Many old timers still recall with nostalgia reading books published in the former Soviet Union and distributed for sale at a very cheap rate. Not only books related with Communist ideology, children’s fairy tales, classical literary works by Russian authors Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turganev, Chekhov and Gorky were also available at an extremely affordable price in several regional languages.
While gone are those days, one of the translators, Shruti Shah, who was with the Soviet publishing house Raduga during the turbulent period 1986 to 1993, recently scanned the books which she had translated into Gujarati, her mother tongue, during her stay in Moscow, and put them all in a blog titled Sankaal.
Shruti translated in all more than 30 books, all in her maiden name, Shruti Mehta. Not only books by classical Russian writers, she especially learned Russian language to also translate books of contemporary Russian writers into Gujarati, since their translations were not available in English. Of these, she has uploaded in the blog 13 published and five unpublished books.
“I don’t have all the books, hence I could scan and upload only 18 which I still have in my collection”, she says.
As a Gujarati translator of Russian books, which she was for nearly six years till the language section of the publishing house collapsed in 1992, initially she translated from English, including a play by Nikolai Gogol and short stories by Anton Chekhov.
Within six months, after learning Russian, she began translating directly from Russian, of course with the help of Russian-English dictionary – there was no Russian-Gujarati dictionary, and Russian-Hindi dictionaries had their limitation.
Of the several books that she translated, one is by Valentin Rasputin (1937-2015), a top-notch environmentalist and award-winning writer hailing from Irkutsk in Siberia. His book, “Zhivi i Pomni” (Jivanbhar Ni Sambharna in Gujarati), which she translated last, was never published. She also translated straight from several Russian short stories of contemporary writers — one compilation was published, another could not be published.
These have been uploaded in this blog, alongside other novels and children’s books and short stories.
