukural
is an unparalleled literary work. I wish
to translate it into Malayalam soon after learning Tamil” she winds up.
B. Meenakshi Sundaram
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