Translation is an enterprise fraught with politics. I thought I knew that but there are two kinds of knowing: there is the knowing in the mind and there is the knowing in the body. When I did my first reading of Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar, which I translated from Marathi, one of my friends who was in the audience stood up and asked, “But do you know Marathi that well?”
I do not remember the answer I gave. In l’espirit d’escalier, many wonderful retorts have come to my mind since, some scatological, but the one that I did not give was a question, “Why do you ask? Is it because my name suggests that I might not know Marathi well enough to translate?”
Will I ever be brave enough to answer that way? I don’t know. Will translators ever be brave enough to talk about money? I don’t know. But already I can imagine the editors and publishers and writers of Translating Bharat Reading India thinking, “Is he ever going to talk about our book?”
Here it is. I didn’t think the name was such a great idea though I have no doubt that its true subtext is simultaneity with the suggestion of a mutually enriching coexistence. This is the underlying spirit also of India that is Bharat: unity in diversity.
But if you speak a dialect — which is any language that has no economic power and no army — then you know this is more often read as “we should stay united and you can be as diverse as you want as long as you don’t disrupt my agenda”.
So let us assume a dialect poet is to be translated into Hindi. How does the dialect poet respond to the deletion of two lines that the translator says, ‘just won’t work’ with ‘this audience’? But don’t even go that far. Let’s start with English, the bone of contention, the elephant in the room, an elephant with diarrhoea.
An elegant friend of mine, diamond of the first water, elegant speaker of the English language with consonants as clearly cut as crystal, fluent in the language and in its subtexts, had a book she had written and published in India accepted for republication in the U.S. Her manuscript came back with thousands of comments, demands for explanations, demands for English equivalents, all of which the anonymous editor in a brownstone in Manhattan (let us say) thought would not work for ‘this audience’.
My elegant friend had been turned by the dialectic elephant into a dialect writer. Our English is not your English.
This is why one can only welcome a book like Translating Bharat Reading India , with or without a serial comma in the title. The writers span a wide range of political positions from Bibek Debroy to K. Satchidanandan.
There are those who have translated and those who have commissioned translation. There are scholarly works with footnotes and there are discursive pieces. You are sure to find something to annoy you, to amaze you or to enlighten you. You might need another verb for lines like: “If we were to summarize what the ethnography of translation would look like in India, we would say that translation locates the locution to the location as it allows us to travel.” (Udaya Narayan Singh in an essay called ‘Translating and Writing as Othering’.)
I like the fact that there are other scripts here. No, let me be clear, there is only one other script besides the Roman, and that is Devanagari. This may or may not be a problem. It only depends on how you’re looking at it.
I wonder what Lakshmi Holmström MBE (whom we lost this year) would have made of that. Probably, she would have smiled sadly and moved on. I’m trying that one too.
Jerry Pinto has translated Baluta by Daya Pawar, Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar and I, the Salt Doll by Vandana Mishra.
Published - June 25, 2016 04:00 pm IST
