Written in our own words

August 27, 2016 04:00 pm | Updated 07:04 pm IST

Bengali writer Buddhadev Bose.  Photo: Wiki Commons

Bengali writer Buddhadev Bose. Photo: Wiki Commons

That literary phenomenon Salman Rushdie, a genius who successfully “translated” himself, said, “I would not be this writer if I had never left India; and I could not be this writer if I hadn’t come from there”. Well, August, in India, is a good month to remember that the vocabulary and psyche of this “translated man” (his own words) were shaped by what happened a hundred years before he was born.

Let’s go back a blip in time. Six months after The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in the 50th year of India’s independence, the Times Higher Education ran a full-page review of the (extinct) Macmillan India translations and titled it ‘Vernacular Spectacular’ (Feb 6, 1998). The reviewer compared The God of Small Things to a Malayalam work in the Macmillan series by Matampu Kunjukuttan, Brushte (trs Vasanthi Sankaranarayanan), and after using words like “stupendous” and “hypnotic” to describe the novel, said, “How sad that such a book, despite this fine English translation, is doomed to be known only in India while Roy’s book is widely accepted in the West as the novel set in Kerala. This is like comparing an elephant with an ant.”

Twenty years later, and despite a hundred outstanding translations from Indian publishing houses, how much has changed? Some time ago, when I sent information about novellas by some extremely well-known Indian women, all translated to English, to the Indian editor of a U.K.-based website, her enthusiastic response was, “Great, send me copies and I will arrange a discussion and interviews in London.” She didn’t even know where they were.

But all is not lost. A ghostly game is in progress. Could some of the success of Indians writers in English come from soaking up India through translations and carom-shooting with dazzling skill what they lack in direct experience? Think how profitable fishing in Adivasi or Dalit waters would be.

Like a black column rearing out of the earth, like a pillar left over from the Iron Age, stood a lone palmyra tree, a testimony to three generations of prayer… Was the tree alive or dead? The truth was a secret as long and dark as the tree itself. Above ground, its life-force had been extinguished. But under the ground… like a vast network of roots, its aatma had spread everywhere. ( Beychi Tree, (Tamil) Thenmozhi/ trs Malini Seshadri.)

An Indian who writes in English and who doesn’t know Sanskrit has already parachuted a Sanskrit scholar into his novel. Place it against Ekti Jibon by Buddhadev Bose, which every Indian should read in his or her own language or at least in English. A Life is about an impoverished teacher of Sanskrit setting out to prepare a dictionary of Bengali.

The light grew dim, the silence of a provincial evening thickened in the room. He forgot to sit down, he forgot his hunger… He woke up at five to write for two hours, drank his share of milk, went out to take private tuitions, bought the day’s provisions, and returned… On the day before Kali Puja, he wrote the first letter of the Bengali alphabet, “AW” in a bold hand. (trs Arunava Sinha.)

Likewise, not many can transpose her India like Sarah Joseph, as the excerpt below shows. But despite her huge corpus of work, she will never make it to the pages of Time magazine.

“Da, aren’t you the son of that Theredya?” The Vicar asked Manikyan when he was in the seventh standard.

“My mother’s name is Thresia.”

“Pha! You upstart! Thresia? Since when has a convert started calling herself Thresia?”

The Vicar believed it was not for converts to use the names of upper-caste Christians. Not Thresia, but Theredya. Not Ousep, but Athuppu. Not Devassi, but Dehathi.

As Manikyan was about to climb the flight of steps with the other children for their first communion, the Vicar stopped him.

“You just wait there. Don’t come up and pollute the place.”

That day Manikyan, son of Theredya, decided that one day he would dash up those very steps, join the seminary, study theology and become a priest. ( Othappu , trs Valson Thampu.)

Prizes like the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature pit translations in English against fiction written originally in English. Apples and mangoes? Thus do we watch Bharathipura (Kannada) losing to Chinaman (2012); The Mirror of Beauty (Urdu) knocked back by The Lowland (2015); and Hangwoman (Malayalam) pipped by Sleeping on Jupiter (2016). Around the time of the Times Higher Education review, Nayantara Sahgal, speaking about literary tradition and how non-Europe is driven by cultural markers and norms unrelated to its ethos, said, “It seems to me that I’ve always lived in a world according to elsewhere.”

When can we hope to see a prize exclusively for translations from South Asia?

Mini Krishnan is Consultant, Publishing, Oxford University Press, India.

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