This week, Gregory Rabassa, who translated Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortazar, Jorge Amado and others, died at 94. In an interview, he said that translating felt like acting: "I think it's acting because… well, particularly with dialogue, but then when you're doing the book, you are García Márquez - you are playing him and someone else might play it a little differently, but it's still Hamlet."
Hold that thought when you pick up Translating Bharat: Reading India, edited by Neeta Gupta (Yatra Books, Rs 350), a rare set of essays by 15 Indian translators talking about the craft and art of translation. There are few "practitioner" books on the craft of Indian writing and very little that foregrounds the translator, a big omission in a country of so many tongues, dialects, languages.
The collection opens with K Satchidanandan's overiew of pre-colonial translation practices. He writes of a multilingual culture where poets like Kabir, Mira and Nanak easily moved from one language to another, a less self-conscious way of "translation" that mirrors the way many Indians shift even today from one language to another as though they are walking through rooms in a house.
Manisha Chaudhury's memories of growing up in a confidently multilingual home are fascinating. The women were fluent in Hindi, her mother, aunts and grandmother interested in literature, poetry, music, and on good but not intimate terms with English. The men were more fluent in Urdu and English. In a beautiful passage, she writes about the many kinds of Hindi she encountered as a translator - not one Hindi, but multiple branches, from high Sanskritised, artificial Hindi to the colloquial flavour of Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Brajbhasha; Hindustani with its "generous and sonorous" mix of Urdu; film industry Hindi.
The late Lakshmi Holmström, who died this May at the age of 81, contributed a scholarly essay on Salma and the intertwined relationship between the writer's Tamil and Arabic.
Arunava Sinha throws out useful provocations. He uses Buddhadev Basu's Tithidore as an example of the limits of translation, explaining why given the context of a particular scene, "every begoon bhaja, every slice of bhetki, every piece of paantua, throbs with associations in ways that fried aubergine, deep-fried fish fillets and sweetmeats simply cannot". Another key insight -translation is also a journey in time, the translator's decision to contemporise the language or to seal in the flavour of the past, is crucial.
Arshia Sattar writes about translating The Ramayana, Bibek Debroy on translating The Mahabharata, and Priya Sarukkai Chabria on translating Andal. Chabria explains her three versions: the first is closest to Andal's literal utterance, the second plunges into mythological allusions, and the third, she declares, is the most intuitive, the freest version. Sattar examines the relationship between translator and author. "What was the voice of the text, what was the voice of the so-called author Valmiki, how would I, a twentieth century woman, hear and reproduce a male voice from the distant past, what if I disagreed with or distorted that voice," she asks.
Mini Krishnan raises identity: what makes a language so crucial that people fight wars over it, will die for it? We are citizens of language, she suggests: "The closer you move to your mother-tongue, the deeper you move into the safety zone of a sense of self." And she offers a striking thought: "Translation is not about moving between two dictionaries, but between two encyclopaedias."
It is also about coming home as you step out into the world. Sampurna Chatterji writes of translating from Bengali into English, Welsh and Irish into Bengali: "It was shocking for me to discover… that I had so much Bangla inside me. Where had it been all these years?"
Translating Bharat: Reading India does not claim to be comprehensive - you miss Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Ira Pande, Deepikha Phukan and others, and wish Easterine Kire, for example, was here to write about translating poetry from Tenyidie into English. But this is a good complaint to have about a book, that it whets your appetite for more. There are many pleasures, and many mazes of questions to explore, in this collection.
Hold that thought when you pick up Translating Bharat: Reading India, edited by Neeta Gupta (Yatra Books, Rs 350), a rare set of essays by 15 Indian translators talking about the craft and art of translation. There are few "practitioner" books on the craft of Indian writing and very little that foregrounds the translator, a big omission in a country of so many tongues, dialects, languages.
The collection opens with K Satchidanandan's overiew of pre-colonial translation practices. He writes of a multilingual culture where poets like Kabir, Mira and Nanak easily moved from one language to another, a less self-conscious way of "translation" that mirrors the way many Indians shift even today from one language to another as though they are walking through rooms in a house.
Manisha Chaudhury's memories of growing up in a confidently multilingual home are fascinating. The women were fluent in Hindi, her mother, aunts and grandmother interested in literature, poetry, music, and on good but not intimate terms with English. The men were more fluent in Urdu and English. In a beautiful passage, she writes about the many kinds of Hindi she encountered as a translator - not one Hindi, but multiple branches, from high Sanskritised, artificial Hindi to the colloquial flavour of Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Brajbhasha; Hindustani with its "generous and sonorous" mix of Urdu; film industry Hindi.
The late Lakshmi Holmström, who died this May at the age of 81, contributed a scholarly essay on Salma and the intertwined relationship between the writer's Tamil and Arabic.
Arunava Sinha throws out useful provocations. He uses Buddhadev Basu's Tithidore as an example of the limits of translation, explaining why given the context of a particular scene, "every begoon bhaja, every slice of bhetki, every piece of paantua, throbs with associations in ways that fried aubergine, deep-fried fish fillets and sweetmeats simply cannot". Another key insight -translation is also a journey in time, the translator's decision to contemporise the language or to seal in the flavour of the past, is crucial.
Arshia Sattar writes about translating The Ramayana, Bibek Debroy on translating The Mahabharata, and Priya Sarukkai Chabria on translating Andal. Chabria explains her three versions: the first is closest to Andal's literal utterance, the second plunges into mythological allusions, and the third, she declares, is the most intuitive, the freest version. Sattar examines the relationship between translator and author. "What was the voice of the text, what was the voice of the so-called author Valmiki, how would I, a twentieth century woman, hear and reproduce a male voice from the distant past, what if I disagreed with or distorted that voice," she asks.
Mini Krishnan raises identity: what makes a language so crucial that people fight wars over it, will die for it? We are citizens of language, she suggests: "The closer you move to your mother-tongue, the deeper you move into the safety zone of a sense of self." And she offers a striking thought: "Translation is not about moving between two dictionaries, but between two encyclopaedias."
It is also about coming home as you step out into the world. Sampurna Chatterji writes of translating from Bengali into English, Welsh and Irish into Bengali: "It was shocking for me to discover… that I had so much Bangla inside me. Where had it been all these years?"
Translating Bharat: Reading India does not claim to be comprehensive - you miss Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Ira Pande, Deepikha Phukan and others, and wish Easterine Kire, for example, was here to write about translating poetry from Tenyidie into English. But this is a good complaint to have about a book, that it whets your appetite for more. There are many pleasures, and many mazes of questions to explore, in this collection.
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