Wind in the Leaves: Contemporary Telugu Stories in Translation

Description

Wind in the Leaves is an anthology of twenty contemporary Telugu short stories, presented in English translation for readers beyond the language’s borders. Drawing together twenty distinct voices from the Telugu literary landscape, spanning established figures such as Volga, Afsar Mohammad, Ganti Bhanumathi, and Beena Devi alongside newer and emerging writers like K. V. Manpreetam and Ramesh Kartik Nayak, the collection reflects the breadth and vitality of Telugu storytelling today. The stories move fluidly between rural and urban settings, between memory and present-day life, taking up themes of family bonds, inherited loss, labor and survival, love, illness, ambition, and quiet acts of courage. The opening story, “The Skilled Worker” by K. V. Meghanath Reddy (translated by Akhila), follows Rangadu and Rangi, a young couple whose search for rat-traps and honeycomb along a village path unearths the story of Rangadu’s father, a legendary “skilled worker” who vanished into the forest years earlier while seeking medicine for his sick son — and the echo of that same fear as their own child falls ill. It’s emblematic of the collection’s concerns: the weight of the past on the present, the resilience of ordinary people, and the textures of rural Telugu life rendered with sensory precision. Each story arrives with its translator credited alongside the author, underscoring the anthology’s identity as a work of collaborative literary translation — a bridge bringing Telugu fiction to English-language readers while preserving local idiom (a glossary of Telugu terms follows each story). The collection was compiled from stories first published in Telugu literary magazines and anthologies, including Katha Prapancham Sankalalam.