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One of the things that makes us unique as a species is our language.
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Humans speak in languages that can embody concepts, construct and contain narratives,
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communicate across time and space.
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And yet, just as language unites us, it also divides us.
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There are over 6,000 languages in existence, at least 1,000 of which have a written form.
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We live this beautiful diversity every day on the streets of India.
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And there is great art created in all these languages, the best of which combines local
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flavor with a universal essence which anyone from anywhere could relate to if they could
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understand the language.
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This multiplicity of languages is beautiful but presents one problem.
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As readers, how can we understand the wonders of other languages?
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We rely on translation.
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And that is why if language is essential and writing is important, then translation matters.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My subject today is the art of translation and my guest is Orunav Sinha, who is no stranger
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to lovers of Bengali literature.
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Orunav has translated more than 50 books from Bengali to English and has introduced authors
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such as Asha Purnadevi, Shankar, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Sharadandu Bondopadhyay, Sunil
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Kongopadhyay, Bonufool, Budhudeb Bose, Banuranjan Biyapari and Noboroon Bhattacharya to a wider
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English reading audience.
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I am delighted that he has agreed to join me for a conversation today.
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But before we begin, let's take a quick commercial break.
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If you enjoy listening to The Scene and the Unseen, you can play a part in keeping the
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The Scene and the Unseen has been a labor of love for me.
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I have enjoyed putting together many stimulating conversations, expanding my brain and my universe
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and hopefully yours as well.
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But while the work has been its own reward, I don't actually make much money off the show.
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Although The Scene and the Unseen has great numbers, advertisers haven't really woken
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up to the insane engagement level of podcasts.
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Because I do many many hours of deep research for each episode, besides all the logistics
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of producing the show myself, scheduling guests, booking studios, paying technicians, the travel
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So well, I am trying a new way of keeping this thing going.
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My proposition for you is this.
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For every episode of The Scene and the Unseen that you enjoy, buy me a cup of coffee or
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even a lavish lunch, whatever you feel is worth.
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You can do this by heading over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contributing an amount of
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The Scene and the Unseen will continue to be free on all podcast apps and at sceneunseen.in.
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This is just a gesture of appreciation.
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Help keep the thing going.
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Sceneunseen.in slash support.
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Orinabo, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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Thank you for having me here.
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So, you know, before we sort of get to your fascinating career, I remember you, I remember
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your byline from like a long, long time ago, mainly as a journalist.
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Then I gradually became aware of your remarkable career and all these books.
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And I'm of course half Bengali and you know, my father reads all your books and talks about
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So I think he'll be delighted that you're finally on my show.
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Tell me a little bit about yourself, like, you know, where did you grow up?
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What was the education?
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So I was born in Calcutta and I grew up there.
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Well, I technically spent the first four years of my life in Bombay, but very faint memories
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I went to school in Calcutta and then like all or most Bengali boys of my generation,
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I was prepping for a, you know, you either go into medicine or you go into engineering.
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And I was prepping for engineering.
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I actually got in, surprising even myself.
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I got into Jadupo University and I joined electrical engineering.
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It took about three weeks to realize that this was not for me.
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And also that, you know, there was no sense in wasting what could be the best or some
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of the best years of your life studying something that you didn't want to.
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So I contrived to fail enough papers and create and burn my boards as it was so that there
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I couldn't go back and start again.
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And I started afresh the next year with English literature in the same university on the same
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So it was a complete turn as far as I imagined that my life took a completely different turn.
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While I was studying English literature, the whole idea was then I was fairly set on being
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So you know, BA, MA, then you go for, back then you had to do an MPhil and then you try
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to go abroad for a PhD.
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So that was the set path.
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But we used to bring out a college magazine, you know, in the old cyclostyle format.
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And immediately after my BA final exams, a job opportunity opened up in a youth magazine
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in Calcutta, which I took.
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And six months, not even six months, within three months of that, I was sure that that
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was what I wanted to do.
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So there when the academic track completely, I enrolled for my MA, didn't go through with
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it after the first year, and just became a journalist.
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And that too sort of entrepreneurial journalist in the sense that it was our own magazine.
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After we managed to run that to the ground in about two years, we started a city magazine
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and that was funded by what you would today call an angel investor.
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And that did quite well.
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We actually had a circulation of about 20,000, a monthly magazine and we even pioneered this
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whole business of local listings, paid local listings, which became the rage much later.
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So it was good, but we couldn't manage the finances well enough.
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So four years later, the angel investor who had since then handed over to another one,
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they said, sorry, we were out of time.
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It was called Calcutta Skyline.
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But interestingly, it was also where the seeds of my future, which I had no idea about at
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that stage as a translator was sown because we used to translate one short story from
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Bengali every month for every issue.
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And I did several of those translations and also sort of spearheaded that whole initiative
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roping in others to translate as well.
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So then I worked for a little bit longer in Calcutta and then moved to Delhi as believe
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it or not, a business journalist is having absolutely zero credentials, but except writing.
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But I worked for business today for eight years, which became a management magazine
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So it was interesting because you didn't have to know the nuts and bolts of what normally
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went into a business magazine and doing a management oriented magazine meant that you
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had to read enormously and assimilate enormously and then write it in a way that would be both
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Then in 2000, you know, even then we were writing about the net a good deal because
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technology was very much part of management.
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And then in 2000, when the internet media opened up in India, so I decided that I was
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going to move in there.
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So I sort of walked into the indya.com offices and I said, you know, this is where I'm going
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And they said, who the hell are you?
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So I said, it doesn't matter how many people do you have walking in to say that they want
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So, you know, just don't look gift houses in the mouth.
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I've been a journalist and just take my word for it.
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And I moved to Bangalore from Delhi and so yeah, I'd moved to Delhi before that from
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Calcutta for business today and then on to Bangalore for two years.
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Then as usual with my Midas Touch, indya.com folded after two years.
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So then I moved back to Delhi with India Times and then it was in the internet for a long
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time after that for about 12 years, being a journalist.
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And then I moved on to being a product manager, building new products, which I did for a startup
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called iBibo and then for ndtv.com as well.
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So yeah, this is my life as a journalist.
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Wow, that's quite an arc.
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And what kind of struck me when you were talking about your decision in college to fail your
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engineering exams was when you said that you decided immediately that you don't want to
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waste the best years of your life and the thought that struck me was that that is an
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enormous amount of maturity for a fresher undergrad because I remember at that age,
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my thinking was not at all as clear about things.
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And then you said you went on to do English lit.
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So I'm guessing that a lot of this must have been driven by a love for books.
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So what kind of books did you read?
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Did you read in both English and Bengali?
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You know, what was the shaping of your literary taste?
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So I used to read exclusively in Bengali till the age of about eight.
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I started reading quite early.
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By about five, I was reading and I was reading Bangla till eight when I discovered till seven
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when I discovered Enid Blyton.
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And then I did this sort of overnight shift to reading English books.
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And so yeah, also school life, I think I devoured everything there was for our age group.
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So starting with Enid Blyton and then there were other very interesting school series
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You know, there was a lovely one by Eleanor M. Brent Dyer called the Chalet School, which
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was quite exotic because that school was not even located anywhere fixed.
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They would move around different European countries.
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And back then in the 1970s, European countries were just concept.
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I mean, you know, we had no idea what it actually meant.
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But this school was in Switzerland today and in Germany tomorrow and it was a girls school.
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So there was this, you know, other sort of undercurrent of fascination also because of
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the fact that these were clearly teenage girls, although completely antiseptic.
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But you know, there were two levels of attraction as it were, as one grew older.
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So there was those and then there was some teenage science fiction, a series called Tom
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Swift, which I remember reading a lot of and then moving very quickly on to Trash.
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So Alistair McLean, which is not Trash really and Desmond Bagley and then anything on the
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And I read indiscriminately, like I think everybody, everybody.
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So you pick one book and then you pick the next book and you pick the next book.
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So with the result that I was reading Camus, The Outsider, followed by Harold Robin's Carpet
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Bagger, followed by The Old Man in the Sea, which I hated at that point.
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Yeah, I'm ambivalent about Old Man.
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I'm ambivalent about, I mean, great writing, but too much machismo for me.
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And then Somerset Mom, whom I really couldn't stand, I don't know.
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And unfortunately, I think some of these early impressions are very hard to undo.
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So even if it turns out later that no, no, no, these are good people to read, you are
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just somehow, you know, it's baked into you that I don't like Somerset Mom and that's
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But yeah, and Woodhouse, I said, and Woodhouse, I think was the biggest value of reading Woodhouse
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was becoming sensitive about language.
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But Woodhouse, he almost read purely at the level of the language, the incidents didn't
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So yeah, so quite a lot of reading.
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Bangla, I did not read too much at that point, but we had to study it in school.
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And then I found it very difficult to write, it was proving to be a very tall order.
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So my uncle, my father's elder cousin, who himself is a poet, he put me through my paces
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of writing by making me summarize the art textbooks.
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And that in some mysterious way got me into both reading and writing Bangla again at a
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My Bangla spelling became almost perfect, which is unbelievable.
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But I realized that by the act of writing fixes your spelling.
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And I started reading a good deal in Bangla as well, starting mind you with trash.
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I still remember this one particular book, which was called Hutta Himal Hawa, which literally
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is, you know, murder cold wind.
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And there was this very clear extramarital affair that was going on between the wife
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of an industrialist and her Sarod instructor.
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And it was full of these very elegant ways of describing physical relationships, you
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know, so much so that for the longest time, I always used to think that a kiss word could
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only be described as imprinting the mark of your lips on another's.
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I mean, I did not know any other way of putting it.
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So yeah, but yeah, I read, I read a lot in both languages.
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No, and this is making me really nostalgic because obviously, you know, there are certain
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authors and certain sort of canons, which are very familiar to Indians growing up in
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the seventies, eighties, nineties.
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I don't think Somerset Mom would have been read so much outside the country necessarily
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in the West, but over here and also the sort of the deification of Woodhouse and the pedestal
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that he is quite correctly put on is sort of strikes a chord.
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Did you also want to be a writer?
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No, I never actually wanted to be a writer.
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Even though you were a journalist and you did write a lot.
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Yeah, even so, I mean, yeah, I've never wanted to be to write and I'm full of admiration
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for people who can write books and I don't think I'm capable of actually finishing writing
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That's very interesting.
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So, you know, so you, you had translated these couple of stories for the magazine when you
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were young and then you come back to translation more than a decade and a half later.
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So what happened was that just before I, so the story is that just before I left Calcutta,
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this was in 1992, Shankar, who some of his stories I had translated for the magazine,
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one actually, he got in touch with me and he said that he wanted an English translation
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of Chorangi and he said that it was for a French publisher who wanted to read an English
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version before taking the decision to translate it into French.
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And back then, mind you, 92, so I don't think English language publishing in the new wave
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In the sense, Penguin may have just set up with Anand, no, they had, I think by the late
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80s, they were already publishing Shunil Ganguly and others, I think, but yeah, they were the
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And there was no sense that, you know, you could actually translate for being published,
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the concept didn't exist.
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So I translated it for him in a few years.
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I did it in about a month and a half, you know, staying back in the office late at night
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after work and bashing it out on the office computer and then taking printouts on those
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old accordion folded, you know, on dot matrix printers on those accordion folded pages.
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And then before leaving Delhi, leaving Calcutta for Delhi, I handed him the whole pota as
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Here's your novel in English.
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Was it the only copy that you handed?
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No, but I kept a copy on a five and a half inch floppy disk, which was the disk drive
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back then, a word star document.
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I remember those thin brown thingies.
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And I carried that with me under the impression that five and a half inch floppies were going
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And that I had a digital copy.
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And then there was no word from him and nothing occasionally, you know, when I was, when you
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had this spiritual crisis at work, I would toy with the idea of, let me translate a novel.
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But of course I never got beyond a line or two.
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Now, 2006, I am already at that age where I'm about to have a full blown midlife crisis.
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So red Ferrari or something equally weird is going to happen.
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I know that it's getting me in the face at that point.
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When I get a call from Diyakar at Penguin, whom I, because all Calcutta people, you know,
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know one another somehow, it's a village.
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So she called and she said, did you ever translate Chowrangi?
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And I said, wow, this is a true blast from the past world.
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How did this come to you?
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So she said, you know, we want to publish a translation.
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And we got in touch with the writer and Shankar said, look, there is a translation, but I
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don't remember who did it.
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But I have the printout.
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So he sent it to us and I found your name on it.
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So luckily I'd put my name on the, on the copy.
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I think your floppy disk by now would have disappeared.
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So there's a story behind that as well.
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So, and she said, so we'd love to publish it.
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So I said, wow, that's fantastic.
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And what do I have to do?
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So she said, do you want to take another look at the text?
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And then I said, I don't need a printout.
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So I took my floppy disk, which had strangely enough survived several house moves and city
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So I took it to Nehru place and I said, can you get the data out of this one?
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But after two days, even they threw their hand up and said, no, we are not able to.
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So I took that printout and I gave it to a professional typist.
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And I said, now you type it all out for me, because by that time, of course we moved to
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We've got Microsoft Word.
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So he typed it all out for me and then I lightly edited it a bit and then that was it.
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That was very unexpected.
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It's probably been my most successful book in the sense of sales in India.
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It was extremely successful.
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And funnily or not, I signed away the copyright and all monetary considerations at the time
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I translated it for the princely sum.
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Actually not princely, it was quite a decent amount back then of 6,000 rupees, which was
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twice my monthly salary in the late 80s in 92.
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That was 2x of my monthly salary, 2 and 3,000 rupees a month.
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So I was very pleased, 6,000 rupees just as I'm moving cities was a windfall to me.
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But I had no idea how publishing worked, how copyrights worked and so on.
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So eventually it turned out that I made absolutely no money from the sales and from the sales
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But you know, it started me off on something, on what's become my life.
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So I have absolutely...
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But is it fair to say that you do what you do because of the love of it?
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The money is a nice bonus, but the work is on the world.
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The money is a nice bonus and it helps holidays and other expenses.
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You can't build your life around your earnings from translations.
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So yeah, it's not primarily the money, but it isn't for, I mean, I've met many translators
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around the world and even the ones who earn well don't do it for the money or primarily
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I was reading Edith Grossman's book, Why Translation Matters and there's a quote from it which
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struck me and she writes, quote, translation is a strange craft, generally appreciated
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by writers with a few glaring exceptions like Milan Kundera whose attack on his French translator
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was so virulent it achieved a kind of a sour kind of notoriety.
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Undervalued by publishers, translators fees tend to be so low that agents generally are
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not interested in representing them.
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Civilized by the academic world, there are still promotion and tenure committees that
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do not consider translations to be serious publications and practically ignored by reviewers.
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Astonishingly, it is still possible to find reviews that do not even mention the translator's
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name let alone discuss the quality of the translation.
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It is an occupation that many critics agree is impossible at best, a betrayal at worst
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and on the average probably not much more than the accumulated result of a diligent
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even slavish familiarity with dictionaries although bringing a text over into another
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language has a long and glorious history, stop quote.
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So this brings me to the question, why on earth did you become a translator?
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Yeah, so you know it's a great question because I don't know and again I've asked others
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how, why and how and all of them have the same answer, we don't know.
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There's some button somewhere you know that makes you, I think it's the instinct of amateur
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singer who's quite good as a singer but will never make it as a top class singer.
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So what do you do when you hear anything, you start humming it right and you want to
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sing it to perfection because you want to recreate that same feeling that you had when
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you heard the original.
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I think it's an instinct like that.
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So that's what makes you do it but I can tell you this, it's a drug.
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You start and you cannot stop, you really cannot stop, I mean I'm at the point where
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if I finish like the like Troll Up, so like Troll Up, I think it was Troll Up, if I finish
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a translation at 6.15 in the evening, I will start a new one at 6.25, I kid you not.
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It is really like that because finishing a translation is such a feeling of the end of
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the world that the only way you can survive is by starting the next one.
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So it is a drug and I think there's a certain amount of ego involved because you know you
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feel although anyone not too many people might know that hey so many thousands of people
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would not have read this book had I not translated it and if you come to think of it, if translators
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go on strike around the world, world literature is going to collapse, publishing is going
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So it's incredible that something that is so important a part of the literary system
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is actually not acknowledged for I think what it achieves or the people behind it are not
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acknowledged to the extent perhaps that they should.
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But having said that, I don't think that that's a problem because you know at the end of
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the day, there are exceptions I'm sure, but most translators don't do it for to be considered
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And also I would guess that when you translate something, you are of course one you're driven
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by the book that you're translating is something that you love and you want to share it with
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everyone but also by the creative urge because you know typically the non-reader would assume
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that translation is nothing than you know you can take a dictionary and one day AI will
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do it and you just transcribe all the words.
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But it's actually not that and I'm reminded of you know Gregory Rabassa who was Marquez's
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famous translator while you know after he translated the book was asked this bizarre
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question by this interviewer on do you know enough Spanish to be able to translate the
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work and Rabassa's incredible response was that the question is not whether I know enough
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Spanish the question is whether I know enough English you know thereby indicating that you
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know it's almost like creating an entirely new work.
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You know another famous translator Herbert Bates who translated Odyssey earlier of course
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which is you know Emily Wilson's latest translation is quite mind-blowing but Bates said once
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said about translation and this is a very sexist remark but it was made many many decades
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earlier where he said that a translation can be like a wife if she's beautiful she won't
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be faithful if she's faithful she won't be beautiful which is incredibly sexist but there
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is something to that also.
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So is this a trade-off that you encounter while translating that you know on the one
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hand you want to get everything right and you know not change too much but on the other
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hand your true loyalty is to the essence of what is what the author is trying to convey.
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So how has your response to this evolved like was this something that you thought about
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consciously reading up what others said on it especially while doing your first translation
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or did you sort of discover your own thinking on it as you went along?
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Yeah it's the latter when I did my first translation I had no idea of what thoughts had gone into
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the process especially because remember those days these books were not available the way
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they are now and there was no internet so there was no way really of reading up and
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if at all you went to the library and read you only read things like Walter Benjamin's
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famous essay and so on which was delightful but completely useless when it came to actually
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translating into a translation strategy.
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So yeah my first and I realized when I look back now at my earlier work that I was very
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much focused on bringing the words over into the new language and very often that led to
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One of a British critic described my translation of Cherungia's fruity and spicy and I think
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it was a very kind way of saying that it was not English it had all these you know exotic
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equatorial flavors from a different land but in retrospect I wonder if that's necessarily
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a bad thing either so you know the real battle is not about fealty and beauty because there's
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no conflict between them the real battle which you're always fighting and negotiating in
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your head is let's say I'm translating from Bangla not why let's say I am translating
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from Bangla to English so is my English going to bring Bangla into it or is the Bangla text
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going to become an English text that is the real battle you know.
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So the point is that you know after translation will it then slip so easily into the stream
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of English or literature written in the English language that you no longer think of its origins
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it now belongs to all the books that have been written in English and that's a perfectly
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fine strategy to go with if in the process of doing that you may have to do you know
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adopt certain tactics where you are saying that I will not make the reader stumble on
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anything when they're reading it in English because hey the reader did not stumble on
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the original so my attempt is to be faithful to the experience of the reader and the experience
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of the reader in terms of the ease with which he can he or she they can navigate the text
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for example if I am reading the original text with a sense of I understand this I get this
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should I make the reader interrogate the text when it goes into a new language because I
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am insistent on keeping some of the flavors and material and words from the original language
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or I can say that no it's not an English text it is a text which has been rendered into
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English but it belongs to another language and therefore I don't want you to read it
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as though it is part of the English canon it is not remember always that it is a Bangla
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text or a text in a language that you are not familiar with therefore you will encounter
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unfamiliarities the way you might not if you were reading a text written in English and
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that is correct that is the right approach because the reader of the Bangla text is not
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the reader of the English text so why should I assume that two readers so far separated
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in space and time should have exactly the same kind of response or that the effect should
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be the same on both of you and there is no one answer to this question you know it's
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a question that we bat around in our heads and it's a question that I encounter continuously
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in the in the translation classes that I teach at Ashoka University and I just eventually
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tell everybody that you have to come to your own conclusion neither answer is right or
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wrong that is why you can have multiple translations of the same text and each may have a different
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Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak's translations of Masha Dadebi for example is faithful to
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all the academic aspects of the original text which she wants to identify and then carry
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across to the reader so these academic aspects of the original text are not necessarily what
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Masha Dadebi intended when she was writing but for an academic reader for a reader who
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is reading it with a particular objective they are crucial and if you can get those
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aspects that you will respond to academically cerebrally from the original text then you
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must do the same thing from the English text absolutely right she is her motive is clearly
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enunciated in the extended introduction that she writes so you know where she's coming
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from someone else might say no I just want to read it for translated for someone who
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is casually picking up a copy of the book and just wants to read it and is not interested
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in the academic ramification so that lead to a different kind of translation and I'm
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not saying that these translations will be terrifically divergent from one another not
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at all I mean I've often picked up so for example you know Lydia Davis has translated
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Proust she's translated Swan's Way and she's called it the Way of Swan and she says that
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my attempt is not to make the French English but to make sure that the reader understands
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that there's a different language underneath even if the words are English to be honest
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when I read the two translations I can see the difference but they're not so far apart
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for me that makes me think oh wow this one is anglicized and this one is not but then
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you realize that it lies in some details here and there so the divergences are not enormous
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but in the translators head somewhere the strategies are different so it's as I said
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it's not about beaut I mean it has the translation has to be as beautiful as the original that
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goes without saying and indeed making it as beautiful as the original is part of the process
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of being faithful you can't change the paltry to quotient so to speak and still claim that
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you're true to the original just because you're trying to maybe take across the meanings of
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the words and the meanings of the words in a very limited sense because what is a word
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what is a sentence it is not just its dictionary equivalent it is a rhythm it is a sound it
#
is music it is silence what is the writer not saying in the sentence you must make sure
#
you don't give voice to what the writer has not given voice to you must hear the silence
#
and protect the silence so it's a whole bunch of things and really what you are faithful
#
to as a translator is your reading of that text translator is the closest reader there
#
can be of any text I think even closer than the writer themselves.
#
So a couple of thoughts that sort of emerged from what you just said one is when you're
#
talking about Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's translation of Mahashweta Devi and her being
#
faithful to what she felt was the academic aspects of it even though you said Mahashweta
#
Devi may not have intended those aspects so now this brings up the question of should
#
we think of the text as something that stands apart from the author and the author's possible
#
intention for example Ralph Mannheim said something which was quite interesting to me
#
where he said quote translators are like actors who speak the lines as the author would if
#
the author could speak English stop quote so you know so when you're translating is
#
that something at the back of your mind that what is the author's voice how closely can
#
you replicate that in a separate language how closely can you replicate the intention
#
or are you saying that this is the work this is what the work means to me and that's what
#
I have to get across and keep the author out of the equation no no sorry I think I didn't
#
put that well I don't mean at all that this I am trying to take across what the work means
#
to me leaving the author out of the equation not at all and in fact I don't believe that
#
the translator should be interpreting the work in any way but what I'm getting at is
#
that the translator still reads it and you know hears the text and hears a voice now
#
the point is I will be true to the voice that I'm hearing is that the voice that the author
#
intended I do not know there is actually no way of knowing right but yeah to the extent
#
that I am intent on taking across the author's voice the way I hear it it is very much the
#
author's work that I'm taking across but the interesting thing is that none of this is
#
a deconstructed process it's not as though you have to break it down into components
#
okay voice sound rhythm none of that it's all fused in the text and really if you are
#
led by the text and if you're a good translator then all of these things will automatically
#
be carried through so you don't have to worry about these things individually when translating
#
you have to worry about whether after you've translated whether when you're reading it
#
you're getting the same kind of feeling as when you read the original that's important
#
you know it's important to read it to yourself read it out loud go back to your memory of
#
the original text and see if you're getting that same notion if you're being carried along
#
the same way if you stop pausing at the right place if you're laughing at the same spot
#
if you're crying at the same spots or not these are important and some so this business
#
of the effect you're trying to create in the reader now some language for example English
#
is not as effervescent a language as Bangla Bangla can pile on metaphors one after the
#
other and it does not even seem very weird try doing that and try translating to go literally
#
into English and it will seem the most over-the-top text ever as you can see when you read his
#
own translations they're weird right I mean no wonder he attracted labels of being a mistake
#
and so on the original texts are anything but mystical but once taken into English because
#
of the strange strange images that are created which are not you know they don't flow naturally
#
from the English language you end up with a very different notion of the text even if
#
the words are the same so that is where you know your judgment has to come in so you have
#
to actually when you're putting it into English you have to actually temper it down because
#
you want ultimately to achieve a similar effect you know Deborah Smith who translated the
#
vegetarian from Korean she was there was a huge storm of criticism of her work from Korea
#
when they said that oh there are many she's completely changed the tone because Korean
#
is a much you know it's like East many languages from Asia it operates at a much more metaphorical
#
level it has a higher pitch and so on and English she is sort of tamped it down my point
#
is that if you try to you know maintain that same pitch in English it would be hysterical
#
so you actually do have to tamp it down so these are the points where you know it's like
#
the author is speaking out in the street and you hear him in the backdrop of all the other
#
noises and then suddenly you know you're translating him and you're putting him in a soundproof
#
studio you have to load his volume otherwise he's going to sound abnormally loud this is
#
always actually seen you know one of the things I wonder about that languages are so fundamentally
#
different that are they translatable at all for example I was reading this excellent book
#
by Guy Dorscher called Through the Language Glass and there was a paragraph that struck
#
me in that quote there are four tongues worthy of the world's use says the Talmud Greek for
#
song Latin for war Syriac for lamentation and Hebrew for ordinary speech and later he writes
#
the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V King of Spain Archduke of Austria and master of several
#
European tongues professed to speaking and now quote within the court Spanish to God
#
Italian to women French to men and German to my horse stop quote twice and you know
#
it's always struck me that for example my specific bias my specific taste in literature
#
is towards minimal spare prose which is why you know I like someone like Hemingway but
#
which is also why I like a lot of Japanese fiction and one reason that I have speculated
#
on why this might be so is that Japanese is just a more minimal language is less flowery
#
it's less whatever even more so than English in a sense and equally languages like Urdu
#
and Bengali are almost Baroque languages there is so much expression and like you said that
#
if you were to translate something literally from either Urdu or Bangla to English it would
#
just seem overblown you know the finest Tagore poem beautifully translated and I've tried
#
it myself and if you just stay faithful to each of the words and you translate them it
#
just sounds bad because of the aesthetic values inherent in the English language are very
#
different exactly so how much of a problem for you was this at sort of conscious level
#
and my other sort of related question goes back to what you were earlier saying about
#
strategy and tactics where I was reading an interview of Rabasa and Rabasa was asked the
#
same question about strategy and tactics and he said I have no strategy it's only tactics
#
and perhaps there is a strategy he's internalized in his processes or whatever I'm guessing
#
but he said it's only tactics I just go you know one sentence at a time and so on so how
#
do you resolve that like you interestingly said that you do have a strategy when you
#
get down to so what's this distinction between strategy and tactics and strategy I mean when
#
I say I have a strategy I would say that I have an objective and it is internalized it
#
is not that it varies from text to text it is a it is almost a philosophy of translation
#
or my philosophy of translation if you like which as I keep saying is about being faithful
#
to the sum total of the text and the world it creates as it is perceived by a reader
#
and my attempt is to read it like a universal reader or like a reader of without any particular
#
objective in mind a reader has no objective in reading the readers is reading so every
#
reader as it was so my objective is to read it like every reader and then make sure that
#
the translation can be read by every reader with essentially the same kind of feelings
#
and notions and what they absorb and so on about it as opposed to let's say I will be
#
true to making sure that every word is taken across or every every metaphor is taken across
#
and so on now this does not mean that you play with the text or you you're reckless
#
with it it just means that then it comes down to specific tactics at a sentence level at
#
a word level where do you do what you think is best keeping this overall overarching objective
#
in mind so sometimes a medium will render itself beautifully in another language there
#
is no need to then say I will not do it at other time it's absurd and you say I will
#
not do it a third time it's absurd and you say I will do it because it's so picturesque
#
and it draws up such a fantastic image that I don't want to sacrifice it even if it doesn't
#
roll off the tongue as easily so that's tactics right and then ultimately it's also not you
#
don't see it in isolation you see where it stands in the scheme of the sentence the paragraph
#
when you're reading it afterwards is it jumping out at you like a sword because that that's
#
something that I am completely against you know these islands of brilliance in a text
#
are avoidable as long as they're not there in the original and that also brings me to
#
the point you have to keep the flaws as well you cannot paper over the flaws if you see
#
something as being clunky writing and remember that Bangla literature was never edited only
#
now is there a sort of semblance of editing but nothing there's no structural edits nothing
#
and often often I guess it would have been written at great speed magazines and all that
#
that's right so in fact it's a wonder that art and it's not just among all Indian languages
#
it's a wonder how good these literatures are despite the fact that there is no editing
#
and if you're mischievous you can always say it's because there is no editing but I mean
#
I don't entirely agree with that but yeah so therefore lot of flaws I mean I would have
#
edited Tagore I would have edited the hell out of Tagore if I were his editor in Bangla
#
but you know so then you when you're translating you have to keep some of those not some all
#
if you perceive weaknesses you have to keep them if you seek clunkiness you have to keep
#
it so are you deliberately recreating that clunkiness into English absolutely if it's
#
there in the Bangla absolutely and then the editor will say can we change this and I said
#
no we can't because it's not in my control the writer wrote I can't help it and let
#
him let the writer be read for you know their warts as well why should they be read only
#
for what's great so yeah no and going back to you know something that Emily Wilson wrote
#
and Emily Wilson wrote this in the context of Seneca but it brought your Bengali translations
#
to my mind when I read it first where she writes on translating Seneca quote I had a
#
hard time figuring out how much I could get away with pulling out all the stops rhetorically
#
because he writes in this wonderfully ornate purple style it's showing off showing off
#
showing off bombast the risk is always that is going to come across as too silly to be
#
impressive it has to go very close to sounding silly but without quite getting there stop
#
code and and later she wrote a Twitter thread which I'll reproduce in the show notes about
#
all the sort of the difficulties of translating Odyssey Home is Odyssey which she did recently
#
and part two of them might be very relevant to you where she said that there aren't enough
#
onomatopoeic words for very loud chaotic noises and Bengali is full of these full of it it
#
was jata bullshit and you know exactly even if you don't know the meaning you know exactly
#
what how do you capture this flavor is it even possible or do you have to tactically
#
decide to you know yeah I've started taking more risks now to be honest originally I would
#
say no I'm not going to put in words and phrases that will make no sense to the reader but
#
now I've started trying sometimes give me an example so you know if it's got a really
#
good load which is basically that I was extremely annoyed and irritated and so on so I might
#
actually say that you know and then I know a really an annoyed wave ran through his through
#
her body or something like that you know but actually find a way to suggest that this is
#
how it is used in the original length and sometimes you know the reason I also do it
#
I think that if the language does not have this maybe it deserves to have it you know
#
so why not introduce because we have done that right the English any language grows
#
by being taking in terms for which no terms exist in its own and because we are now living
#
in an increasingly globalized world you don't have a choice but to represent many things
#
which are not part inherently part of your of the culture from which your language came
#
so what do you do then you I mean we do it in India all the time we're forever borrowing
#
English words so why not the other way round no and in fact translation in a sense has
#
also been described I forget by who has also been described as a dialogue between languages
#
yes and is that something you felt cutely while yeah yeah the good thing that perhaps
#
the best thing about all of this discourse is that you can happily get into it after
#
the translation is done it does not have to actually intrude on the act of translating
#
itself because then you'd be upset click you wouldn't be able to finish a line if you kept
#
put so much thought into so much thought of this kind into it but yeah I'm eternally like
#
I have this new theory now of literature of translations and so on which is that I know
#
we keep seeing the original language and then the target language and so on my theory is
#
that there is no original language in which a work exists a work exists outside of language
#
and it springs into being in each language at the time in which it is written so even
#
if it so turns out that the Bengali version was written first chronologically it does
#
not mean that the English version is a version of the Bengali version both the Bengali and
#
the English are versions of that pure thing which exists up there which the writer pulled
#
out of their own head and everything and put into words in a particular linguistic system
#
they could just as well have done it in another linguistic system depending on which one they
#
were familiar with and that therefore the work does not spring up only in that one particular
#
language it can exist in all languages this is one of those clever you know something
#
Octavio Paz once said when he said quote when we learn to speak we are learning to translate
#
stop code which is exactly what you said yeah but I'm saying that there's a slightly clever
#
thing because I also equally will argue for the fact that you cannot actually divorce
#
the content of a text from the language the language determines the content even you know
#
because certain things you cannot put it in that language they're not in the text I agree
#
with that yeah and therefore some books cannot be written in some languages because there's
#
things that need to go into that book perhaps cannot be put into English you have to write
#
it in Hindi or Bangla or Urdu so you know and I'm saying that these are theories and
#
theories don't necessarily have to map on to any kind of reality a theory is after all
#
what it is a way of examining a phenomenon and seeing what patterns you can discern in
#
it that does not mean that alternative theories cannot do an equally good job of discerning
#
patterns or explaining it and perhaps the beauty of it is that you don't eventually
#
need it's not science so you don't need one all-encompassing theory to explain it because
#
the purpose of that theory is to then also predict that if this is the input this will
#
always be the output and essentially literature and art and translation are not about same
#
input producing same output if that were the case then every translation would be the same
#
it's not so someone is mediating someone is mediating with who knows what kind of agendas
#
that even they don't know as a translator I'm sure there are things going on in my in
#
my subconscious and unconscious that I'm not aware of as a translator I know I've evolved
#
every translator evolves so the way you translate a text if I were to go back and translate
#
the text that I translated ten years ago I am certain they would be different no and
#
what I also find fascinating is that while you are someone who now teaches writing who
#
teaches literature who teaches translation you were first a practitioner yes the theorizing
#
has come later the theorizing has come later but I don't teach translation theory okay
#
I just I mean these questions come up in the course of where truly performing translations
#
so then we answer them and then sometimes we get carried away and start constructing
#
theories because it's fun to do and interesting things to discuss and write about to be honest
#
I see translation theory as a very valuable but distinct space from the practice of translation
#
the praxis of translation on that note we'll take a quick commercial break and we'll come
#
back in a minute if you're listening to the scene in the unseen it means you like listening
#
to audio and you're thirsty for knowledge that being the case I'd urge you to check
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Welcome back to the Seen and the Unseen I'm chatting with Arun Avaswana on the art of
#
translation and so far we've spent a chunk of time talking about the theory of it just
#
before we sort of got back just before we went to the break so you know another thing
#
that strikes me and this is something that other translators across the world have pointed
#
out is of English sort of being a bridge language between languages that very often English
#
is a first language that something will be translated into and quite often it will become
#
the source of translation for further languages so for example language one is translated
#
into English and then language one is further translated into language two via the English
#
translation so English almost has a sort of a central role and this is of course in the
#
context of world literature but even in the context of India you know English is sort
#
of where you know the whole publishing industry in English how has the ecosystem there evolved
#
in terms of languages getting translated into English into each other what is the importance
#
of English in spreading popularizing our literature in other languages so if you mean around the
#
world outside of India that too but also yeah so outside of India it is of course crucial
#
because this is it's the language that your most translators working into so it's much
#
harder to find translators who will translate let's say a Bangla text into French or German
#
or Spanish right there'll be one or two or three people so there are only so many tech
#
they can do so English automatically becomes the receptacle as it were of the translations
#
and then because as you said it is the language that lubricates global publishing so people
#
will read the English version and then maybe decide to publish it in another language and
#
more often than not they might well use the English edition as the source because they
#
don't have translators working between the original first and the new languages it's
#
not the best situation but to my mind it's better than no situation I mean I always feel
#
that any translation is better than no translation so we have to lump it even if we don't like
#
it in India it's the same and even worse in some ways because people who now are genuinely
#
by literate in two non-english languages from India are very hard to find you had a whole
#
bunch of them earlier for one thing you know there were when people there were large-scale
#
migrations in India of people from particular communities into other spaces and who then
#
had to perforce learn the local language so very interestingly a legacy of that is one
#
of the best translators working from Bangla into English is actually a Tamil his name
#
is Ramakrishnan yeah but you wouldn't know that except for the fact that his name is
#
Ramakrishnan and his Bangla is fantastic and I dare say he could translate into Tamil if
#
his Tamil was good enough but people like that are almost impossible to find no one
#
picks up the another language anymore at best you have to learn it to be able to go into
#
translation and then nobody is interested in going into translation you know between
#
Indian languages so perforce we are moving to a situation where English will become the
#
fulcrum and from there you know the arms will poke out in different directions it's good
#
and I feel it's better than nothing because at least there are so many good literatures
#
in India and such fantastic books being written in at least a dozen languages that it would
#
be a shame if they could not be read by people who read other languages and don't want to
#
read them in English or do not read English and even an imperfect translation if it conveys
#
some of what is good about the original can spur the reader to look for more and maybe
#
do the work ourselves absolutely absolutely that's what I'm saying a bad translation is
#
better than no translation quite honestly if the original work is really good and also
#
does you know given that language affects thinking like one would you agree that language
#
affects thinking as or will keep saying and two would you then say that our thinking can
#
become homogenous and Englishified if that becomes sort of the universal language of
#
use now I don't know if I'll be sort of able to express it well but for example one question
#
I have seriously sometimes posed to people is that do Hindi speakers think differently
#
because there isn't a semicolon in the language you know if that makes any kind of sense so
#
I know what you mean but I think the way I see it is that those of us who are born in
#
India actually have the unique privilege of being able to code switch fairly at least
#
those who also use English are able to code switch at their convenience and therefore
#
they switch to the language that best accommodates their thoughts I don't think no matter how
#
much English spreads our thought is limited by what English can or cannot do we very happily
#
use languages words from our own language and from other languages across India for
#
that matter and then we sort of show them into the English quite seamlessly to the extent
#
that if you hear the way English is now spoken for example across streets it's quite different
#
in fact you know to me the best example of the way the English is used unself-consciously
#
with massive borrowings from Indian words is pornography if you read in English pornography
#
written in India you will find that obviously there is no attempt at any pristine literary
#
values so therefore the word that best suits the situation is used no matter which language
#
it belongs to while the fluid is primarily English but it's mixed with all kinds of things
#
it's also interesting that even English is misused in the sense for example that instead
#
of lay the lay as in lie down it will always be the word in English will often be sleep
#
so it will be a man will often say write something like I slept on her you see where it's coming
#
it's very interesting that the thought originates in another language and there is a sort of
#
futile attempt to translate it into the English equivalent and literally so that you end up
#
with a rather comic kind of image if you want to but it is fearless the way the language
#
is treated in pornography is absolutely fearless and because I dare say there is a range of
#
activities and impulses that you are trying to portray you cannot be sort of you know
#
out down by the by the limitation of your medium so in the same way I think the English
#
that I hear is a brilliant combination of the best of many different languages and what
#
you just said like from the limited in the limited erotica that I have read Indian erotica
#
in English that I have read that category I have never noticed any such thing so which
#
kind of makes me wonder that because you are looking at language so carefully being a translator
#
do you also notice all of these things quite possibly I think that's entirely right and
#
you know it can be an annoyance sometimes because you are both marvelling and being
#
annoyed by what you are reading no matter what so when I read English for example I'm
#
always thinking oh man this sentence is so good and why can't I translate a sentence
#
as good whether I'm read whether what I'm reading is a translation or not and when I'm
#
reading Bangla I keep thinking oh no what if I had to translate this would I ever be
#
able to do it or what a lousy sentence you know how am I going to put any kind of value
#
into this sentence so it's annoying it's like a meta commentary that is always running through
#
No and I'm just like thinking aloud like I deplore language Nazis because as far as
#
I'm concerned language evolves new words come in all the time for example people frown
#
on the use of the Indian English neologism prepone but I think prepone is a great word
#
it's a very elegant word for the user it's a very economical word yeah it's a very nice
#
word why would you say it longer yeah and it's obvious what it means and because of
#
the sheer population of English speakers in India exactly is it then possible that the
#
future of the English language will be driven by all the contortions which we carry out
#
with the like sleeping on it maybe in India it will I don't think it will spread across
#
the world I mean for example here in India we have no idea of the African flavors of
#
English or the Caribbean flavors of English and yet those are very very distinct in those
#
spaces inside William Carlos Williams once said that I don't write in English I write
#
in the American idiom which obviously also creates then additional problems for translators
#
now you've also sort of you've translated writers from like Bonquim who are much older
#
you're translating people like Noboru and obviously the idioms that they are writing
#
in the times that they have inhabited the slang and the language they use is very very
#
different so how do you sort of how easy or hard is it to deal with something like that
#
it's not easy I mean it's easier to deal with modern and contemporary it's definitely harder
#
to deal with classic text so when you're translating someone like Bonquim and a freezing of his
#
seems archaic in the original Bengali will you then also attempt to reproduce that archaicness
#
in the English I will not in the way in which you might read it in say a Victorian novel
#
or or in an Arthur Conan Doyle story no because I think that will not sit easily on me but
#
I will try to bring out what we think of as archaic as a certain quaint elegance and I
#
think that is what I would aim for yeah so I might not use certain words which were very
#
prevalent when you were writing in English in the 19th century because after all I you
#
know the translation is being done in 2020 or whenever it is not being done a hundred
#
years ago and indeed if I read translations of those words done a hundred years ago you
#
can see that they use what is contemporary English but see there's this other factor
#
there which is this that Bonquim take the first novel that he wrote in Bangla Durgesh
#
Nandini which I've translated he was 26 Bonquim Chandra Chattopadhyay is 26 at the time 26
#
okay that's it he is he has written an English novel which has bombed so to speak and he
#
himself is unsure of his ideological moorings in having made that choice so he writes this
#
tremendously racy romance it's in the Walter Scott mold right it's racy it's full of I
#
mean it's everything that you would want to read in a historical romance but he's writing
#
it for a contemporary audience although he's setting it in his past he's setting it several
#
hundred years ago from the time he lives in but he's still writing it in a contemporary
#
idiom now that contemporary idiom a hundred years later appears very archaic but am I
#
being true to that text if I were to use a very archaic mode for it because a 26 year
#
old writing for a contemporary audience should I not try to create something of that effect
#
not by being faddish because those terms will come today and go tomorrow but in keeping
#
some sense of modernity about it and so you aim therefore for a more timeless kind of
#
approach you know which is where your idioms are not rooted in a particular space or time
#
or anything but you try to bring out the notion that it should be read without the degree
#
of difficulty that we now encounter in reading the bangla and that's a very interesting question
#
always and an interesting theoretical question if you're looking at an older text which is
#
that should you reproduce the reader's response as it was when the text came out or should
#
you produce the reader's response now if they were to read the original text and to me frankly
#
reading bunkim chandra original in bangla is like reading it in translation not reading
#
a foreign language in many ways I mean the words may be familiar or not even but the
#
structures the whole flow are clearly from another era and you know like they say the
#
past is a foreign country so it is no no different from you know when we say that this work is
#
in bangla just because it uses the bangla script and certain familiar words we are actually
#
papering over huge differences in register huge enormous so you know these are things
#
to be factored in for sure and and how does it and especially with the contemporary guys
#
how do you deal with dialogue for example edith grossman writes about dialogue quote
#
dialogue contains often nuance or sometimes egregious indications of the class status
#
and education of the characters not to mention the intelligence and emotional state significant
#
intentions and sonorities abound in the narration and in the descriptive portions of the work
#
there may be elements of irony or satire the rhythm of the prose long flowing periods or
#
short crisp phrases and the tone of the writing colloquial isms elevated diction pomposity
#
slang elegance substandard use are pivotal stylistic devices and it is incumbent upon
#
the translator to apprehend the ways in which these instrumentalities further the purposes
#
of the fiction the revolution of character the progress of the actions stop quote and
#
here it strikes me that you know when it comes to a novel itself you know I guess you go
#
through that original moment of discovering what the voice is and then you can continue
#
with the authorial voice for the whole of the book once you sort of slipped into that
#
voice but when it comes to the dialogue within a book where you have different people speaking
#
in all of these different kinds of languages in some cases written by people perhaps much
#
younger than you today in settings you haven't inhabited yourself is that harder how do you
#
get around it is and it's not just that it's also for example and this is probably true
#
of all languages in all Indian languages as well which is that you have many dialects
#
and many local variations and many authors are very good with reproducing the speech
#
if you take an even an urban setting which is a confluence of people of different socioeconomic
#
backgrounds then each one is speaking in a different register very clearly different
#
vocabulary different ways pronunciation and so on and you cannot actually bring all of
#
that into English for the simple reason that if you were to choose first of all your choice
#
of English dialects or versions of English would be purely random.
#
So I've actually read translations where a certain village dialect has been translated
#
into a Scottish version of English how does that even work because in fact on the contrary
#
you are creating in the reader who identifies it as a Scottish broke a false sense of space
#
it's not correct at all so this is a very very difficult situation especially when there's
#
a clash let's say when people are speaking the same dialect then it's not such a problem
#
because they're perfectly intelligible to each other so even if you were to put them
#
in standard English it would not matter the problem is when so you know classic thing
#
is that the guy who drives your car is talking to you so you're speaking a kind of language
#
which is very different from theirs and you have to translate this while maintaining the
#
difference in register so it gets tough and I would say that you don't always succeed
#
you try to do it with the words you use and so on the other things that Edith Grossman
#
talks about you know rhythm music and so on those are easier to or let me put it this
#
way if you're sensitive if you can hear them then you can perhaps take them across into
#
In fact you've said in the past that you read out both the original and your translation
#
of it to get a sense so is it important to you that rhythmically and all that?
#
Yes it's very important to me that is absolutely very important to me but there again you have
#
problems for example in Bangla it's very natural to have short sentences in the same structure
#
in English creates a tremendously staccato feeling sometimes in Bangla you generate tension
#
with short sentences in English you actually have to use a longer sentence to generate
#
the same kind of tension.
#
So can you give me an example?
#
So you know this pulp writer named Sopan Kumar whose work I've translated so his work starts
#
and this is almost a cliche and may not actually be that it's like one of those excellent say
#
die elementary say die kind of things but it goes like ghori the dong dong kore akta
#
bajlo and the big joke is if it's akta one o'clock then there should be only one chime
#
should be heard only once so what is this dong dong business and so on or he has things
#
like you know akhate bandhu akhate cigarette and akhate boi niye uniduklen so other than
#
that so it's like govir raath brishti poche rastaay aktau lok nahi so you get the sense
#
In English it's very staccato.
#
In English if you make it as yeah dead at night it's raining not a person it does not
#
create the same kind of but here it's almost breathless the way it's described so you know
#
there you may have to combine them into a single sentence and find a way to keep it
#
taught without using too many words and sometimes you do that thing that many English grammar
#
nudges hate which is comma splicing which does not exist in English right you're supposed
#
to use a semicolon or break it into two sentences.
#
If we wanted to exist I mean language evolves so if people use it it's fine.
#
And now I find in fact I've been one of the things I do is read translations of from European
#
texts very closely to see if they're comma splicing or not and I find that some do and
#
some don't so then I went back to the translator as it was the story and some of them said
#
I hate comma splicing so I will not use it and the other one says no no the original
#
has the rhythm so I have to use it even if I don't do it in my own writing.
#
So people do have their quirks as well you know which translators quirks also flow into
#
their work somehow but yeah so what she's talking about the rhythm and music and sound
#
the assonance alliteration these are still possible to manage I mean the most brilliant
#
exponent of this of course is Anthea Bell in her translations of the Asterix comics
#
and very interestingly her strategy well okay let me not use the word strategy her method
#
there was that she would ensure that there were as many puns on a page of the English
#
translation as there were in the original French my god but not necessarily the same
#
equivalent puns or not necessarily the same words being punned on.
#
So if there was a pun in a panel she would have a pun in the panel but the pun might
#
be on a different word altogether because English would adopt or accept that pun and
#
So these are things that you have to do but it's when people start speaking in different
#
for example you know when we read the Asterix comics we have no sense of whether there's
#
a different register that I mean Caesar sounds the same as Obelix for example right the only
#
difference might be in the choice of words or in this how sonorous Caesar is whereas
#
Obelix is much more crisp or maybe excited and aggrieved for not getting the magic potion.
#
So that's how you take it across but you cannot actually convey the unstated information in
#
used in the choice of dialect to the reader who understands and many readers will not
#
even get nuances there all they will know that okay this guy is not speaking standard
#
Bangla so therefore from a different section but they can't look at which section or where
#
and so on for that you need a tremendously more discerning here.
#
So that information you're not always able to convey in your translation and that's a
#
problem perhaps in some cases in other cases it may not matter because even if you conveyed
#
the information it would not mean anything to the reader.
#
So you know it seems to me that the most intense illustration of the difficulties of translating
#
actually comes from poetry like Robert Frost controversially said that poetry is a thing
#
that gets lost in translation and I was reading John Felstener's book Translating Neruda where
#
he talks about that experience and he writes quote bring over a poem's ideas and images
#
and you will lose its manner imitate prosodic effects and you sacrifice this matter get
#
the letter and you miss the spirit which is everything in poetry or get the spirit and
#
you miss a letter which is everything in poetry but these are false dilemmas worse translation
#
at its best generates a wholly new utterance in the second language new yet equivalent
#
of equal values stop code and have you tried your hand at poetry?
#
Yeah, I've done poetry.
#
I've done poetry and it is true that translating poetry is a whole different ball game and
#
indeed if you keep this that goes and so on and you may have to make some sacrifices but
#
equally I agree that you are aiming to write poetry in the new language and I would actually
#
say that translating poetry is a little bit like doing a cover version of a song you know
#
where the artist's own voice and manner of singing will come through.
#
A good cover version will also be an original in a sense.
#
It will be an original it will stick to the melody but it will improvise and it will very
#
clearly be rendered in the artist's voice and not in an attempt to replicate I mean those
#
covers like when you sing exactly like the original actually the cover versions are pointless
#
because you might as well listen to the original then right yeah I don't want to hear somebody
#
sounding like the Beatles if they're going to do that.
#
So do you write original poetry yourself?
#
No I don't I couldn't for the life of me.
#
Because I've noticed that you know some of the translations from Indian languages of
#
poetry in other languages is by great poets themselves like Arvind Krishnam Erothra doing
#
Kabir and Ranjith Hoskote Lal did and you know it almost seems to me that to be able
#
to translate you have to be a poet yourself.
#
Yeah except that I agree except that I'm always worried about terms like am I a poet or am
#
I not right because you know you may be a poet without having written a line of poetry
#
for that matter I mean you may have all the qualities that a poet has.
#
The thing is poetry also eventually is a matter of appreciating the entire holistic effect
#
of text right including rhythm including rhyme including sound so to that extent poetry and
#
prose are not that far apart but it's just that because prose is more loosely there's
#
no structure in prose I mean just flowing sentences one after the other whereas poetry
#
has a line length it has prosody it has certain structured effects as it were.
#
So those are harder harder to put across but very interestingly Ranjith Hoskote's approach
#
to translating is vastly different from Arvind Krishnam Erothra's.
#
I mean Arvind Krishnam Erothra rewrites poems you know he is actually that's a true cover
#
version I mean he brings Rastafarians into Kabir which is great is wonderful to read.
#
It's perhaps also only possible because there have been so many translations of Kabir.
#
So now you can start reading these if he were to be the first translator then Kabir would
#
have an entirely different.
#
Let all jump on Arvind Krishnam Erothra also like what are you doing exactly where is Ranjith
#
Hoskote was doing Lal Daad has to be but Ranjith brings a different he is much more aware of
#
the need to be to put less of himself maybe his skills but not himself not his sensibilities
#
as a poet if you know what I mean.
#
Yeah and the other question I have and this also I'll probably phrase it in a clumsy way
#
because I'm almost thinking aloud is that a lot of us who are educated in English certainly
#
me we bring our biases to the table when we read anything.
#
So I have a certain way of looking at a text for example when I look at poetry you know
#
I will value things like economy I'll value things like precision of language you know
#
I'll value things like what the specific rhythms that I'm used to thinking of as good poetry
#
and so on and so forth they too with prose you know I might have my own specific taste
#
but there's a certain sort of even for people who haven't studied literature just through
#
the books that are considered great there's a certain pedagogy of values that this is
#
what is good and this is what is not.
#
Now the languages as we discussed earlier are so incredibly different you know in Bengali
#
Tagore may write in very flowery purple vivid prose you know a lot of subcontinental languages
#
are certainly far more Baroque than English and that's definitely not a value that you
#
look for you know you want to cut out all of that if any word stands out we are taught
#
to cut it out you don't want the language to draw attention to itself per se I mean
#
with exceptions such as you know magic realism and whatever Rajshri does and you know I'm
#
not a huge fan of that but that's a question of taste.
#
So is how we and here I'm not talking about translation per se but is how we look at literature
#
in languages other than English colored by the values that we have imbibed through studying
#
or being exposed to English literature I mean is this a problem and is it for example something
#
that you would face in practical terms that say you're translating something from Bengali
#
to English and it's beautiful in the original and you're recreating its essence in English
#
and therefore it is not precisely how a writer in English would write it or consider good
#
but it still makes sense to you how do you look at all of this.
#
Yeah no I agree completely and I think my personal aesthetic is also one toward one
#
that abjures excessiveness excesses of any kind so it's a hard balance but at the same
#
time you can't also completely strip the original text of of its decorations or ornaments and
#
so on but it's just that the way I look at it is that what is this place of those decorations
#
and embellishments in the original language and sometimes when that becomes the norm then
#
its effect is actually much lower because it is not standing out you're used to this
#
sort of slightly exaggerated form right everyone is as I said no one will say which is a more
#
prosaic way of putting it so when you read encounter that all the time you are actually
#
all your hearing is got nothing more than that so it's fine then you don't know embellishment
#
that you need to carry across at other times you see genuinely wonderful prose someone
#
has really come up with something fantastic and then you then you sometimes you keep taking
#
it into the new language and see is it creating the same effect does it seem overblown or
#
even under sometimes you may have not pitched it high enough so you tweak but you have to
#
be sensitive to the natural tone of the language into which you are translating and therefore
#
where a particular sentence stands with in relation to the natural tone of that language
#
is where your translated sentence should stand in relation to the natural tone of that language
#
and the two natural tones may be quite different therefore you will have to choose but the
#
relationship between the natural tone and that sentence should be the same more or less
#
that's what I look at you know I was struck by an example Rabasa gave of an exercise he
#
carried out in his class where and I don't remember the two languages involved the one
#
of them was obviously English the other would have been Spanish I guess and he handed out
#
a text to one student who had to translate from Spanish to English next student had to
#
translate that translation back and so on all the way back to down the line and then
#
they would look at the final English version with the first English version and sort of
#
compare I've done that in my classes you've done that in your class as well so what have
#
you found so you know the divergence is less than I had thought oh yeah I had thought before
#
it like Chinese whispers it would have been altered tremendously not quite so much but
#
you can see that individually it's not so much the writing that's different as the reading
#
that's different so two people have read same word differently and therefore I've written
#
it in different ways or the same phrase differently so really the divergences come in the way
#
in your reading and in your reading comes your your relationship with the language as
#
well you know in fact this is another very interesting point which is that in the West
#
most people translate from a language that they have learnt into their into the language
#
they live in with English in our case we trans most of us translate from a language we live
#
in and English also we live in in some senses in India but perhaps the English we live in
#
is not the English we translate into entirely so because sometimes when you're translating
#
into English you're always thinking of an international audience as well so because
#
of this difference we are perhaps better readers of the text than many Western translators
#
are but I guess they may be better writers it's possible because they live their entire
#
lives in English right we don't even despite our comfort and our familiarity with the
#
English language many parts of our lives are not lived in English at all whether it's your
#
daily transactions sometimes your thoughts your most instinctive responses to something
#
are often not in English right so we end up translating I think in a different way which
#
somehow I think is a little closer to the original text because we're reading it better
#
and we're internalizing it more so the English that we reproduce it in will inevitably I
#
think have more of the flavors of the original language like it or not than in the case of
#
someone translating from say a French or a Spanish into of course it there's also the
#
point that those languages are far more similar here English is comes from a completely different
#
space if you were translating from Hindi to Bengali for example it would not nearly be
#
such a as much of a leap no and in fact that you know so there I'm thinking for example
#
an American writer who lives in Calcutta and learns Bengali will come up with a very different
#
kind of translation as someone like you would who you know will find the sort of the familiar
#
equivalent idiom in English much more yeah and also also perhaps have a better sense
#
of what that where the text is text is going beyond its dictionary meaning and something
#
you said was interested me which is you know when you said that we don't necessarily translate
#
in the same English we use because there's also the question of an international audience
#
is that a consideration for you like when you translate are you thinking of audience
#
or are you just thinking okay let me capture the joy that is primarily let me capture the
#
joy that I feel but when I'm validating that joy I have to figure out whether it will register
#
with the reader and that point you start thinking maybe not when the when you're actually translating
#
but when you're reading revising you have to question your decisions to see someone
#
who does not come armed with the same body of knowledge that you have what it will mean
#
to them is some is a question you must so let's talk about your process now like what
#
is your process like when you get a book like first I assume you will only translate books
#
you enjoy reading is my guess or are you sometimes given a book and sometimes I do get commissioned
#
books which are not necessarily books I would translate by choice and I do it for various
#
reasons because increasingly I've discovered that this business of what I like is a little
#
idiosyncratic because as a translator you also sort of have a responsibility towards
#
the entire body of literature being produced in a language or all its in all its variations
#
and diversity it is also important increasingly as we've learned that some voices need to
#
be amplified are you saying that because there aren't too many translators from Bengali
#
to English allowed and around therefore the responsibility is more on you well no no no
#
I mean there are more translators actually from Bengali to English than perhaps from
#
any other like okay to be honest so no it's not more on me personally but I'm just saying
#
on all of us on all of us because fact is that we are not as many as there are writers
#
yes so although it takes a less time to perhaps translate than to write a book but the thing
#
is that you can't always go with only your personal taste 100 percent that's all I'm
#
saying because then important books which you may not like not all important books are
#
books you may like but they need to be translated for let's say they come from an underrepresented
#
voice or they increasingly for example I've I've tried to make I mean over the past couple
#
of years I'm trying to get to a point where I say for every book I translate by a man
#
I will translate one by a woman also so I want to ensure that 50 percent representation
#
in my ongoing work so sometimes you know one have one picks up books that are important
#
that you know need to be read without it being a book that you personally would enjoy and
#
does it expand you translating a book that you wouldn't otherwise have like yeah yeah
#
absolutely absolutely and sometimes what I do is so this is interesting very increasingly
#
now I don't read the book through before translating it oh yeah I did a little bit and then I get
#
into it and I discovered the book as I'm going along and while I can be cute and sort of
#
say things like it reproduces the first reaction of the reader when they're not familiar with
#
the text and so on the fact is that I enjoy it because I am actually discovering the story
#
as I'm going along so you read enough to get the voice and then you just yeah yeah yeah
#
yeah so starting like that is where I put the most effort really in doing the first
#
few pages to make sure that I've got the voice once you feel you've got it then I move very
#
quickly because you always worried what if the voice leaves you at some point or do you
#
allow yourself to be distracted by other things and then it's gone that is in fact one of
#
the toughest things because you also have to live at the same time you're not just writing
#
for people like us we also have to do our day jobs whatever they might be so you have
#
to inhabit the book very very obsessively while you're translating it I guess that's
#
true of a writer as well they have to inhabit whatever they're writing and is there and
#
again this is true of everyone writers translators anybody who does anything is there a trade
#
off between getting it right and getting it done so do you sort of like if you have a
#
particularly problematic passage or a para or a bit of dialogue and you're not sure what
#
to do do you just do it as best as you can literally and say I'll come back to it later
#
yes and move on in the draft absolutely I do not allow the flow to be impeded by anything
#
I mean I very often leave entire chunks in the original without even translating because
#
I know that that's going to engage a different part of my mind and I don't want to suddenly
#
change the rhythm of my writing at this point so I do that yeah words phrases paragraphs
#
sometimes I translate very literally knowing that I will come back to this but the structure
#
is so complex that I don't want to pause it right now so in fact that's one of the tricks
#
we do in our translation class and then when sentences prove very difficult to translate
#
we do an actual word by word rendition which comes up quite beautifully as poetry almost
#
because you know the syntax is mangled in English give me an example if you can so you
#
know if you take a long sentence like a lullaby and you're trying you're struggling with the
#
rhythm of that in English and you're trying to compose it entirely in your head before
#
you put it down and it's proving impossible so then I tell the class okay let's just put
#
down each word the way it is so it's go sleep parani put sleep put aunt and as I say go
#
even more literal mother sister father sister our house come okay and then they've suddenly
#
got a skeleton and then say okay now let's play with this and see what interesting things
#
we can do just like a hack to release the mind yeah it's a hack to release the mind
#
exactly so that you know because you're not struggling with structure and meaning at the
#
same time so you get the meaning out literally word for word so now you know what words you
#
have to capture now you find the right structure for it that will so these things happen sometimes
#
you know and they're quite interesting exercises and they sometimes alert you to the richness
#
of that original take because what we tend to do when we read is that we abstract a meaning
#
and we tend to forget about other things right so that's why one of the exercises I do with
#
my class is I make them translate birth song well so the whole idea behind birth song is
#
that there is no meaning you have to translate sounds and let your minds just you know put
#
words to these sounds and then they create beautiful situations around those what I also
#
make them translate from languages they don't know and I don't know oh okay yeah so you
#
know almost none of us knows nor Norwegian or Swedish so I take Swedish text and say
#
translate and say what the hell is this I don't care just translate look at the text
#
and do an English and then it open unlocks different parts of their mind where there's
#
they try to from sounds or from from okay this is a short word it may be a verb and
#
so on and they come up with something that is a cogent structure which may not have any
#
relationship in terms of significance with the original but it alerts you to the fact
#
that there is so much more to text than its bad dictionary meaning of each word so you
#
know now I'll completely digress and ask about teaching yeah that you know how do you learn
#
this pedagogy you know what do I teach how do I teach you know you are basically before
#
this you are a doer yeah you know your strategy is internalized you are handling things tactically
#
suddenly you have to teach a class and you've got all these interesting methods yes so number
#
one how do you devise these methods and number two in this process does it change the way
#
you see your translation or do your translation yeah great great question so my first and
#
this is something that I've only managed to I can articulate some of this now because
#
I've thought about it again I've gone I'm an organic translator and I'm an organic teacher
#
of translation so my idea of teaching translation let's translate let's not talk about it and
#
let's see what problems come up in the course of translation let's address I still follow
#
that I just plunge people into it and as I was telling you I plunge people into it not
#
just in terms of meaning but also both in terms of trying to capture all the richness
#
of a text that exists outside of the dictionary meaning of the words and simultaneously also
#
practice different forms of rendition for example one of the exercises I said them is
#
we'll do let's do a feminist translation of a text when you are obviously allowed to play
#
much more with the content but you are true to a certain vision you have of the end product
#
so eventually you will marry the two where you will have a vision and you will have a
#
sense of what the original text is but first let's do them as separate exercises without
#
being hamstrung by the need to do both at the same time so yeah in fact my classes I
#
do two or three things for example one of the things I do is I hand out a sheet which
#
is a combination of paragraphs of translated text and text written originally in English
#
and I ask them to identify which ones do you think are translations and which ones are
#
not and can they possibly do that no even I couldn't the first time the exercise was
#
given to me I couldn't either then the point of the exercise is just that that there is
#
actually when you read the final thing you're not there's no difference right so let's not
#
worry about some you know the anxieties of a translated text a well translated text no
#
one will be able to tell apart from an original so that's one exercise second exercise as
#
I mentioned was things like birth song and so on the third exercise is that we translate
#
we translate pictures you know for movie scenes into scripts so the whole idea is can you
#
see something visually and put words to it if the words are not there for you to begin
#
with wow that's so fascinating yeah so then they do that so that ultimately teaches them
#
to read the text also for the visuals that are out there without only worrying about
#
you know you lose the side of the wood for the trees and as a translator you can't really
#
do that rather you have to do both you both have to go so down deep that you are looking
#
only at the trees and even the wood but then the entire wood must also the forest must
#
also be coming alive to you at the end of what you've done in the same way that it was
#
there in the original other than that my job is really to teach them to fall in love how
#
do you teach someone to fall in love you can't write but you can create the conditions for
#
them to fall in you recreate the joy which it seems to me that you are doing because
#
I am now tempted to just go and see a movie scene and try to do this it's so exciting
#
so the other thing you recreate the conditions in which you will fall in love right you bring
#
the chocolate and you bring the the lovely person and you put them in the right frame
#
of mind but then you step back and say okay now if the magic has to happen it will happen
#
that these are the primaries tasks of my teaching once that is done then it boils down to as
#
we said you know specific questions that keep cropping up in the course of the text and
#
I teach translation without knowing the languages from which they're translating and my point
#
to them is that I'm this is not a mathematics class we are not testing for accuracy that
#
is as a translator that's your responsibility no one can teach you how to do an accurate
#
translation I mean is this day and age it's not difficult at all you will always get the
#
meaning of every word one of the translators greatest tools today by the way and I'm very
#
grateful for this is Google images yeah because sometimes you don't know what the hell is
#
this word but then you put it into Google in the original language and you click on
#
the images tab and you surely so that's what it is I had no idea and then you say okay
#
now I figured out what it stands for yeah so it's a Google image is a huge this is a
#
fantastic hack I just feel yeah so excited I'm yeah learning so much so how long does
#
it and how do you balance the sort of personal and it's not even the professional because
#
it's not your profession how do you balance the regular rhythm of your life which includes
#
everything else and the translation that you take on and would it be different if translation
#
was your day job yeah so it is my profession in the sense that it may not be my profession
#
financially but in every other sense it's my profession it's the one that I give it's
#
a calling it's it's my almost my identity now primary identity would it be different
#
yes I mean I always often fantasize about that although I would not now not give not
#
I would not give up teaching for anything but I still fantasize about a life of being
#
only a literary translator so in that life I would be so here's how my day would go I
#
would wake up in the morning and I would translate into Bangla first thing in the morning which
#
I do now I've translated one book and I'm going to be doing more so first thing in the
#
morning for about two hours when my mind is freshest after sleep friends say from about
#
six to eight I would translate into Bangla then I would go for a walk a long walk and
#
have breakfast then come back and then work on the main text that I'm translating for
#
about four hours so say till about one o'clock or so nap for 20 minutes wake up and read
#
read English what kind of Bengali naps for 20 minutes yeah so let's not call it a nap
#
I mean let's just you know shut my eyes relax yeah read for a couple of hours then translate
#
again but a different text I would always be working on three texts wow one into Bangla
#
and one in the morning and one in the evening and I'd knock off work by about eight o'clock
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or so and watch a film at night that would be my that's your fantasy yeah fantasy no
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socializing mind you I mean this is almost that's what I was wondering why you working
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till late I thought you'll work till five and evening you chill out with your friends
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and all no no no no I mean friends and all that happens anyway yeah I can't deal with
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meeting people every day all the more reason I'm so grateful that you come here today this
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is different yeah but you know socially I mean every day is out of the question fair
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enough and so you know going back to the process how long does it take you to translate a typical
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book so depends on the length of course but my I aim to translate three thousand words
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a day wow okay in translation so if it's a middle medium-sized book of about sixty thousand
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words it'll take me 20 days of three thousand words each which eventually even inevitably
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becomes a month or so because you don't achieve three thousand words every day so yeah it's
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I mean I average let's say fifty to sixty thousand words a month let me put it wow that's fantastic
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and did you also sort of like you mentioned that your first translation when you were
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in college when you were working rather that magazine was one of Shankar's stories and
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he liked it and he asked you to translate Chaurangi which you did so do you have a lot
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of interaction with the writers themselves what do they feel about the world fortunately
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no well fortunately and unfortunately because I'm sure it would benefit I would the work
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would benefit from these interactions but see here's the thing most Bengali writers
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are not so able to read the English in a way that will tell them whether it's a good translation
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I mean they'll get a sense of it but it won't go beyond that many of them are not interested
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a third chunk are dead so between them I have had almost nobody look closely at a translation
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or so on once in a while I've asked questions but not too often and in the general like
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one of the you know when I was reading interviews of translators a really common complaint is
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that is about the reviews that either the review won't even mention that it is a translation
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or talk about the translation or in some cases a reviewer will say well I don't know the
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original language so I cannot comment which according to Grossman among others is an inadequate
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response because it's not about position of translation it's about whatever you're creating
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and translators are often translators often feel that reviewers and many people in the
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general public as well don't really understand what they have done they think that is like
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you're putting a bit of tracing paper say on a painting and you're kind of but it's
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not that it's a it's an act of recreation and people don't often get this is that something
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you feel frustrated by that I mean I know you won all these awards and so on the crossword
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award for translation twice and so on but is that something that sort of frustrates you
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that you know your translation doesn't get the kind of recognition it deserves perhaps
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you don't get the kind of advances you deserve so on and so forth no no it doesn't frustrate
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me doesn't frustrate me at all because I really see the translator as being a transparent
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individual they do their job but you know the real I mean I'm happy if someone reads
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the book and says they liked it that's that's good enough for me because then I know I've
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done a good job and that's all that matters whether they're saying you've done a good
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job or the review says it or so on is immaterial to me and really I think that too much I mean
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I know there are all the movements like name the translator and so on which are all good
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and so on but they distract I think in some ways they're not crucial to the quality of
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translations they're not crucial to ensuring that more translations are read they're not
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crucial to ensuring that more translations are published none of those you know feed
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into those important thing I think that's what as the translator community should be
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fighting for certainly the money would be useful but again how much money do writers
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make either that's true so to be honest you can't complain the trick for if you live in
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India the trick for you is actually to try to get published in the West as a translator
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because then the fees that you get are actually very handsome certainly they're very handsome
#
by Indian standards but they're also pretty I mean I'll tell you brass tacks it's very
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simple in the UK you get paid 90 pounds per thousand words up a hundred words so no thousand
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words 50 so 50,000 would give you of yeah that's right per thousand words so let's
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say if you were translating even a slim book of 50,000 words you're talking about 4,500
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pounds 4,500 pounds is almost four and a half lakh rupees right in India that goes a long
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way you're certainly not going to get an advance of four and a half lakh rupees for a translation
#
I mean the best advance you will get is maybe a lack and that too if a publisher is trying
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to break into a market when they're already settled they will not pay that so many young
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people are listening to this episode excited by everything you have said so far wanting
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to be translators and you just brought them crashing down yeah well if you if you I mean
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my point is that I don't think you can actually be a great artist if you have to do it for
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the love of it it's not going to happen and almost conversely if you the more you do it
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for the love of it the more money you'll make and the more happy you will be because you're
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not expecting anything to begin with but it is also I think you know we also have locked
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ourselves into a kind of consumer lifestyle which perhaps if you're really serious about
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being a translator connection today's generation is actually quite different in that sense
#
they're far more they want to live far more lightly so it could be possible I wouldn't
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make it in fact I know an Italian translated into Italian Joya I'll just call her Joya
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strangely Indian sounding name she's used to spend half a year in India because it was
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cheaper to live in India given what she was earning yeah fine lady yeah so you know I'm
#
given everything you just said about not being social and all of that and you have translation
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to get back to I'm very grateful you gave me so much time I won't take much more of
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it final question something that listeners of my show often ask me for and I think the
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part of the show that they enjoy the most is when my guest is recommending books for
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them to read and in this case is particularly pertinent because it's your whole life so
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a dual question really one is that out of those who are translated whom you've translated
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and even otherwise who are the writers you really really love who means something to
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you and apart from that if you had to sort of recommend three works that you have translated
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that you're particularly proud of not just as translations but you feel they are great
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books you feel everyone should read this you know what would they be okay so as for the
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writers are you talking about writers only who write in Bangla or let's stay with Bangla
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because other guests will recommend sure yeah so in Bangla I think the people to really
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read are Mahasweta Devi for sure and the brilliant thing about Mahasweta Devi is that her work
#
will remain alive I'm not going to use a word like relevant because that is that is too
#
narrow her work will remain alive for many generations to come so Mahasweta Devi her
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son Navaroon Bhattacharya who has who's writing has this manic energy which you would not
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think literature capable of actually holding leave alone. Was he particularly hard to translate
#
or was he energizing? He was tremendously energizing and in fact there's been a newer
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translator translation of that book by Sunandini Mukherjee at Segal and hers is even better
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it's not even it's actually better than mine because I think she's taken off where I left
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off as it were so you know if she's gone out more on a limb over there to reproduce that
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energy and that and that sense of manic adventure that that is text contains. So these two for
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sure I would recommend Asha Punna Devi because she has this incredible ability to locate
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her stories in within these four walls and home in on the aspects of human beings which
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we tend not to look at because we all tend to think of human beings as being very noble
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people right we're noble and we're always striving to be better versions of ourselves
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and so on. She just goes in at the pettiness and the weaknesses and the foibles and the
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way they create discord in the tightness and the and the claustrophobic kind of spaces
#
that middle-class families live in it's fascinating and she's able to do I mean she has written
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over what I think two or three thousand stories. Great literature for me takes me to this is
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something Nadeem Aslam said and I completely love what he said he said it takes you to
#
a place where you've never been before and when you go there you feel I've lived there
#
all my life. Wow. Yeah so that's exactly what she does it's fantastic so her definitely
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let's see who are the others there are writers like Shatinath Bhaduri who used to live in
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you know many of the Bengali writers who wrote in the first half of the 20th century actually
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lived and grew up in what is Bihar now. So Shatinath Bhaduri was one of them. Shatinath
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Bhaduri has this fantastic book called Dorai Chorit Manosh which is as you can make out
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from the name or take off on the Ramcharit Manosh and Dora is the name of the place.
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It's an extraordinary book and it's been translated fortunately so him Shwandeep Chattopadhyay
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who was one of those plotless writers who arrived at this fantastic vignettes of human
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behavior and always with the sense that you were looking at something deeper than you
#
thought and in the most amidst squalor amidst middle class meanness middle class poverty
#
and so on and yet very strongly informed by human desire which was which is somewhat unusual
#
for Indian literatures you know where do you human desire doesn't play a very big part
#
and desire in a in a very cheap tawdry way not even particularly poetic or anything very
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real therefore. Anita Agnihotri who writes from her own experiences as a bureaucrat and
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although she writes in Bangla she writes her fiction is set all over India. I think you
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got the 2011 crossword award for translating her work. So her works are quite amazing and
#
especially because take you out of your known spaces and they actually sensitize you to
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politics to to social fault lines to poverty to living conditions and so on. It always
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looks at those stories through what human beings are doing. I mean they're not blank
#
treat as if he's not throwing data at you or anything like that. So these people for
#
sure and I would actually say Tagore's short stories. They really are something. I mean
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some of them are already part of the popular culture in such a way that it almost seems
#
cliched like Kabliwala for example. Yeah exactly but there are whole bunch of others which
#
are you can there's so much you can get out of if you wanted to do a feminist reading
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of Tagore's stories for example but written by. So was he an ally? The question is forget
#
about whether he was a feminist. Was he an ally? Here's this very upper middle class
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very privileged person. Was he an ally or was it sort of pretense of understanding?
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So there are very many important critical questions you can throw at his stories and
#
you will always come back and you don't necessarily have to say the answer is not always yes.
#
But the point is he's engaging. He's engaging with all these things and even if his viewpoint
#
is not one you agree with you are grateful that he's engaging with it and he's raising
#
the question back in that day and framing them in a way that the questions remain relevant
#
now. Whatever your answer is. He framed them in a tremendously modern or I would say out
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of time in a way that does not cannot be pinned down to a particular time or social system
#
or anything. In Bangladesh there are these great writers and in fact that I can segue
#
into the next question for that. I've finished the translation which is going to be published
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later this year of Akhtar Uzzaman Ilyas's Khwab Nama which to me is the most mind-blowing
#
novel I've ever read. Tell me a bit about it. Khwab Nama is set in just before and just
#
after independence and partition. It's set in a village cluster in the north of what
#
is now Bangladesh. It is set in the background of the Tebhaga movement. So it's a confluence
#
of many streams. You have the Tebhaga movement going on where farmers are agitating for their
#
rights to the land. They want it to be Tebhaga three parts and they want two-thirds of the
#
takings. You have the whole independence or rather the partition track. So you have therefore
#
the Hindu-Muslim track. You have oppression. You have personal desire. You have magical
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realism because things are happening that cannot quite be explained. You have hunger
#
in a very big way. Food and hunger is such an important part of that book. And there
#
is this one character who doesn't have a name. He's called Tamiz's father, Tamiz Erbap.
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And Tamiz Erbap is perpetually hungry and he can put away enormous quantities of food
#
and he becomes a mythical figure eventually. And it is written in a way that is you almost
#
feel like how can a person have so many perspectives in the same novel?
#
Well, and it is not conscious. It's not that he is telling this story through X's eye or
#
Y's eye or Z's eye or anything, but he just seamlessly shifts his, the camera seamlessly
#
shifts his position. And it's an extraordinary work. So both in literary terms and in terms
#
of being a document of... So, Akhtaruzaman Elias wrote just two novels in his life. He
#
wrote this one and his second novel, his first novel was called Chile Kota Sheppai, the soldier
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in the attic. And he developed cancer while he was writing his second novel and he died
#
soon after finishing it. It's almost like he willed himself to finish the novel before
#
he died. And he wrote a bunch of short stories.
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Have you translated that one also?
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No, but I may. I mean, there is another translator from Bangladesh who's very keen, but he says
#
he doesn't have the time. And if it turns out that he doesn't have the time, then I'm
#
going to do it. Otherwise he will do it.
#
Any other translations of yours you'd like to recommend? What are your sentimental favorites?
#
Well, sentimental favorite would be Budhadev Bhushu's When the Time is Right. It's just
#
an extraordinary piece of writing. It's not so much the story or anything. It's an extraordinary
#
piece of writing, but it is a very real... It's set in, again, just before independence.
#
It's set at a time when the old order of the Bengali aristocracy is crumbling and there's
#
lots of money because of the war. And a newer bunch of Bengalis are rising and yet they
#
are associated by the aristocracy with being crude and money is, after all, vulgar and
#
so on. So there's this very interesting clash between these two worldviews, but told beautifully
#
through the story of one family. One family with a gentleman whose wife dies after giving
#
birth to their fifth daughter. So there are five sisters in this story, but only one of
#
them is pivotal, the youngest one. It's a love story as well. But I'm most interested
#
in the third part of the novel, which is almost half of the novel, which is a description
#
of one night, not even one night of four or five hours of a wedding. And it's this grand
#
wedding that is taking place under the specter of the Japanese about to bomb Calcutta or
#
fears that they might bomb Calcutta. And it's almost the last fling of the old aristocracy
#
before they know that they will be eclipsed. And the writing is like a camera moving in
#
and out of rooms and it moves between, I mean, you know, it goes up to two people who are
#
having a conversation halfway through a sentence. I don't want to hear anymore. It moves on
#
and catches the second half of a sentence. Somebody else is uttering somewhere. And so
#
in this way, it sort of, you know, restlessly circulating around the whole space and making
#
you see and listen to what's going on. So it's like a plotless film almost in words,
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Well, I can't wait to read all these books. I will make sure I get these books across
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to you. I'm going to pick them up. Please don't get them across to me. Let the royalties
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go where they should. You know, thank you so much. This has been such an enriching discussion
#
for me. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you, Amit. I mean, I don't think I've had
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a better chat on translating ever. Thank you. If you enjoyed listening to this episode,
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do head on over to Amazon and just search for Runawa's name. A whole bunch of magnificent
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books will pop up, including the ones he just named. You can follow him on Twitter at Arunawa
#
that's just his name. You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Varma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in and thinkpragati.com.
#
The Scene and the Unseen is supported by the Takshashila Institution. Do check out more
#
about their public policy courses at takshashila.org.in. Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen? If so, would you like to support
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