I have translated Maralara Mrutyu, a book of 15 short stories by Surendra Mohanty, the eminent Odia writer (a Central Sahitya Akademi award winning author), into English under the title The Death of the Swan which was published by Macmillan Publishers India Private Limited in January 2012. This paper is a critique of one aspect of this book—the religious.

The status of a poet-critique is an established status conferred by tradition and reinforced by T S Eliot’s famous essay “The Frontiers of Criticism”. For Eliot, “workshop criticism”—the criticism of poetry written by a poet—is the outcome of the poet-critic’s “love of certain poets who had influenced him, and ... a prolongation of his thinking about his own work” (Eliot, 1969, p. 107). Such love of other writers and a prolonged thinking about his/her own work confers dignity of critical faculty on a poet which a translator does not enjoy. A translator’s critical faculty is exercised not in the context of his/her love of other writers and a prolonged thinking about his/her own work, as in the case of the poet, but in the context of choice and acceptability—choice of the work to be translated and its probable acceptability by the readers. Primarily, the critical activity of a poet-critic is a postnatal exercise; of a translator, a prenatal one.

My choice of translating Surendra Mohanty’s Maralara Mrutyu has been dictated by the consideration of variety and innovation. The form and content of these stories corroborate this contention. They move away from the narrow confines of any fixed style and of any exclusively local and parochial theme.

English Studies Journal, Surendra Mohanty’s, World, Piety, Study, The Death, Swan.