As translated works receive praise from critics and readers, will regional language writers be offered more chances?

George Steiner, the polymath critic, who is as revered as he is controversial, has said “Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.” Steiner’s After Babel (1975) is widely considered a convincing endorsement of the multiplicity of human language. After all, many think it is a curse, perhaps even counter-evolutionary that so many different types of languages continue to exist. In the Indian publishing scene, 2018 was a definitive year for translations in more ways than one. Unlike the year before, the most talked about and acclaimed books of 2018 have been read in two languages, not one. Notably, neither of the two were Hindi in most cases. The recognition has not only been local, but beyond national borders as well. There has therefore been a change of scene; the story, rather than the setting and the language, it seems has taken over. Despite this success, the support that translations seem to have enjoyed of late, the process and its after-effects remain a bit of a mystery. “It’s heartening to reach new readers through translations. Awards can help publishers reach more readers. I think we should not be using the word “vernacular” any more, since it has a colonial chauvinism attached to it (Even the Oxford dictionary says it’s a language spoken by ordinary people!). It’s the new reader who will be enriched by translations, and not the other way round,” Jayanth Kaikini, Kannada author of the DSC Prize-shortlisted No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories (Harper) says. Kaikini clearly agrees with Goethe’s belief that ‘no monoglot truly knows his own language’.

But would the knowledge of a bigger, international audience in-waiting influence the way the author writes? “In the earlier period of my writing I was not concerned about translations. So I used colloquial dialects frequently.

Many of them are untranslatable or uncommunicative to other language readers.

But in the later period when I have known that there is a chance that my work might be translated, it does unconsciously reflect in my writing. You could say the target shifted. Before it was for a regional reader, but now I cannot forget an international reader,” Benyamin, author of the JCB Award-winning Jasmine Days (Juggernaut) says. Reach could therefore influence the way these stories, seeped in a culture of their own, are written. Does the translator then play a role in this process?

There are a considerable number of people in the Latin-speaking world who are of the opinion that the translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s works were far better, far richer than his original. But is that one of the tasks a translator must undertake, or should they remain true to the original script? “I think it’s a hoary old problem — be faithful to the text or betray it in favour of readability. I’m not sure much is to be gained by asking whether a translation is doing one or the other. I translate something only when I can feel personally invested in it. I share with Jayanth Kaikini a passion for Bombay and a strange insider-outsider relationship with it. His characters and narratives spoke strongly to my own sense of what Bombay was like. The translation is spurred by this connection,” Tejaswini Niranjana, translator of Kaikini’s stories, says. Srinath Perur, translator of Vivek Shanbhag’s pathbreaking Ghachar Ghochar (2017), said in an interview that he translated the book keeping in mind how English is used as an ‘Indian’ language. Are there then dos and don’ts that every translator follows? “There are no dos and don’ts of translation, because so much is context-specific and also within a history of translations from a particular language into another. For decades, people have translated Kannada writings into English (and into other Indian languages, which is not so controversial), but there hasn’t been a wide commercially-successful market until now. The reasons could include the following: There’s a growing demand for Indian writings from a readership familiar with world literature in English, and the demand is both domestic and international; translators are also more familiar with the literary universe into which the work is being translated, “Niranjana says. From the writer’s perspective, there must be anxiety, as well as doubts about the way their work will be handled, read and re-written in a second language. Considering that this second language is English, the scope widens, and with it, perhaps the paranoia of your creation being compromised. “Anxiety on part of the writer cannot yield any result. The writer must give the translator some freedom. He must acknowledge that word-to-word translation is not possible and that transformation of an idea is the best way to communicate with other societies. That may well be relaxing for the author too,” Benyamin says. Jayanth largely concurs and believes the author and the translator work towards a  common goal, and neither perhaps looks for control. “We had a couple of meetings. Once, initially about which stories to pick and then after translation, about the mutual doubts we had. That is about it. I don’t control my stories; when I write, it’s the story which drives me. So if at all it’s the story that will drive the translator. Not the other way, around or me,” he says. Of course, translations aren’t an assured way of widening scope of the writing or taking authors to new readers. For one, there aren’t enough good translations and translators to begin with. But with new possibilities, and publishing houses hedging their bets on translations, things could change. “Only when there is more and more translation can better and better translations surface. It’s like creative writing in English in India, to take an obvious example. There has to be an ecosystem of publishing in a particular language — the more extensive this ecosystem is, the better the chances are that a good translator will emerge, and good editors of translation will also emerge,” Niranjana says.