For Satti Khanna, translation is a passion, and he says his style is to “translate fairly closely to the literal movement of the original.” He is an associate professor at Duke University, United States, where he teaches Indian Cinema and Modern Hindi Literature. Vinod Kumar Shukla, a poet and novelist from Chhattisgarh, is Khanna’s favourite. Having translated four of his works, the fifth and latest is A Window Lived In The Wall (originally published in 1997 and titled Deewar Mein Ek Khidki Rehti Hai ) which won the Sahitya Academy Award in 1999.
The text that explores a marriage, talks of “poor people who manage to be neighbourly or generous in drab circumstances,” says the author. It centres on peoples’ daily lives, with humour and lyricism. The window in the title forms the point between the sparse interiors of the couple’s home and the vast world outside. It is the story of people flourishing despite hardships.
Khanna’s family, displaced from Pakistan in 1947, found refuge in north Bihar and he later studied at St. Stephen’s, Delhi, and won a scholarship to Harvard. In Delhi, after visiting Shukla in Raipur, he shared his views on his work:
What are the skills you have honed to be a translator?
A lot in my life has been to get on the bus, and then it takes me somewhere. I haven't really planned the journey, but I stay awake. I started translating out of love of the text and a desire to inhabit its space. By now I've translated say 10 books [Mohan Rakesh, Phanishwar Nath `Renu’ and a few more] and not all by the same author. The greatest skill I've learned is to leave the work as open as it is in the origin. The sweetest thing about my work is its music. The next is the possibilities that hover around what is said.
What kind of research is involved in your translations?
Because I'm an amateur, I don't have a reliable method. I don't read the book, unless I have leisure to admire it and savour it. And so the relationship of pleasure in the work is the thread that goes from the original to what I'm calling the estrangement to the music that's possible in the new language. In the course of reading a book, there are allusions, references to other works, and obviously I have to understand them. I ask some specialists to respond. So the words I'm usually translating are poetic, they create their own coherence.
Do you agree that translators don’t get their due?
I agree. There are two kinds of translators. One that seeks to be seriously faithful to the surface of the work we are translating. Then the perfect one, a translator for the United Nations. They are an even smaller niche than those of us who translate text. They deserve equal notice with the original writer because they've taken it upon themselves to engender energy, rather than to relate to a world whose glimpses a translation might give us. So they feel bound to the power that's possible to human words. And may they receive, and some of them do in Europe receive, that kind of acknowledgement.
Have you ever thought of writing a book of your own?
If I wrote a book it would be about my childhood. Being displaced and being treated with people in a place of such kindness (north Bihar), such support of strangers that you can't repeat.
A Window Lived In The Wall (Westland) available online and in stores, ₹399
