TRANSLATION – Central News Hub

‘Translation is not to impose meaning on a text’

In the course of writing on/interviewing several authors who have won major awards, a name would come up repeatedly in the conversation — Rahul Soni. They insisted that the work would not have in its current avatar if Soni had not edited it. One of them even said, “He deserves the award as much as I do — for acquainting me with so many possibilities…”

And they were also right about another thing — he liked being in the shadows.

Also, a translator, his translation of Shrikant Verma’s milestone book of poetry ‘Magadh’ which was published in 2013 has been revised and recently hit the stands (published by Westland Books). In fact, the editor/translator’s translation of International Booker Prize-winning author Geetanjali Shree’s ‘The Roof Beneath Their Feet’ (Penguin) was also republished two months back.

Soni, who first encountered Verma’s ‘Magadh’ in 2007 post a friend’s recommendation remembers that he started translating it almost immediately before he had even finished reading the collection in its entirety. “I was struck most of all by the language, the most arresting thing about the collection – the almost-paradox of its pared-down vocabulary and repetitions, against the slippery circularity and riddle-like ambiguities of its locutions. There was also the intense, often unbearably overwhelming, even indiscriminate, sense of loss – for times, for places, for people – that haunted its pages. I had never translated anything until then; in fact, I didn’t think of what I had begun doing as ‘translation’ at all – I was just so struck by the voice of these poems that I wanted to see if it was possible to achieve those effects in the language I wrote in, i.e., English.”

Stressing that there cannot be a rigid ‘process’ when it comes to translations, he feels different texts require different approaches, thus the process can also change and it is hard to make general rules. For him, the effort is to try and replicate the effects of the original (“there’s a phrase I’ve grown very fond of: the ‘literal force’ of a text”) in the target language without adding or subtracting anything – which he feels is that is ideal. “The other thing I try very hard to do is to resist interpreting. As a translator my job, I feel, is not to impose meaning on a text. It helps, for me, to approach the early drafts as a writer – to try to create a poem or a story that works first, and then over the course of many drafts and revisions get closer and closer to the original…”

Talk to him about the many many writers who acknowledge his work and if editors are finally coming out of the shadows, and he stresses that editors, much like translators, have been mostly doing their thing invisibly; often the best compliment to their craft has been that it is unnoticeable… “I feel lucky that my work has been acknowledged, and I have had the good fortune of getting to work with a number of remarkable writers and translators, perhaps more than my fair share…”

Someone who co-founded ‘Pratilipi’, a bilingual literary journal that carried a lot of translations, and was also associated with ‘Almost Island’ and ‘Asymptote’, he feels we need many more small magazines. Arguing that small presses and little magazines are crucial to the health of literary culture in any language – to keep it vibrant, diverse, to push the envelope and take risks, he adds, “One cannot rely on mainstream publishing to do that.”

While the past decade and a half has witnessed a boom in translations from Indian languages into English, he says some important changes that have come about in the past few years – Arunava Sinha’s translation of Sankar’s Chowringhee and then Srinath Perur’s translation of Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar were perhaps key turning points.

“Translation has moved beyond the realm of the worthy, you-ought-to-read-this literary classic, and the focus has shifted equally to more modern and contemporary literary works, and to a larger variety of works – including non-fiction, and commercial and genre fiction. Some major literary prizes now recognize and award translations; there is more awareness in the media and more conversation around it. So there has been more work in translation being published perhaps – or it’s been more visible, certainly. I’m not sure it has necessarily translated into a greater readership for these books though.”

As the conversation veers towards the market for literary works published in English in India, he feels the same has always had a very niche audience owing to a host of economic and socio-cultural reasons. Stressing that the average sales of a work of ‘literary fiction’ in the English language in India, whether it has been written originally in English or is a translation, are not very different, the editor-translator adds, “Poetry fares a little worse, but again, I’m sure the numbers for English originals and translations are not all that different here either. I do not think most readers of literature discriminate between whether a work is a translation or not. It is a small market, one that I don’t think has expanded much in the past many years and would not rapidly expand in the near future.”

Busy publishing full-time, at the moment (“and a number of books that I am very happy about”), he says there are some writing and translation projects/ ideas he would like to get back to. “But like most of us, I am struggling to balance the demands of job life and creative work.”

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‘Translation, the best way to attract global audience’

Adding that more translations from twentieth-century Urdu literature are needed to demonstrate the literary backdrop in which contemporary works, whether in Urdu or English, are being written… says Musharraf Ali Farooqi.

xxxMuch more than a tale of two enigmatic individuals past their prime and beyond the underlying recital of love, honour and treachery, what his book ‘Between Clay and Dust’, shortlisted for The Man Asian Literary Prize 2012 and longlisted for the 2013 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, stood out for were the silences it evoked long after the last page had been turned.

Pakistani author Musharraf Ali Farooqi latest offering is for children — ‘Monster Folktales from South Asia’ (HarperCollins India), with illustrations by Michelle Farooqi. He says the idea was to find a monster from local folklore and employ an ‘overcoming the Monster’ plot to tell the story.

“As all the stories are from provinces in Pakistan, I hoped to engage school children across the country. What child would not like to have a local monster and a local hero to boast of?” says this author and translator, who is also the founder of the interactive storytelling program ‘Storykit’.

Talk to him about how over a period of time, and in the face of multiple entertainment platforms, folktales are escaping children’s lives, and he blames the modern school, as it exists today. He feels that engagement with stories does not fit well in the testing-heavy model of modern schooling, so there is little focus on stories.

“The constant academic testing also takes away the downtime children used to have after school. More online entertainment choices are available to kids today, but they are fundamentally different in structure from storybooks. Some of them use characters and story-like structures, but are in fact closer in form and intent to the testing mechanisms used at schools. They are designed for constant engagement, requiring a player to keep moving forward. They do not allow a child to pause, idle or think. In this, they represent the opposite of the engagement children can have with books.”

Considering the fact that in the past two decades, contemporary English literature from Pakistan has earned a massive reader base in India, he feels that for readers here, one factor is the natural curiosity about lives and stories from a common culture, only accessible through books and other media.

Adding that more translations from twentieth-century Urdu literature are needed to demonstrate the literary backdrop in which contemporary works, whether in Urdu or English, are being written, he says: “This consciousness is missing, even in Pakistan, where people think that reading Manto is enough to know what is worthy in 20th century Urdu literature. It is a sadly misconceived notion of twentieth-century Urdu literature.”

Further adding that Pakistanis need to read more Indian literature, particularly translations from the many regional languages, he says: “Urdu literary magazines such as ‘Aaj’ have a tradition of publishing contemporary Indian writers in Urdu translation and we need more such platforms both in Urdu and English.”

Even as Indian publishers have started bringing out more translations into English from different Indian languages, which are winning major literary honours in the country, the author says that it is thrilling to see this trend.

“My friends, the translation juggernaut Arunava Sinha and Daisy Rockwell, are making very important contributions to world literature through their wonderful translations of twentieth-century Indian literature. Similarly, I feel that a greater and more meaningful engagement for Urdu literature will come when we translate the many accomplished works from twentieth-century Urdu literature, which are not as much a part of the literary conversation today as they should be. Translations are the best and the only way to attract an international audience for our literature.”

The author, who launched the ‘Urdu Thesaurus’ (urduthesaurus.com), a mega project which he developed over a five-year period remembers that in his work as a translator of classical Urdu texts he often encountered words that could not be found in standard dictionaries.

“About 15 years ago, I began collecting dictionaries so that I could rely on them for the many uncommon words I encountered in my work. Dictionaries are typically very heavy creatures and I often wished there was an online dictionary to make my own work easy. Finally, I decided to do it myself. As synonyms were an important part of the project, I thought of beginning with a thesaurus first. There are fewer fields to fill in an electronic database. I am proud of the ‘possible synonyms’ innovation in the Urdu Thesaurus. But it remains a work in progress. It will be completed when it features the meanings of words and a dictionary of antonyms.”

Stressing that it was important to reexamine how languages are taught in Southeast Asian countries, he says that traditionally after children had learned their letters and speech, they worked with story texts to acquire proficiency in the language. Once that is achieved, the world of knowledge truly opens up.

“Short fables we find in the Panchatantra, parables from Gulistan and Boostan of Saadi, were all used for instruction. A whole world of information can be fitted into a story. And this capsule of knowledge can be easily comprehended and retained. Today, we have moved away from this instruction model. I hope to revive it in some way because I acquired proficiency in language from reading stories, not texts taught at school,” says the author whose last work of fiction ‘The Merman and the Book of Power: A Qissa’, was conceived as a trilogy.

“I am currently working on the next two books,” he concludes.

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