Language, Glory, and Football

Recommendations is a weekly column, in our Books section, where we invite a well-known author to recommend four books translated from an Indian language. These are not just recommendations, but books that have made an impact on their creative world. 

This month, we will feature author Anita Nair’s selections. 

Striker, Stopper
By Moti Nandy
Translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha 

I first read “Striker, Stopper” written by Moti Nandy and translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha, about one and a half decades ago. I read it the first time because I was curious. My exposure to Bengali writing was limited to the best-known names, whose socio-political literary themes were consistent with literary fiction. But here was “Striker, Stopper” by Moti Nandy, a collection of two novellas about football. I have always been a sports buff albeit, an armchair one. I will watch any sport be it equestrian, floor or team sports. But football, tennis and cricket are the three sports I dedicatedly follow round the year. Of these, football is what gives me the greatest adrenalin surge. 

While there has been some outstanding writing about tennis in English by Abraham Verghese and Lionel Shriver, I was yet to read about football, in any other language. I knew N.S.Madhavan, the Malayalam writer, had a short story titled “Higuitha” on football but I hadn’t read the book then. This made “Striker, Stopper” that much more tantalizing to read. It is a brilliant piece of fiction on so many counts. I read the book a second time, and this time it was for the quality of Arunava Sinha’s translation, which had captured the original text in all its effortless glory.

To this day, the first two hundred words of the book live rent free in my head. The story opens with the narrator’s dream: A white car drives up and out comes a black man in a white suit wearing dark glasses with a cigar dangling from his mouth. He speaks to them in Portuguese and then switches to an accent-free Bengali. The people there, though surprised, are reassured by his ability to speak to them in Bengali, their language. In many ways, this makes me think of the translator’s rare ability to convince the reader that they are reading a book in a language it was written in, while the truth is the exact opposite.