Veyipadagalu in French

Vishvanatha Satyanarayana’s magnum opus, “Veyi Padagalu (The Thousand Hoods) is an epic Telugu novel critically acclaimed and regarded as one of the best in Telugu literature. This novel was written for a competition organised by Andhra University in 1934, in which this entry was declared winner. It was drafted by his brother, while the author was dictating,. It was completed in 29 days fitting into exactly 999 pages.

With 1000 pages plus War and Peace is the longest novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in 1869. The work is epic in scale and is regarded as one of the most important works of world literature. Viswanadha's Veyi padagalu is greater than War and Peace because Tolstoy came up with the title, and some of his themes, from an 1861 work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: La Guerre et la Paix ('War and Peace' in French). It has been translated separately from the "known" version, to English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, 

Finnish, Albanian, and Korean. 

This great epic work was translated into Hindi by PV Narsimha Rao, the 9th Prime Minister of India as Sahasra Phan in 1968. In 1976, Chandrakant Mehta and Prof, Mahendra Dhave translated this novel into Gujarati. Later R.V.S. Sundaram translated the work into Kannada.  In 1995, it was aired on Doordarshan as a serial.In 1998, it was published in a Kannada newspaper by name "Nootana". "Sahasra Phan" was also translated into Sanskrit with the same name by Prabhavati Devi. 

I think that “Veyipadagalu” deserves translation into other foreign languages. So I am translating it into French. I want to popularize this book among the modern students but this book has three major problems. Although the book is written in their mother tongue Telugu, modern students can not easily read it because of

1. Archaic words

2.  Sentence structure

3. Size of the book.

When you offer them a voluminous book of 1000 pages students get baffled.  So it must be abridged. I want to reduce the book to 250 pages - one fourth of its original size without losing the story and its flavor. Easy English version will be available soon. This makes our students understand and enjoy the novel. More importantly the gripping novel will transform the movie lovers into good readers. I am sure our people will honor their ancient literary icons. Once the book is made handy and easy it will move easily. I have the hope that many Europeans will take interest in our literature.