Hindi translation reveals shared human anxieties in Lithuanian author’s work
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Rekha Sethi translated Lithuanian writer Jaroslavas Melnikas’s collection The Last Day into Hindi, discovering universal themes within his work.
Sethi was initially drawn to Melnikas’s unsettling stories, which explore the blurring of reality and the anxieties of modern life. Melnikas, born in Ukraine and now living in Lithuania, writes in both Ukrainian and Lithuanian, and his work has been translated into multiple European languages.
His eight stories center on characters facing existential crises and moral ambiguities, often confronted with the fragility of certainty and the weight of choices. In “The Last Day,” a family learns the date of their son’s death and grapples with how to spend his final hours, only to find the prediction doesn’t come true, collapsing certainty once more. Sethi connected Melnikas’s themes to Indian philosophical traditions like the “Nasadiya Sukta” from the Rigveda, which also embraces paradox and doubt.
Throughout the translation process, Sethi noted Melnikas’s deliberate use of ambiguity and fluidity, even altering character names within a single story to resist fixed identities. She described the work as a “jugalbandi,” a musical dialogue between artists, and a collaborative effort involving the Lithuanian ambassador, a Polish translator, and Melnikas himself. Ultimately, Sethi found the act of translation to be a journey of self-reflection, revealing shared human experiences across cultures.
