Tracing the art of translating literary works and future challenges

Illustration/Uday Mohite

It is often said that a translator does not translate words. They translate worlds." The adage as quoted by Shanta Gokhale breaks the confines of its commonly viewed definition - to merely render the meaning of text in another language. After penning down two novels, Rita Welingkar (1992) and Tya Varshi (2008) in Marathi, Gokhale translated both to English, a task she followed up with several Marathi titles including Lakshmibai Tilak's memoir, Smirtichitre. And we wonder if the translator then is the invisible writer, or is there a voice? Like Gokhale tells us, "You can't hide your voice from anything that you write. I make the greatest possible effort to get under the skin of the author," adding that the translator need not be a writer, but it helps to be one.

"Translation is not a natural progression from reading and writing. If it were so, everyone who reads and writes would also translate. At its worthiest, it's the result of a decision made by a person who has two languages at her command and is driven by the desire to make the best literature from one language available to readers who do are unable to read in it," she explains. But unlike Gokhale, there aren't many multilingual writers who choose to translate their own works - Jhumpa Lahiri, Milan Kundera and Kiran Nagarkar included. Saat Sakkam Trechalis (1974), Nagarkar's debut novel written in Marathi was translated into English by Subha Slee. Secondary to laziness, the bilingual writer maintains that translation isn't his forte.

Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto

"Saat Sakkam Trechalis is a difficult book to translate because the language in Marathi itself is very unusual. I was very lucky that Slee did a brilliant job. I was being difficult with the first 30 pages, but then I realised I was being a monumental a''. Since then all my books have been translated into German, which I fortunately don't know. I have taken a vow that if the translators are people of great integrity, then I will never check a translation," he says. The Sahitya Akademi-award-winning writer also states the paucity of academic courses for translation in our city and country, where translators are underrated and underpaid. "It is a crying shame that in India you don't see enough of graduate or doctoral programmes like you do abroad. It is impossible for me to live off my writing, so you can imagine what happens to the translator."

The National Translation Mission (NTM), an initiative by the Government of India, was launched in 2005 to encourage the translation of each of the 22 languages listed in schedule VIII of the Indian Constitution. But the literary world is still burderned with imbalance - a few texts can be found with 200 translated versions, and some barely have two. Cuckold, for instance, doesn't even have a Hindi version. And Professor Udaya Narayana, the then Director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages, who helmed the framework of the NTM, and writes in Bengali and Maithili, is still optimistic. "If there are 40 translations of Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali, each translator will be interpreting it differently.

Udaya Narayana Singh and Kiran Nagarkar

For instance, the Aijaz Ahmad experiment had seven American poets translating 37 ghazals of Ghalib. And each translation is so good that you can't choose between Adrienne Rich and William Merwin," he states.

Contemporary initiatives in the city such as the Indian Novels Collective, are a saving grace with a project to translate 100 classics of non-English literature for English readers. In Tamil Nadu, Tulika Books, an independent entity publishing children's literature, has 50 bilingual and over 150 single-language titles. Radhika Menon, its founder, states there is now a growing demand for books in regional languages from schools and NGOs. "Our books are designed so that simultaneous printing in multiple languages is feasible. Therefore, adding more languages to the nine we already do is never a problem, and we have in special instances done books even in Odia, Khasi, Mishmi and Mundari," she says.

That perhaps resonates with the spirit of translation, aptly put across by Sahitya Akademi award winner Jerry Pinto, who translated two books this year - When I Hid My Caste by Baburao Bagul and Eknath Awad's Strike a Blow to Change the World. He says, "I believe that one of the reasons why we read is to answer the question: what is it to be another person? What is it like to be someone else?

And this is the basis of empathy, this is the basis of our socialisation, this is the basis of our world. Translation in a small way brings some more richness into the texture of our lives."

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