Translators don’t play “second fiddle to authors”, remarked Angela Rodel, the 2023 International Booker Prize-winning translator of Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Hachette), in an interview. According to her, a work of translation is a result of a “duet”, blending of “both melodies” that the author and translator compose individually.
This reminded me of J. Devika’s translation of R. Rajasree’s Sthory of Two Wimmin Named Kalyani and Dakshayani (Hamish Hamilton by Penguin Random House, 2022). While it’s good to stray away from hyperbole, I believe this book to be one of the finest demonstrations of preservation of the flavour of the origins and socio-politico nuances of a text written in the multiplicity of one language in its translated version.
From a language’s history and politics to market-driven forces that create the demand for one work to be translated as opposed to others, translators are faced with an array of challenges. However, it’s a pity that translation discourse is often reduced to “lost and found” and rendering an “untranslatable” word or phrase from one language to another. What Devika does with this text—and other works she chooses to translate—is the kind of deeper engagement that a work getting translated deserves. Her translator’s note to any of her translated works reflects the same in which she problematises the issues facing society a particular text highlights to help enable a nuanced reading of that work.
A flavour of that can be witnessed in her note to R. Rajasree’s book: “The fact that we are translating from regional languages/spoken words into a powerful, global language cannot be forgotten. If the latter is to be transformed by the former, this multiplicity of sources has to be taken seriously; and the historical moment of its rise to relevance has to be properly countenanced. Importantly, as a translator and feminist, I have argued that by translating anti-patriarchal writing in Malayalam to English, I seek to preserve the political charge of these writings from the debilitating ‘taming’ exercises of Malayalam literary circles.”
Devika not only translates works by K. R. Meera, Sarah Joseph, Unni R. Ambikasutan Mangad, Lalithambika Antharjanam and Shihabuddin Poythumkadavu among others, but she also manages the archives of the works of the first-generation Malayali feminists (see Swatantryavaadini). The feminist-historian who works with the Centre for Development Studies was at the seventh edition of the Kerala Literature Festival in Kozhikode, Kerala, where in a conversation with Writerly Life she candidly discussed a variety of issues concerning the act of translation. Edited excerpts:
The works that you choose to translate signal your feminist politics. But as you translate them into English, do you meditate on the fact that in this process, you’re rendering stories in the coloniser’s language, for it can be argued that the act of translating anything into English strengthens Anglo-centricity? Do you feel that way or do you feel translation renders a decolonising effect—that it works as a medium to bridge the divide and socialise a book or a story to a wider readership?
In the translation process, this coloniser’s language, the English language, actually gets decolonised—if you use it as a medium to translate. Because when it’s done—the translation, it’s no longer in British English. It doesn’t remain British English when all kinds of new words are introduced to it.
For example, in R. Rajasree’s Sthory of Two Wimmin Named Kalyani and Dakshayani Malayalam expletives are used in plentiful. You’ve got to create equivalences for them! Sample mayire, which means pubic hair in Malayalam. If you render it as-is in English—pubic hair, it doesn’t have any effect at all. I used ‘crotch fur’ for that because crotch conveys better the sense of a private part, and mayire is an expletive that relies on the shaming force of calling someone the name of something that is utterly peripheral to an unmentionable private part—a double insult. ‘Pubic hair’ does not convey that. So, one needs to be creative in using them in English is all I’m saying.
Regarding the coloniser’s language—well, in the 1950s, you could call it colonial; but now more and more Indians speak English. We’ve, as [Salman] Rushdie says, chutney-fied English enough. There’s a lot of chutnification which is still going on. For example, what’s happening to Hindi in the South. I overheard a Malayali mason, a senior, instructing his helpers from Bihar or Bengali or wherever—baithikoda. He didn’t say baitho [a Hindi word that translates to sit]. He said baithiko. So, this usage becomes Mallu-Hindi. Because a variety of people are now coming to the South, we don’t know if some of these are Bengali, Nepali, or Assamese words; it’s all chutney, and we call it Hindi. Some people call it Bengali. But we don’t know what it is. This new chutney is emerging.
It’s my dream that all these workers who are coming here and settling down, whose kids are going to local schools, maybe great writers will emerge from their generation, for they are hearing this chutney-fied language—Hindi at home and learning Malayalam in school. In another thirty years, they might come out with wonderful writing.
Basically, you’ve to take the language away from the elite. The British aristocracy and upper class left English behind, and we’ve done strange things to it, and we’ve taken it away from them. And they’re not complaining either. They can’t even complain. Similarly, Sanskritic Hindi-wallas also can’t complain. In another twenty years, you’ll have an exotic Hindi which they’ll have to give a name because it’ll be a mix of Hindi, Bengali, Nepali, Assamese, and maybe some language from Burma [Myanmar]. And as most people in Kerala come from the Northeast, so all of those languages will be present in this Hindi, too. So, Hindi will not be colonising India. India will probably colonise Hindi.
As you deeply engage with it, I wanted to know your thoughts on this constant and boring mention of this binary of “lost and found” in translation. Isn’t this process a form of co-creation—translating a text? In your view, what should be the translation discourse?
I find it to be wrong, this metaphor because it’s not as if there’s some essence that’s true and fabulous and wonderful which is “lost” in translation. Well, that’s a reading. Whatever you consider to be the true essence of a book, it’s a certain reading. A. C e r t a i n. R e a d i n g.
Individualistic maybe?
Not individualistic necessary. Maybe from a literary, theoretical lens—or a framework of a certain kind of literary theory. So, there’s no question of “lost in translation.” Bad translations are just that, bad. In the sense that they’re wrong; if you get basic meanings and things wrong, and if some characters go missing, then that’s bad translation. That I agree. But besides that, there’s a case to argue that a translated version is a translator’s baby. That reflects very much, very strongly in a translator’s work—how they read that text. And translators must have a right to it.
A good example of that is this book. [Points to K. R. Meera’s Assassin (Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2023).] I read this book as a neoliberal-feminist-paranoid-narration. The protagonist of this book—Satyapriya—is a young woman whose whole idea in life is to overcome patriarchy on her own. She seems to be battling patriarchy as a brave, single warrior. There’s nobody to help her. Everything on her side is white and pure. And everything opposed to her is black, mud, and evil. There’s this ‘competence porn’ [to her nature]—she does everything perfectly, she manages to overcome all barriers. Everybody, from a new-age Swamiji to hybrid Kashmiri Naxalites to high-flying corporate honchos to even the police officer investigating her case, falls in love with her. She’s rescuing helpless Muslim women persecuted by their community beliefs; she’s cool with sex workers … she’s like p.e.r.f.e.c.t!
So, it might look odd that she is in so much admiration of her mother, who had so violently instilled in her these ideas—Do everything on your own. Never try to ask for help. You’ve got to achieve everything on your own. If you are subjected to sexual violence, deal with it alone. You are actually on your own, but there is no contradiction at all because this is after all the core of the neoliberal self.
That’s why this character is so shallow. When she’s talking about Tamil and looking at Tamilians, she’s very condescending. Then, her father is a damn paedo! Her mother protects the father in a strange way. She [the character] was angry with that, but when she finds out that the father has left the property for her, she kind of almost reconciles with him, nearly. [Laughs.]
It’s all connected—patriarchy and property. Reminds me of Frederick Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State [translated by Ernest Untermann].
Yeah, now that she finds that this guy—her father—has left her aplenty, somehow her anger towards him softens. But then what happens … when she has defeated everybody and gone back home in triumph? It’s back to square one.
Because a neoliberal feminist always has to go on this loop of being threatened, fighting the threat, and going back to being threatened again.
Is this atomising her? There’s this kind of self-validation as well which she’s constantly seeking as well.
Extremely atomised woman she is, this character you’ve got in here. Another core character of this neoliberal feminism is this unhealable wound.
And this wound will never heal. Because it makes you vulnerable all the time. Because you need to keep protecting yourself from it all the time. You need to keep the world from hurting you, so you close in on yourself.
So, that’s how I read Assassin. Not as a paean of praise for this character called Satyapriya because Satyam in her—the essential core which she believes that she has—is wounded and she needs to protect it. She will never really let it heal. And that is my reading of the book. But that reading will not go in [as an introduction to the book] because all our authors have so many Facebook fans now. That’s not how people would want to read it.
Like it to be marketed?
No, even if marketing is done right, I’ve seen some responses to Assassin, which were like, Oh it’s my story. It’s my story. Oh, this is my life … Oh my, this is just exactly my life. And all that. In a sense, there’s pressure on the author to also read this character Satyapriya as this ideal heroine. What does it become then? Yet another black-and-white story—all good ones on my side, all baddies on the other side. It then just becomes a popular text and nothing more than that.
Actually, Meera’s is a kind of feminist middle-brow modernism, which relies heavily on the craft. One small slip and the text falls into a kind of sloppy popular sentimentalism. The translator has to be deeply aware of that.
Isn’t it ironic? A text written for emancipation, to cater to a certain feminist idea but then fails to acknowledge this discovery of a self-inflicting wound, a new identity which this person of course doesn’t know is making her follow an infinite loop …
… and imagine if that is glorified as feminism! Then it’d be very strange altogether.
This is why reading for me is very important when I translate. What I like about Assassin is the way Meera presents Satyapriya through her own eyes. We are not judging Satyapriya because she’s in constant pain, this woman … despite all her triumph and glory, we’re seeing her pain and we’re seeing her going on and on in these loops. But here, the author steps back and lets us see all this, so I like this documentation of sorts. There are parts of this book that go like … ‘then a conversation happened like this’. So, this book, for me, is a documentation of a neoliberal-feminist-paranoia.
But then you notice that my translator’s note isn’t in this one [in Assassin]. I’ve it in this one [lifting this writer’s copy of her own translation of Manasi’s Subversive Whispers (Hamish Hamilton by Penguin Random House, 2023)] and in Hangwoman: Everybody Loves a Good Hanging (Hamish Hamilton by Penguin Random House, 2014) [by K. R. Meera].
I think there’s resistance towards a translator’s interpretation guiding the reader.
Please understand that I’m not blaming anyone for this. It happens. That’s the problem with this [phenomenon of the] moment. Sometimes translations happen to be the flavour of the season … The point I’m making is that translations seem to be everywhere. Everybody is interested in them. But somehow the translator seems to be disappearing. I mean a translator’s role seems to be shrinking.
Do you feel they’re becoming peripheral characters in their own narrative?
That seems to be happening. Because we’ve editors, too, who need to sell a book. And knowing that an average reader who cannot spend let’s say more than an hour and finds it challenging to read more than a 100-page book, then the editor would request that the two demotics in a book [referring to Sthory of Two Wimmin …] be simplified; that the language be made easy-peasy. That becomes a problem. Let me tell you that editors don’t force it on you.
But that’s terrible—this invisible pressure to make the narrative simpler, and easier to read, which I think does a disservice to the original when one is attempting an exercise which is far more complex. So, yeah, we live in a great moment for translations but it’s a very ambivalent moment.
The mention of economy of words and using simple language brings me to my last question. In the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and large language model (LLM)-based tools like ChatGPT, and given that a major problem-solving exercise for Google was to develop competencies towards translating between languages, what do you consider would be the place of human translators?
AI or any other tool cannot or will not replace a translator—a human translator. If AI might gain access to the range of imagination that a human being can have, then it might need another translator. But I think if you use two different programs, you will get two different translations. This diversity is quite central to the translation exercise whether it’s done by humans or machines. So, I suppose what’s important for us is diversity. Three different translated versions of a piece of work, that’s not bad, is it?
This interview was conducted when the writer was on a sponsored trip to Kozhikode, Kerala by the Kerala Literature Festival (KLF)’s official PR team to attend the seventh edition of the KLF 2024.
Unless stated otherwise, all images belong to Saurabh Sharma.