Suman K Sharma
Man built the Tower of Babel and God sent down translators to correct his blunder. A translator is a dealer in words and wisdom. Humility, integrity, commitment and the rectitude of a tethered beast are some of her attributes. You have to take her on her word or find yourself up against the wall of unintelligible gibberish.
But, talking of literary translation, is it really possible to carry an idea, intact in all its shades and layers of meaning, from one language to another? Not always. Take the title of Usha Vyas’s Dogri short story, Pani Aaya, Pani Gaya. The story is about a single working woman, who is exploited both by her own family and the people she works with in a government office. The first difficulty in translating the text into English is presented by the title itself. ‘Water Came, Water Went Away’ would sound comically literal. Will ‘The Tap Ran, The Tap Goes Dry’ be okay? Perhaps, it will.
Think again. The substitution of the Indic words pani, aaya and gaya with their English equivalents fails because that is not the way the English-speaking world thinks of piped delivery of water. Consider then the two English phrases of the more acceptable translation. A North Indian housewife, who does not know much of the language, may rightly observe, ‘Kya nalka daur sakta hai. Aur voh sookh kar kahan gaya hoga? Nalka to bejaan hai, pipe se jura hua!’
The above illustration may perhaps seem less valid since the words in it have been used idiomatically. So let us see how a Dogri expletive ‘Moa!’ takes to English translation. ‘Dead one’? But the rendition would be bland, stating prosaically that someone is lifeless. Where is the wrathful passion of the original in it? The expressions ‘May you die!’ or ‘May you fall dead!’ would convey the anger, but still fall short of the vengeful intent of the original. The Dogri speaker is already seeing her adversary dead – moa; while an English speaker only expresses a wish that the luckless man, who has roused her to anger, ‘may’ die. Notice the dilution of meaning in the translation. Does not Umberto Eco say, ‘Translation is the art of failure!’
The art of failure or not, the world would have been a less habitable place without translation. If the Vedas and Upanishads have gone to the West; if the Holy Bible and the Holy Quran are read all over the world by the faithful and the not-so-faithful; if the stories of The Panchatantra and The Arabian Nights regale the readers in Alabama and Alaska; and if Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy have become household names in Kolkata and Coimbatore; it is all because of translators. Most of the established authors, you may agree, dabbled into translation at one or the other point of their literary careers.
Yet, translators, poor fellows, end up playing the second fiddle to authors. The prefix anu (the lesser one; that which follows) in the Hindi term anuvaadak says it all. Anonymity has been generally their fate. The Mughal prince Dara Shikoh got Sanskrit texts rendered into Persian, we are told, but can you name anyone who actually did the job? Or, coming closer to our times, how many of us remember S.S. Koteliansky (1880-1955), the Russian émigré to Britain, who brought to the Anglophones the Russian masterpieces of Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Rozanov?
More often than not, the translator’s significance gets subsumed in the merit and popularity of the original. The glory and the attendant material rewards are largely the author’s. Yashpal, an eminent Hindi author, writing in the late 1940s, decries that for all their labour, translators are paid less even than the typists. Sadly, the position has not changed much in India these seven decades. There are occasions when the translators are denied even the right to have their names on the title page.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel. On 16 May this year, 28-year old Deborah Smith, a translator from the United Kingdom, has equally shared the prestigious Man Booker International Prize with the South Korean author, Han Kang for the novel The Vegetarian. Apart from the worldwide recognition, both the author and Ms Smith have each got the prize money of twenty-five thousand British pounds (about Rupees twenty-five lakh) and another thousand pounds for being short-listed.
The name and fame, albeit, have not come easily to the young translator. She spent one-fourth of her life learning the source language, Korean. If that was not enough, she moved to the far off South Korea to imbibe the cultural nuisances of the language. Just to be a translator.
Follow our WhatsApp channel
