From the dog-eared histories of places to the latest glossies, the first thing that hits you about Kamal Sanyal’s airy apartment, is the abundance of the written word. And once you are treated to slivers of her interesting life, it all falls into place, and how. Sanyal’s stories are stuff that make costume dramas these days, and die out the moment we turn the final page of a hardcover or leave the theatre hall. Stories of days when student movements were not farcical propagandist exercises, when women were better married off than educated, when the country we so complacently sleep on was still fumbling for its identity. And the times then lived, don’t let its survivors yawn and go to sleep every night like most of us. And thus it comes as no surprise that Sanyal, now 85 years of age, took to translation formally when she was 70 years old.

“Things fell into place accidentally. I was editing the translated version of Marathi author Ghasiram Kotwal’s work. That is when I seriously thought about translation,” says Sanyal. The translator who was born a Gujarati, and married a Bengali, has equal command over five languages which include Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi, Bengali and English.

Sanyal was born in Aurangabad, but was sent to Mumbai for her education. “My father was a prominent social reformer but we lost him very early in life. Since then my mother, who was unlettered, had to fight a society in pre-Independence India to let us continue with our studies,” recalls Sanyal. Graduation and then political activism in pre-Independence India caught up with Sanyal, like many of her ilk. Marriage followed and since then Sanyal has dabbled in teaching, social work, commercial art ventures and advertising. “But translation has a certain charm of its own, though when I started off, I wanted to become an author,” smiles Sanyal.

However, when Sanyal finally had time at her disposal to return to her dream of authoring a book, she found nothing that fired her imagination. So translation happened and till date the octogenarian has seven books to her credit which include books which had earned awards in vernaculars. “I also bagged the top honours in the national and international legs of a translation contests organised by Katha,” says Sanyal adding, “it’s both challenging and interesting to understand the nuances of a language and a text, to internalise the authors’ thought, to translate it evocatively into another language.”

At present Sanyal is busy trying to find publishers for an English translation of stories by Marathi author G A Kulkarni. And at the same time, she’s even busier trying to fight off the disappointments occasioned by the irresponsibility invading the social, political and even literary scene in India.

“This is not the India we had fought for, with no ideals, no hope, no positivism about it,” rues Sanyal. While pulp fiction and diaspora chronicles seem to have inundated the pan-Indian literary scene, the country seems to have turned its back on the treasures that we have in the form of literary icons of the past.