A journey within: Reflections on translating Lithuanian writer Jaroslavas Melnikas into Hindi

The work being translated into Hindi is The Last Day, a collection of eight stories by Jaroslavas Melnikas. The translation matters because Lithuanian literature remains relatively unfamiliar in India. It brings a distinctive European literary voice into another linguistic and cultural setting.

Melnikas’s stories explore reality, freedom, memory, identity, mortality, and moral choice. Their everyday situations suddenly fracture, revealing loneliness and uncertainty. The title story follows a family that learns the exact dates of its members’ deaths, including their young son’s final day. The family responds by watching television together.

The translation became more than a literary task for the translator. Melnikas’s movement from fear toward renewed uncertainty prompted reflection on Indian philosophy, especially the Nasadiya Sukta of the Rigveda. The collection also gained international recognition: The Last Day received the BBC Book of the Year European Prize. Its Hindi version therefore connects Lithuanian fiction with Indian readers and ideas.

Jaroslavas Melnikas is a writer positioned between Ukrainian and Lithuanian cultural worlds. Born in western Ukraine, he has lived in Lithuania for the past three decades. He writes in both Ukrainian and Lithuanian, although Lithuanian has become his main literary language in recent years.

This background gives him a distinctive place in European literature without reducing him to a single national tradition. His nearly 15 books combine dystopian imagination with surrealism. His writing has also moved beyond its original languages, appearing in several major European languages. The article presents him as both a Lithuanian writer and a figure with Ukrainian roots.

That cultural position helps explain the breadth of his literary setting. Lithuanian is one of Europe’s oldest surviving languages, yet it remains unfamiliar in the Indian literary sphere. Melnikas’s work crosses that distance through translation. The Last Day, translated toward Hindi readers, carries his Ukrainian-Lithuanian literary identity into a new cultural conversation.

Melnikas’s literary body of work comprises nearly 15 books. The Last Day itself contains eight stories. This scale matters because the collection is not presented as a loose group of unrelated pieces. Instead, its stories repeatedly return to human crisis, unstable reality, and questions about existence.

The eight stories appear remarkably similar in their intellectual concerns. They can feel like one long story, with different emotions and situations woven into a shared meditation on life’s purpose. Each narrative begins from circumstances that may seem simple. Then reality shifts, and the characters face loneliness, moral ambiguity, or the limits of choice.

Melnikas’s larger oeuvre is marked by a fusion of dystopian imagination and surrealism. His books have been translated into several major European languages. The Last Day also received the BBC Book of the Year European Prize. Together, these figures show both the breadth of his output and the concentrated design of this particular collection.

In “The Last Day,” a mother, father, and two children discover the exact dates of their deaths. The immediate crisis concerns their young son, whose appointed final day has arrived. The family does not know how to mark such an unbearable event. Instead of creating a ceremony, they sit together and watch a television series.

This ordinary activity beside catastrophe creates the story’s haunting force. The family must live with knowledge that death is certain and scheduled. Yet when the clock reaches the appointed hour and midnight passes, the boy does not die. The Book of Fates has stopped working, so the prediction no longer provides reliable certainty.

The reversal changes the father’s understanding of his own life. He had believed he still had many years, but now realizes he could die tomorrow. Uncertainty returns almost as a form of grace. The family decides to go to the beach without planning around the future, suggesting that life should not depend on imagined certainty.

The translator connects Melnikas’s stories with the Nasadiya Sukta because both challenge the human desire for definite answers. Melnikas’s characters lose confidence in time, identity, morality, relationships, and language. The Rigvedic hymn likewise refuses to settle the mystery of creation. It ends in radical doubt rather than certainty.

The connection becomes especially clear in “The Last Day.” The family first receives exact knowledge about death, but that certainty collapses when the boy survives past midnight. The Book of Fates has stopped working. The change resembles the hymn’s movement from apparent explanation toward the question of who can truly know.

For the translator, rendering the collection into Hindi became an inward journey. Reflections on impermanence and illusion in Indian philosophy helped illuminate Melnikas’s movement from fear to release. The comparison suggests that Lithuanian fiction and an ancient Indian hymn can meet through a shared concern: how people live when reality cannot provide final answers.

Surrealism is a style that places strange, dreamlike, or impossible events inside recognizable life. Dystopian fiction presents societies or conditions marked by crisis, control, fear, or the breakdown of accepted order. These definitions come from established literary usage, while the article describes Melnikas’s work as a fusion of both forms.

His stories begin with ordinary people in deceptively simple circumstances. Then reality fractures. A family may learn the exact dates of its deaths, or a system such as the Book of Fates may suddenly stop functioning. The key mechanism is collision: familiar routines meet events that cannot be explained by ordinary logic. This exposes hidden questions about identity, freedom, morality, and existence.

The result is not merely fantasy or social warning. Melnikas uses unusual events to make an unseen reality feel as true as the world people can touch and name. His fiction keeps dismantling stability. Readers are pushed to reconsider whether certainty, choice, and external reality are as dependable as they first appear.

An existential crisis is a period of deep doubt about meaning, identity, freedom, moral responsibility, or mortality. It matters because these ideas help people understand who they are and how they should live. If they become uncertain, everyday actions can lose their familiar purpose. This definition uses established philosophical and psychological usage, while the article shows it through Melnikas’s fiction.

His characters inhabit realities that suddenly fracture. External circumstances begin simply, then expose loneliness, moral ambiguity, and fragile certainty. In “The Last Day,” the family receives exact death dates, but the son survives when the appointed hour passes. The Book of Fates has stopped working. Knowledge that seemed absolute becomes useless, and the father realizes he could die tomorrow.

This instability makes reality feel divided between the visible and the invisible. Melnikas suggests that people constantly make choices while discovering how helpless they can be. The forward implication is not to solve every mystery, but to live without allowing uncertainty to dictate the meaning of one’s life.