[LINK] "The middlemen: how translators are boosting India's writers"

[rfmcdonald]

This article, written by Chandrahas Choudhury, published in Abu Dhabi's The National and shared with me by @belovedsnail, makes a point that's relevant not only for India's languages but for languages worldwide: language communities that are larger than others, that have more prestige than others, or are just more accessible than others, have their cultural products prioritized over the products of language communities that aren't so favoured. Still, as a native speaker of English, I'm simultaneously privileged by the fact that my language is the global language and left at a disadvantage my the lack of easy accessibility of the works produced by people in other language communities. My knowledge of French is a help, true, but not that much of a help: it still leaves the languages of several billion people wanting.

For a network whose English strain is diverse, highly developed, and globally circulated, Indian literature is surprisingly short on high-quality translations of works from its other languages into English. The number of memorable translations of fiction from the basket of Indian languages – Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Oriya, Gujarati, Kannada, to name only a few – into English could be counted on one’s fingers.

This is unfortunate, for no single branch of India’s literature can possibly encompass the representation of diverse social realities that a flourishing national literature requires. As the poet and critic Vinay Dharwadker wrote recently in Indian Literature (the little-read and poorly distributed – though increasingly well-designed and well-produced – bimonthly journal of literature published by the Indian government’s academy of letters, the Sahitya Akademi): “Indian-English literature by itself is inadequate to represent who we are to the rest of the world. Only a broad representation of the full range of Indian literatures, translated into a world language such as English, can do what is needed.”

Dharwadker’s essay frames such translations as a way of understanding India – its plural cultures, the variety of self-representations and existential dilemmas – not only for international audiences, but also, crucially, for Indian readers. Currently, the north of India is often unaware of what is going on in the literature of the south, the east of the west – and few seem to ever know what is happening in the remote but sizeable north-east. No literary scholar, let alone the general reader, possesses a map of the entire country.

Translation is the force that makes it possible to imagine such a map – a map that, when fully sketched in, would represent a wonderland of literary riches from diverse languages, all made intelligible to one another for the first time. In addition, only translation can finally allow readers and scholars to weigh and judge properly the merit of Indian writing in English, which presently has something of a free ride on the world stage.

An example of a good translation is described below.

Salma’s massive The Hour Past Midnight comports itself [. . .] with an almost Tolstoyan calm and gravitas. Set in the world of a group of Muslim trading families in a village in Tamil Nadu, Salma’s story, first published in Tamil in 2004, fashions an intricate web of observations and criscrossing perceptions from the lives of a group of women who serve, in their patriarchal society, as wives, daughters, mothers, mistresses, paramours, and widows before anything else. This makes the novel a paradigmatic example of Dharwadker’s point that works written in translation radically expand the India made available to readers in English by novelists in English, who are mostly urban and, almost inevitably, urbane. It is hard to recall an Indian novel in English that explores the hierarchical social order and worldview of a village culture as densely and unselfconsciously as Salma’s does.

One sees the difference between urban and rural not just at the level of theme or worldview, but in minute particulars, down to the writer’s choice of metaphors. To read, in The Hour Past Midnight, a sentence like “Kani Rowther’s smartness in making such a grand alliance was the envy of all; he had grabbed hold of a fine tamarind branch, laden with fruit, they said” is to be jolted into the realisation that the only metaphorical branch found in Indian fiction in English is probably the olive branch, and that there is a gap between the botanical imagination of Indians and Indian literature in English. Every such instance serves as a salutary reminder – to Indian writers in English no less than writers and readers in all languages – that we blind ourselves to our own world whenever we borrow metaphors or linguistic structures without reanimating then with our own particulars.

Holmstrom’s translation, although very different in sound and spirit from Sinha’s, is astutely calibrated for the demands of Salma’s novel – and might even be read as a making a theoretical argument about translation along the way. While Sinha Englishes everything about Sankar’s story except some terms for family relationships, Holmstrom leaves a significant number of significant words and terms untranslated. A thinnai, we release from the context, is something like a front porch, but it is better to think of it as a thinnai, much as a puri loses all its puri-ness by being described as “fried bread”, and evokes its visual, tactile and gustatory properties only as a puri.

Similarly, a simple bit of speech like “Watch out, di, you’ll get a crick around your neck” manages, entirely through that di, to make the sound of English in Salma’s novel at once familiar and foreign. By not translating completely out of the Tamil, Holmstrom demonstrates the strange truth of the Indian scholar and translator AK Ramanujan’s observation that “A translator hopes not only to translate a text, but ... to translate a non-native reader into a native one.” Holmstrom’s is not a translation that truckles to the linguistic and economic power of the English-speaking reader. It insists, rather, that the reader meet it halfway.