In the middle of the call, Laila Saein asks to be excused for a minute. In the background are the typical sounds of a school just closed for the day. Laila, in her Kozhikodan slang, talks to her students at the AFRC, in Wayanad, an educational institute she’s put up there with her husband Anil Emage. As she holds the phone, someone says she is shown on TV, as the author who inadvertently translated one of the most famous works of Kazuo Ishiguro, who has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
When she was commissioned by DC Books to translate The Remains of the Day, Laila had no idea the author of the book would win a Nobel.
She had at first felt the book was so difficult that she planned to refuse the work. But then after a few pages, and many readings, she was really into the book. “I’d read it whenever and wherever I got a break. I read it three or four times!” Laila says, in her polite endearing accent. “I was so involved. In the book, the butler Stevens and the housekeeper Miss Kenton, the central characters, have discussions over cocoa in the evening. Like them, I began having coffee in the evenings, with my husband, to discuss the book!”
Laila, who has done other translations before — Maxim Gorky’s Childhood, Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo etc., — was touched by Stevens’ character. “He has these deep feelings for Miss Kenton but he never expresses them. He would pass her room and hear her cry and long to go sit with her and comfort her. But he would always think about his job first and feel that’d be improper. Even when his dad, who was a butler too, dies, Stevens prefers to attend to his duties at a conference in the house, and not go to his dad’s side. Because his dad had taught him work came first.” Laila recalls the rainy day Stevens finally goes to meet Miss Kenton, who has by then been married to another for 20 years, and she tells him the moment has passed.
She named her translation Oduvil Avasheshichathu. It is seeing her translation of burns survivor Neehari Mandali’s autobiography, ‘Mattathinte Kuthippu’ that made DC call Laila for The Remains of the Day.
Laila, who studied journalism, is the national advisor for children’s newspaper Peace Gong. She works in every way she can to educate children, going to villages and tutoring tribal kids and girls from the minority communities. She took Thansila Meyyarikkandi, a plus two student from Wayanad, to represent the nation at the Asian Girls Human Rights Anniversary Award ceremony in Taiwan. “I know what they go through because I love to sing, and we were told to not let our voices be heard,” Laila says, as she prepares to translate more Russian books for children to read, and a book of her own, based on research.
