The art of translation and the tragedy of Indian literature



Arunava Sinha is probably one of the most prolific translators of literary works from Indian languages to English. He has completed 27 Bengali translations in the last seven years and works on at least four projects at any given point—one first draft, one second draft, one piece edited by a publisher and sent back to him with changes and one work that has to be proofread. His first translation was of 1962 hit Chowringhee, the bestselling Bengali novel by Sankar. It was published in 2007 and continues to be one of Penguin Book India’s most successful crossover hits, selling around 50,000 copies; a great number even for an original English literary novel.

In the late 1980s, Sinha was part of the editorial team of a city magazine in Kolkata, Calcutta Skyline, which used to publish one short story in translation every issue. It was around this time that Sankar got in touch with him and asked if he would do a translation of Chowringhee—only, not as an actual manuscript. “It was at that point meant to be a translation for some European publishers who were interested in publishing in their languages. But they needed an English version. It was meant for these publishers to pass around and make up their mind over. I did the translation as a commissioned piece of work,” says Sinha. He had a day job at The Economic Times then, and he worked nights on the translation, finished it off in three months and gave it to Sankar. Soon after, he left Kolkata.

In 2006, 14 years later, an editor at Penguin who was also his friend called and said she had something interesting to tell him. They wanted to publish Chowringhee in English and had got in touch with Sankar, who said there was already a readymade translation; which led to Sinha. After the book was published, the editor came back to Sinha and asked whether he was interested in translating another one of Sankar’s books. By 2009, with two more books out besides Chowringhee, Sinha realised this would be a good project to continue. “I thought, ‘Publishers are interested, I am enjoying it, why not do more?’”

And yet, despite his evident success and productivity, Sinha is a part-timer. He has a steady job heading web portals for a media company and does the translations at night and on weekends. For, being a full time translator in India is just not an option for a creative professional. “There are a very small number of translators in India. You can’t make a profession out of it yet. It doesn’t pay enough. Most writers can’t make a living out of writing, translators come even lower down the pecking order,” he says. And while Chowringhee’s translations might have sold really well, it is an exception. A translated literary work would be considered successful even if it only sold a few thousand copies.

One of the first works of contemporary fiction that R Sivapriya— Penguin’s managing editor and head of its translations list—commissioned for the publishing house was Goat Days, a translation of the Malayalam bestseller Aadujeevitham, by Benyamin. “Goat Days really worked. We’ve sold over 6,000 copies, which is a pretty good number for literary fiction. It is nothing compared to the number sold in Malayalam, which, a couple of years ago, must have been over 50,000,” she says. While Penguin is actively focusing on literary translations like many mainstream publishers, Sivapriya, who has over a decade of publishing experience, says she cannot remark on any radical change in readership numbers of late. “We are getting just a little more reviewed these days, and that is also probably because we market and publicise the books better.”

Mini Krishnan, translations editor at Oxford University Press (OUP), has so far managed 84 full-length works—a mix of short stories, novels, autobiographies, anthologies, biographies and plays—over three decades. Some of the works she has commissioned include UR Ananthamurthy’s Bharathipura, translated from Kannada by P Sreenivasa Rao; Kalki’s Ponniyin Selvan, translated from Tamil by Karthik Narayanan, Uddhav Shelke’s Embers, translated from Marathi by Shanta Gokhale, and Mridula Garg’s Anitya: Halfway to Nowhere, translated by Seema Segal. When 11 more scripts appear between October and February, that number will rise to 95 volumes. One writer calls her ‘a one-woman army in promoting literary translations’.

When Krishnan was a student in the late 1960s, very little was being published in the way of literary translations. “Occasionally I would come across a Jaico book, and the joy of reading about Indian situations in English gave me a thrill that no amount of English literature could. My mother read Tagore in Malayalam, so a dim sense of it being possible to look over the wall began to grow,” she says. When she was completing her MA at Delhi University, she remembers a professor begging students to join the Indian Literature in English course because he couldn’t otherwise keep it open. “The idea that an Indian language had something of equal worth was so remote that no one even thought it worth mentioning,” she says.

She joined Macmillan India in 1980, and on the first day received a 4,000 page script. It was Comparative Indian Literature, a two volume survey of Indian literatures covering the history of every genre in 17 languages, edited by KM George. “As I read and edited the 200 contributors and supported George in his involved discussions with the 17 chief editors, I knew this was a world hopelessly closed to me because descriptions of all the famous works were being made available but not the works themselves,” she says. Krishnan therefore designed a programme of translation: five modern novels from eleven Indian languages. The management was “horrified”, she says. “The MD said flatly, ‘You can do the project if you find the funding outside, but not with my money and you cannot slow down on your textbook programme’.”

Then, translations were not considered worthy of even an hour during annual sales conferences. “Mainstream publishing was not in the least committed to a nationalistic philosophy or mission of recovery of our own past. No one seemed to realise the emotional importance of translation to a polyphonous country like India. At literary seminars, when the presenter of a paper on translations stood up, the room would empty. We didn’t seem to mind insulting ourselves,” says Krishnan.

For the Macmillan list, she had to source texts, writers, translators and funds all by herself. “I was the first to insist on equal returns for the translator and author, and to print the translator’s name on the cover with a note on the translator alongside that of the author. In those days translators were paid as little as two or three per cent, and sometimes settled [on] one-time fees,” she says.

MT Vasudevan Nair is the greatest novelist Malayalam literature has produced. Anyone who reads books in Kerala knows his work. But in the rest of India, he is practically unknown and the few who are familiar with his writing know it mainly through the translations of Gita Krishnankutty. Among MT’s novels, Naalukettu (1958) is one of the most iconic in Kerala. When Krishnankutty first completed a translation of Naalukettu in the 80s, her experience while getting it out illustrates how translations were perceived. “I sent the manuscript to a publisher who accepted it for publication, kept it for about four years and then sent it back saying they had changed their mind because it was too long. Another well- known publisher took it from me at this point, kept it for three years and finally said they could not publish it either. I then put it away and tried to forget about it. Two years later, to my surprise, Orient Longman asked me for the novel and published the first edition immediately. A second edition came out three years ago,” she says.

The respectability of translations was established only in the 1990s, and according to Krishnan, a number of elements contributed. “The women’s movement, the rise of Dalit consciousness following the Ambedkar centenary celebrations, the availability of translations of Latin American literature, the deep consciousness of ourselves as a post-colonial civilisation wrestling with a multitude of forces amidst us where millions were not really affected by the presence of English in our midst for nearly 200 years. The realisation that we have a medieval mindset about most traditions but are applying Western norms to them! The sense of identity that we seemed to be searching for suddenly seemed possible through reclamation and reinterpretation of our own past and our own stories,” she says.

Sinha has an interesting explanation. He says the acceptance of translations has to do with the quality of Indian writing in English, and how it has been compromised. “In the 90s, the [Indian English] books written and published were genuinely good books that broke new ground in so many different ways. But then, when thousands of people started writing in English, obviously the quality went down. Publishers realised [that] on the one hand there was this great publishing explosion, [but] on the other hand they didn’t have enough good material. It was natural to turn to books that you already knew had been successful in their languages. There was already a canon around these Indian language writers. There was an established track record, they had a pedigree. It’s almost obvious that as a publisher you would want to tap this.”

IN THE absence of any organised culture of translations, those who venture into it are led by love of literature or a creative necessity. The case of Professor AJ Thomas, former editor of the Sahitya Akademi journal Indian Literature, illustrates this. In 1977, he was working at the Kerala Tourism Development Corporation’s Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary in Thekkady when an Australian woman asked him for some samples of literary works in Indian languages. Thomas had been writing poetry for about five years then. “That was the time when Kamala Das was Poetry Editor at The Illustrated Weekly of India. She used to publish translations of poetry from various Indian languages. So, I could get hold of some ready samples to show the lady. But there was none available in Malayalam. In my eagerness to show her some specimens from Malayalam, I set to work and translated a few poems of Vishnu Narayanan Namboodiri and some others. That was my first attempt at literary translation,” he says. After this, he continued translating poems and then short stories, novels and plays. “Through translation, I became more acquainted with the form and structure of poetic composition. It helped my own poetry. Translating fiction gave me new insights into the creation of stories, which helped me in writing my own stories,” he says.

For Aruni Kashyap, whose first novel, The House with a Thousand Stories, was published last year, his own writing and translation have worked together since his student days. Kashyap is from Assam, and moved to Delhi in 2004 to study Literature. He noticed that in a course called ‘Twentieth Century Indian Literature’, there were writers from Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and Hindi traditions, but not a single one from the Northeast. This was how he started translating Assamese works he liked, especially those of Indira Goswami. His translation of Goswami’s The Bronze Sword of Thengphakhri Tehsildar, originally published in Assamese in 2009, was also released last year.

Predictably, the translation got about four reviews in English national newspapers, while his own novel, written in English, was reviewed by almost every publication. However, he still sees more visibility for translations today. “If a book does not sell one million copies, I am not disheartened because it started a conversation in some quarters— and it would if it is a good translation and gets visibility. People translate because of the love of it, people write literary fiction for the love of it. But the time of living off translation[s] has not arrived in India yet,” he says.

“The best publisher will split the royalty (often 10 per cent) on a 50-50 basis between the original author and the translator. But many publishers give the translator a lump sum, which would really be unmentionably slight,” says Thomas.

The difficulties for the Indian translator are not only focused on getting published and marketed; there is also the creative challenge. Thomas did his PhD in Translation Studies—his paper was titled ‘Modern Malayalam Fiction and English: An Inquiry into the Linguistic and Cultural Problems of Translation’. He says, “The translator has to negotiate a number of hurdles in creating ‘equivalences’ in the target language text, making aesthetic sense for the reader of that text, presenting as faithfully as possible the essential meaning and intent of the original text.”

The problem of equivalences keeps coming up in conversations with translators. Kashyap says Goswami employs dialect in her writing, and asks how one can get that across when writing in English. Likewise for Krishnankutty. “English does not offer equivalents for the varied registers of spoken Malayalam. I generally prefer to aim at maintaining a comprehensible idiom, which of course means that I fail to convey the subtle linguistic nuances in the text. I am not sure there is a way to overcome this problem. Words that are specifically cultural are equally hard to translate, particularly those that are associated with rituals. As far as possible, I try to explain them in the text and this sometimes makes a sentence much weightier than it is in the original.”

Sinha says the problem is that English is a product of a different culture. He takes the example of the complexity of relationships within an Indian family. “There are no equivalents for them in the English language. In an Indian language, your father’s brother is addressed differently from your mother’s brother. But not in English; they are all uncles,” he says. Something is lost in the process but you can work around it—explain, retain certain words and avoid papering over the differences.

Likewise, the problem of dialogue. Sinha gives the example of a conversation between a man and his driver in India. “Let’s say they are talking in Hindi or Bengali; they will employ a very different vocabulary, although they understand each other perfectly. How do you reproduce that difference? So there are challenges, but that is where the creativity comes in.”

Any debate over whether writing in Indian languages or English is superior is a fallacious one, because they are separate worlds. It can only be bridged to some extent by translations. Only then is it possible for the English speaking world to understand the ambition and genius on the other side.

THIS MONTH, Penguin will publish KR Meera’s Hangwoman, which was first released as a serialised novel in a Malayalam weekly, Madhyamam, and then as Aarachaar (2012), in Kerala. Sivapriya read excerpts in a special fiction issue of Tehelka and immediately asked Meera if she would give the book to them. She then recruited a translator, J Devika, who had worked with Meera before. What got Sivapriya interested was the ambition of the writer. “Meera’s a Malayalee sitting in Kerala and she writes this novel that is set completely in Kolkata and is about a Bengali family. It has no Malayalee connection at all. I think she did two recce trips, that was about it. And a lot of reading. It is really quite extraordinary,” she says.

Krishnan lists the books she is involved with presently, a veritable tapestry of India. “There is a tribal work called Mandol from the Bhili language, the first Oriya Dalit autobiography, Bheda (Target). Then, I’m just finishing up work on the Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing and a fresh cluster of novellas, one of which is the famous Kusumabale (Kannada) by Devanura Mahadeva. There is the first Kannada novel, Indira Bai, waiting to be edited. Each of these books opens up an unknown world. It lets you into its secrets, which in turn become your secrets,” she says.

One of the reasons why India has never seen an Orhan Pamuk, who writes in Turkish but has global appeal, is that Indian language literature in translation just doesn’t get access to the world. Kashyap calls it a problem with gatekeepers, the literary agents who are not willing to accept Indian literature in translation. “How many international literary agents represent Indian writers who don’t work in the English language? The Western publishing market only wants to see a certain kind of India. They can’t handle a multilayered, complex India. They want names they can pronounce. They want stories they can handle.”

Earlier, you could have put this gap down to a paucity of great translations, but AJ Thomas says this is not true anymore. “Of late, great translations do appear, as we can see from the works that emerge from publishers here. In the case of Pamuk, a dedicated publishing giant like Faber & Faber sends out his books as international editions.”

Besides Chowringhee, only one other translation by Sinha, Buddhadev Bose’s My Kind of Girl in 2009, (originally Monor Moto Meye, in 1951) was published internationally, in multiple languages and written about in the foreign press. Sinha says the two books are exceptions. He thinks the way to get a global audience lies in the concerted marketing of translated works. “You have to present it as a canon. If you bring all the works of writers— the greats—together and go out to the world and do a roadshow for the major publishers and say, ‘Here are our 100 best works from Indian literature in the last 100 years,’ I am sure they will find a global audience.”