Where do we find a story? An interview with Snehaprava Das
Photo: Snehaprava Das
Poet, author, and translator Snehaprava Das speaks to Mitra Samal about her storytelling process, how translation can enhance creativity, the authors that have inspired her, and more.
Snehaprava Das is an eminent poet, author, and translator. She has translated several Odia classics into English, including works by Umesh Chandra Sarkar, Ramshankar Ray, Pandit Gopabandhu Das, Manoj Kumar Panda, and Paramita Satpathy. Das has five poetry collections to her credit: Dusk Diary (2018), Alone and Other Poems (2018), Songs of Solitude (2019), Moods and Moments (2019), and Never Say No to a Rose (2020). She has also written two short story collections: Night of the Snake (2023) and Fog Whispers (2024).
Das has received the Pravasi Bhasha Sahitya Award (Delhi), Jivanananda Das Award (Kolkata) and Fakir Mohan Translation Award (Odisha). She teaches English literature in various colleges of Odisha, and lives in Bhubaneswar, India.
In a detailed interview, Das spoke about her storytelling process, how translation can enhance creativity, the authors that have inspired her, and more. Edited excerpts:
The Chakkar: Your latest story collection Fog Whispers begins with an essay that asks the question “Where do we find a story?” Could you tell us where you find your interesting stories?
“My stories tend to tiptoe around speculations, since they make an effort to unravel certain complexities involved in the survival process itself, which are often kept camouflaged under a visor of rationalistic civility.”
Das: You are right there. The introduction begins with a question. And is immediately followed, as you might have read, by the answer: That a story could be found in our surroundings, in our experiences, in our connection with people around us, in our interaction with the world outside and the world within us. The act of conceptualizing a story possibly depends on what and how much we have read, and are still reading, collecting experiences, gleaning matters from the ordinary and extraordinary happenings in life, and our inclination to approach and address certain specific issues that influence and shape our thoughts and behaviour. I prefer studying and examining human psychological and existential issues to social issues.
A storyteller might come across events that could have serious implications, but let them pass by; while on the contrary, a trivial, common incident could trigger his or her imagination. It depends on how you look at things. I usually look for the stuff of a story in the inner working of a human mind, to know how human subconscious reacts to the events happening around us. Delving into the human mind, navigating the secret and mysterious arena—which writers of psychological fictions and plays name as ‘looking inward’—could be extremely exciting and captivating, and baffling nonetheless. I would rather go with of Carl Jung who postulates. “The one who looks outside dreams, but the one who looks inside awakens.”
My stories might appear a little veered off the realistic and conventional form of writing, because I believe George Orwell when he says, “Reality exists in human mind and nowhere else.” I happen to be fascinated by a term called ‘magic thinking’ (the phrase is coined by Sigmund Freud) which implies a belief in the subtle and mysterious connection of unrelated events even in the absence of a causal link between them. This prompts a character to imagine, experience and as you use the word ‘speculate’ certain things which ordinarily defy logical reasoning. And that is the area I am interested to explore and observe.
The Chakkar: In your collections Night of the Snake and Fog Whispers, you have also included a few speculative fiction stories. Escapist fiction has been gaining popularity—Ray Bradbury wrote in his book, Zen in the Art of Writing (1990) that science fiction often tries to provide solutions to real-world problems. What are your thoughts on this?
Das: You could say that, in a way, my stories tend to tiptoe around speculations, since they make an effort to unravel certain complexities involved in the survival process itself, which are often kept camouflaged under a visor of rationalistic civility. We human beings are not always what we pretend to be, or even believe ourselves to be. Nor do we often summon courage to face the realities of our lives. But, at some unguarded, vulnerable moment, the mask of falsehood drops off of us, revealing the truth. In some of my stories I try to capture the character’s response to that moment of interfacing of truth and falsehood, the epiphany. Psychologists like Kareen Horney believe that the moment of self-discovery could also be self-destructive. I wonder if self-discovery—instead of always being a destructive process—can at certain cases be an awakening experience, which would enable us to deal with the existential crisis effectively.
I agree with the view of certain science fictions being escapist in nature as far as the act of introducing new and puzzling ‘ideas’ are concerned. You have mentioned Ray Bradbury’s postulations on science fiction aiming to provide solutions to real world problems. The plot of Dan Brown’s Inferno centres around the idea of the invention of a virus which when injected to a man would curb his libido, one that would result in controlling the crisis of ‘population growth’ which the present world is confronted with. Bradbury is right when he says that ‘ideas’ are pivotal to writing speculative or scientific fictions. Ideas that would appear absurd and incomprehensible to common understanding had motivated H.G Wells and Jules Verne to conceive the plots of books like The Time Machine and Around the World in Eighty Days. I agree that escapist fictions create an ambience which appears to be unreal and illusionary, but they too handle specific ideas relating to human psychology, which in a way has a scientific implication—psychology being the study of the mind. Stephen King’s The Shining is also an escapist fiction that experiments with the psychological issues of extrasensory perception and telepathy through interpolations of the supernatural and fantasy. R.L Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hide falls into this this category, too: it experiments with both psychological and scientific writing, since the issue of personality/identity-conflict which psychologists name as Multiple Personality Disorder is central to its theme.
The Chakkar: You are also a translator and have translated many Odia classics into English. Does this experience of translation and reading in more than one language enhance your creativity?
Das: The translation activity has inspired my creativity to some extent, but I would say the reverse is also true in this case. Literary translation is often a transcreation involving creativity. From my years-long experience as a translator I have learnt that unless a translator is a creative writer, the replicated product will be rather bland and dull. I find the act of translating challenging, even demanding at times, but writing a story is engaging. While translating a particular text the translator is compelled to keep himself confined in the framework of the original author’s intention (what he intends to say) and does not find much space to interpose his own creative competence, unless his own creativity helps in enhancing the aesthetic status of the original one. An overzealous effort to enhance the appeal of the original could ironically distort it through an unwanted and unwarranted intervention of the translator.
The experience I have gleaned over the years as a practicing translator had taught me the art of effecting a harmonious blending of the translator’s creativity with that of the original author, to produce a healthy, wholesome, readable, and aesthetically appealing parallel text.
The Chakkar: You were an English professor before retiring as a principal. What, in your opinion, is the role of an English professor in the lives of students seeking a literary life—and other students not in the field of art, too?
“An English teacher plays a great role in insinuating the idea into the minds of the students, whether they are from a literary or from a technological and scientific background. Science and technology sustain us, but poetry and art give us a reason to live.”
Das: The job of an English teacher/professor does not remain confined only to the imparting of classroom teaching. They have a responsible and integral role to perform through utilizing their experience of learning literature in broader perspectives. Their close acquaintance with literature enables them to discover and define the sublime truth under the trivialities, to understand and explain metaphysical issues and to disseminate knowledge not just among their students but all that they come across in the walk of life.
It is not true that boys and girls who pursue a technical career or are in the field of science have nothing to do with literature or art. To be practical and pragmatic is essential, but art and literature are things that reveal the subtilities of life to us, connect us to the suffering humanity, teach us the transcendental values of life, and direct us to the paths of nobility.
I remember a short stanza from Walt Whitman’s Passage to India (I use to teach Whitman in post-graduate classes) where he announces the arrival of a poet in the world in a tone of celebration. A poet’s mission is to elevate the humanity to a noble height, to justify the human values: “Then your deeds only O’ voyagers, O’ scientists, and inventors, shall be justified……The whole earth, this cold, impassive voiceless earth shall be completely justified… Trinitas divine shall be gloriously accomplish’d and compacted by the true son of God, the poet…” Whitman daringly calls the poet as the ‘true son of God’ and describes him as a visionary and a poet.
Literature, art, and poetry make one more human. Look what Steve Jobs had to say: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing.”
An English teacher plays a great role in insinuating the idea into the minds of the students, whether they are from a literary or from a technological and scientific background. Science and technology sustain us, but poetry and art give us a reason to live.
The Chakkar: How is the challenge of writing poetry different from your other work?
Das: Unlike translating and storytelling, poetry writing for me is an act of passion, an overwhelming indulgence. The strength and dynamism of poetry is immense. It is something that takes you under its mysterious captivity, casts a magic spell that so overcomes you that you feel transported to an altogether different realm of creative experience. It makes you transcend the tangibility of the drab, mundane world, and attain a height of the sublime, even when you are speaking about the real-world issues. That, perhaps is the magic of poetry writing, the art of encapsulating a universe of ideas and emotions in a small space. The expression is compact and cryptic, yet all-embracing.
Blake is right in saying that poetry could make one perceive the whole world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour. Poetry has the power to circle an individual experience timelessly, excluding the entire world, and at the same time take in the experience of the humanity and transform it to an individual one.
I am reminded of one of John Donne’s wonderful poems in The Sun Rising, where he admonishes the sun not to invade into his private world of love, and at the same time announces that his private world is expansive enough to gather the whole world in its compass. My poems usually aim at delineating the condition of the humanity’s sufferings, the constant struggle of mankind against a hostile destiny and adverse living conditions. I prefer to begin with an individual condition and extend it to a study of the general and universal.
The Chakkar: This interview would not be complete without mentioning your favourite authors, whose works you admire and who truly inspire you. Could you please tell us about your reading life?
Das: Being a student of English literature and language, I had had ample opportunity to read world classics and several iconic texts. But I had also been an avid reader of novels and other forms of writing including nonfiction since my school days. It may sound funny, but I have no hesitation in admitting that I had started with reading what you people call ‘trash fiction’ today, like thrillers and romances. I remember buying Mills and Boons romances (I used to be a great fan of Barbara Cartland) with my pocket money. I made frequent visits to the railway station (Cuttack) while I was doing my school finals and during my initial days in Ravenshaw college, and looked for my choice titles in the Wheeler shops there.
Later, when I switched from science to humanities, I had, as I mentioned earlier the privilege to explore world literature, either prodded by the academic need (since most of them were included in the curriculum) or by choice to gain further reading experience through a comparative study of those texts which were not in the syllabus. I have a fascination for novels of authors like Dostoevsky, Boris Pasternak, (Dr Zhivago) Hardy, Lawrence, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Kafka, Khalid Hosseini, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Wilde, Maupassant, Maugham, Munro the poems of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, Salvador Dali, and of course the inimitable Pablo Neruda, just to name a few. I am tremendously excited and inspired by Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, which teaches humanity to endure and never give up the battle—however uneven it might be. You may again find it funny if I say that John Grisham, Irving Wallace, Dan Brown, Jeffery Archer offer me great reading experience.
There are many others, but I am afraid that the spatial constraint would not permit me to give a detailed account of my reading experience. I have learnt a great deal from reading these great writers and they helped a lot to shape and mould my writing career.
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Mitra Samal is a poet, writer and IT Consultant with a passion for literature and technology. Her poems, stories, essays, and reviews have been published in The Hooghly Review, Muse India, Borderless Journal, Madras Courier, The Chakkar, Kitaab, and others. She is also an avid reader and a Toastmaster who loves to speak her heart out. You can find her on Instagram: @am_mitrasmal and Twitter: @MitraSamal.
