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The essay that appeared recently on Scroll, “Literary translation and its discontents”, by Jayasree Kalathil, brought back memories of my earlier talks and essays written on the subject as an author. One of them “To pierce a mustard seed and let in seven oceans” which is part of the book Translating Women: Indian Interventions (Zubaan, 2009) edited by Kamala Narasimhan has appeared on Scroll earlier. However, it will be very relevant to give a summary of my talk entitled “Ways of Seeing: Text, Translation and Authors Who Refuse to Die” at the Habitat Centre, New Delhi for the Leela Foundation Lecture series on November 21, 2013, in response to Jayasree Kalathil’s essay. It was a lecture given in 2013, but contains the essence of what can be seen as an author-translator conflict. I am giving below an updated version of the talk bringing it up to the present-day scenario.
Translation is not just an act of rendering a text from one language to another. Translation is a way of seeing and relating which one is doing all the time. One has to expand the meaning of translation to include ways in which texts are seen, contextualised, categorised, reduced and expanded and presented.
Coming from a middle-class Tamil family I was exposed to music and dance when I was young. Once when he was teaching me a complicated chitta swaram my music teacher told me to look at the notes as a flowing river so that I can sing the chitta swaram in one breath. Similarly, just the line Theruvil varano from a padam and the intricacy of abhinayam opened up an entire way of life for me. I understood that “to see” something or someone one did not just need sight but vision and perspective.
To that extent, a 100% translation from one language to another is an impossibility. Some Tamil words would fall flat in English for their depth of meaning would be lost when taken out of the cultural context from which they spring for very often words have apparent meanings and inner meanings based on personal experience, language modes and allusions. There is that poem of Thirumoolar where he talks of the raging elephant that hides the wood it is made from and how the raging elephant disappears when only the wood is seen. I am not talking of a gestalt shift in language which is a two-image concept: an apparent and a hidden one. Rather I am talking of layers that open up with a word, an image, a sound.
Tamil words have different sounds and rhythm. Gidugidu, kudukudu, salasala, palapala, minuminu, sadasada and gadagada are not words that can be translated. Understanding a language and translation are acts that have always been difficult. There is a constant tussle between the text and the act of translation. One often feels like Ghalib who exclaimed:
Ya Rab, woh na samje hain
Na samjenge meri baat
Ya de dil unko aur
Ya de mujhe zubaan aur
Although it is supposed to have been addressed to a beloved, we can also take it as meaning that as people did not understand him nor will ever understand him, he requested God to give those people a different heart or give him a different language. I often recall a comment of Manthara in Tulsi Ramayan, which my poet-friend Shefalika Verma alluded to in a conversation, to explain this point. Manthara says, at one point,
bhanu kamala kula poshanihaaraa,
binu jala jari karao soi chaara— Ramcharitmanas: Ayothyakanda: 16:4
The sun fosters the family of lotuses; but in the absence of water, it turns them into ashes. A lotus blooms when the sun rises only so long as it remains in a pond full of water. If the pond goes dry, the same sun can scorch the lotus. I always apply this beautiful imagery to translation. It is only so long as words remain in their contextual water with their elements that the sun of translation can keep it alive; otherwise, it can become a dead text.
When a translation of my work reaches me my first reaction is one of non-recognition for the images and sounds are different and it takes me time to accept it as my work. And then as one slowly gets into the mood of the translated language, one sees one’s stories bound in a certain way and take wings, traversing the distance between the two languages. This magic of a story taking shape in another language can happen only if, like pushing the fishing boat into the sea, a translation gently nudges a story into the vast ocean of another language.
As for my own experiences of being translated they have been extremely interesting and also at times puzzling and annoying. I have come to realise that there is a politics to translation with a constant undercurrent of a notion of power in the act of translation into English which involves choice of text, translation and rendering, and presentation of the author. Extended dialogues with the translator and negotiations are made in turning the text and the author and the culture into an easily acceptable, marketable format.
When it comes to translation from an Indian language to English it certainly bestows power on the translator and hierarchies are created between the writer and the English readers. I have dealt with touchy translators who when told that my corrections have not been carried out in the translation have responded by saying that I cannot use the word corrections as they know more about nuances of the language they are translating in than me and I cannot really “correct” them.
The translator who translates into English an Indian language always feels that it is an act of favour where the Indian language writer is being raised to a different level. The Indian language writer also feels this act of translation to be some kind of a “promotion”. It is almost like a magical transformation where an ugly frog becomes a handsome prince or a divine blessing where a cursed stone turns into a woman when a divine man steps on it. In the process of this transformation the writing is turned into a consumable product that can be easily consumed by a market of different kinds of readership.
The English readers, I realised, can never be troubled to understand the translation. They are privileged readers and so everything, including food, clothing and relationships, must be explained to them with footnotes, end notes and glossaries never mind, if you yourself struggled to understand what champagne and other exotic western foods and so many other elements were when you read their works of fiction as a young girl.
The current way of translation is to open up the layers of the text and lay it bare like opening its underbelly making it totally transparent. I believe that stories are not about revealing; they are about hiding. Stories hide elements and emotions in such a way that they reveal themselves differently to each reader. A story or a text should never be denuded to reveal all; some mysteries must remain. For that to happen a translator must approach a text with humility and authors must refuse to die!
That was some 11 years ago. I still hold the position that a translation is not inferior to the original. It is different. I also don’t think the translation should be verbatim or “faithful” in a rigid way. However, one cannot deny that there is a politics to translation. Many translators feel that the translation is better than the original and that they don’t even have to consult the author while translating. They also take the liberty very often, of deleting sentences from the original which they don’t think are needed for the English or other language readers. I once wrote “caterpillar” somewhere in the story and it was translated as centipede by one translator and snake by another.
In a recent Literary Festival in Dibrugarh Mamang Dai said that her Sahitya Akademi award winning novel The Black Hill got translated into Tamil without even her knowledge and won a Sahitya Akademi award. When she found out the translator’s contact and rang him up and asked him how he could translate the complicated cultural elements in the novel without even consulting her, he told her, he did not need her help at all, he felt he was part of Arunachal Pradesh when he translated it.
This is not to cast aspersions on what Jayasree Kalathil has written. I respect her a great deal. In fact, when I was looking for the names of the translators in Kannada and Gujarati of a famous writer’s book, I had to really search hard. The book had only the writer’s name and even the publishers had forgotten the translators’ names.
What I am trying to do is to bring attention to the hierarchy that a writer often faces when translated either by an Indian translator or western translators. The recent push for translation is such that the translators from Europe or other countries translate a Tamil book or any Indian language book through English and don’t feel the need to connect with the author at all. Even with the Indian language translators the author has to insist on sitting with the translator for the final manuscript.
I have also attended translation conferences abroad where all that the authors had to do was read a short passage from the original language so they know the sound of the language, and the nuances of translation, the difficulties of the translators, how often the translation makes the original better were all discussed by the translators. The authors in many ways were seen as “inferior”. When I took a second helping of something during lunch in one such conference, a European translator told me, “You eat a lot.” It is as bad as that.
A good translator does not ever take over the original text. She nudges it gently like a boat, into the ocean of another language knowing the boat is as important as the ocean and not letting it capsize is the real victory of both the translator and author. A translation should never happen as a unilateral venture; it should always be a combined effort.
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