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Last week, two-time Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel passed away “suddenly yet peacefully” at 70. Her historical fiction sold millions of copies, particularly the Wolf Hall trilogy, a fictional account of the rise and sudden fall of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII. Set in the 1500s, the first book was published in 2009, where she recounted the story of Henry VIII and his spouses through the life of Cromwell, who became one of his most trusted advisers. Ambitious in its retelling, it went on to win the Booker Prize, as did the follow-up novel, Bring up the Bodies. In her acceptance speech in 2009, Mantel said she had waited 20 years to tell the story of a blacksmith’s boy who becomes the king’s righthand man, a venture she knew had to interest historians, “amuse the jaded palette of the critical establishment” and capture the “imagination of the general reader.” The third book, The Mirror & The Light, which was longlisted for the Booker, takes Cromwell to the “heights of power” before tracing his rapid descent in 1540. In an interview after being longlisted for the Booker, she said, “…for the greater part of the book we have a narrative that is expanding, breathing more deeply; then it begins to fold itself away into the space of a burial chamber.” Mantel was also Booker longlisted for her 2005 novel Beyond Black, which tells the story of Alison Hart, a medium by trade who passes on messages from beloved dead ancestors to her clients. There are consequences of having knowledge about the other world, and this darkly comic, savage novel deals with love, loss, grief and death. Her fiction apart, Mantel will be remembered for her non-fiction work, particularly her searing memoir, Giving up the Ghost (2003). “I’m used to seeing things that aren’t there,” she writes, and then takes stock: “You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted.” Seizing “the copyright in myself,” she leans on memory – always “shapeshifting” – to recount her childhood, schooling with Catholic nuns and living with pain (she suffered from endometriosis).
In other news, Harry Potter fans have something to look forward to with the soon-to-be-released Madly, Deeply: the diaries of Alan Rickman in which Professor Severus Snape, the character he portrayed in the Potter universe, has written about his co-stars. In an excerpt in The Guardian, he writes in a May, 2003 entry: “Dan Radcliffe is so serious and focused – but with a sense of fun. I still don’t think he’s really an actor but he will undoubtedly direct/produce.” In another entry, he says, “These kids need directing. They don’t know their lines and Emma [Watson]’s diction is this side of Albania at times.” His favourite Potter film? The Alfonso Curaon-directed, third film in the series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
We have a new look for the magazine on Sunday, and the redesigned literary review pages marked Translation Day (September 30) with essays by Saikat Majumdar on classics vs cancel culture, Mini Krishnan on how authors and translators subvert the dominant language from within, Mini Kapoor on why translators must get their due by having their names on the cover alongside the writer and more. We also talk to Jyoti Thottam about her remarkable book Sisters of Mokama (Penguin Random House).
Translation Day
Saikat Majumdar, whose novels include The Firebird, The Scent of God and The Middle Finger, writes an essay in which he wonders when books from the past upset 21st century sensibilities, should readers adopt an alternative vision or shun the historically distant text. He cites an example from his experience of translating into English Rabindranath Tagore’s short story Shubhodrishti as The First Look. It’s the tale of a young man of a privileged class in colonial Bengal who takes to hunting after the death of his wife. The first challenge was to present a story deeply rooted in time and place to a 21st century global readership. But he writes that this challenge paled in comparison to the kind of social and environmental violence that seemed to define the protagonist. The hero, in his mid-20s, possibly older, is soon staring at a girl, just about pubescent. Majumdar says that he knows from his extensive reading of Tagore that few male writers are as sensitive to the female mind, yet “how does one find a contemporary idiom and aesthetic to render the celebration of this unexpected romance, even if it appears to be paedophilia to today’s reader?” There are occasions, he concedes, when a disjuncture calls for the cancellation of historically distant texts, but there are other moments “when a classic shakes us with its grating worldview.”
International Translation Day: Classics vs #cancelculture
In her essay for World Translation Day, Mini Krishnan argues that the growth of a hybrid culture calls for much borrowing and adaptation and it is here that translation plays an important role. G. Geetha in translating Vanna Nilvan recalls that it felt like dancing on a slippery floor with two left feet. But she also said, echoing Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, that she preferred the absurdity of translating to the absurdity of not translating. In Translating Myself and Others, Jhumpa Lahiri says the word in Italian for translation, traduzione, has a second meaning other than the well-known ‘traduttore, traditore’ (Italian for translator, traitor). It is a bureaucratic term that refers to the transportation of persons who are under suspicion or detained. While moving literature across a language divide is a challenge, it is a risk that has to be taken, says Krishnan. “Reading a translated work is a simultaneous entry through two doors into two rooms. You cannot be in one without being in the other as well.”
International Translation Day: A writer’s dual passport
In Japanese writer Yoko Tawada’s new novel out in English, Scattered All Over the Earth, the translator’s name Margaret Mitsutani does not appear on the cover, though it is mentioned prominently enough on the back. In her column, Word Count, Mini Kapoor says it took her a rereading of Edith Grossman’s 2010 classic Why Translation Matters to register this oddity. At the heart of her essays is the assertion: “I believe that serious professional translators, often in private, think of themselves — forgive me, I mean ourselves — as writers… I also believe we are correct to do so.” At its most visible, says Kapoor, this demands that the translator’s name be visibly, legibly mentioned on the book’s cover. It involves a consideration of what it is that a good translation achieves. It needs the translator to have “a keen sense of style in both languages”. A translator must first gain a deep understanding of the first version (the original) — “this is a kind of reading as deep as any encounter with a literary text can be,” she points out. This, then, must be recreated “as far as possible, within the alien system of a second language”. In other words, reading a work in translation is to be aware that it draws from the translator’s reading and then the translator’s writing in the second language. As she quotes Walter Benjamin, “No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original.”
How to be mindful of translations as distinct from the original works
Spotlight
In Sisters of Mokama: The Pioneering Women Who Brought Hope and Healing to India (Penguin), Jyoti Thottam recounts how six Catholic nuns from Kentucky set up a hospital in Bihar in 1947. The nuns, belonging to the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in Nelson County Kentucky, travelled by ship and railway at a fraught time to the little-known town of Mokama. It’s also the story of her mother who left her Kerala home when she was 15 years old to train as a nurse at the hospital. The book doubles up as a historical and social account of America and India right up to the 1960s, taking into its sweep Partition, and the communal riots and migrations that followed. Talking to Uday Balakrishnan in a zoom call, Thottam said her mother occasionally talked about her nursing school in Mokama but that she wanted to know more. “Why did those nuns leave Kentucky? How did they end up in Mokama? And why did all young women like my mother leave their homes to study nursing there? Answering these questions took me deep into the history of Kentucky, the history of America during and after World War II, the history of India after Partition. I found that threads of all these histories were connected in unexpected ways. The book is a way of placing my family’s story in the larger American story. It is the outcome of 20 years of research, accessing archival material and personal papers preserved by the families of some of the sisters.”
Going to Mokama was exciting, but there was fear too: Jyoti Thottam
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- On the 75th anniversary of India’s independence, two writers put together a collection of original essays on what and who comprises ‘New India’. From Gyan Prakash, Suraj Yengde, Ornit Shani to Kaur and Mathur, the writers analyse the politics at the heart of ‘New India’ in The People of India (Penguin/Viking).
- The Song of the Cell (Allen Lane) by Siddhartha Mukherjee tells the story of how scientists discovered cells and are now using that knowledge to create new therapies for a range of issues like Alzheimer’s, dementia, AIDS and even COVID-19. All may be viewed as the result of cells, or systems of cells, functioning abnormally.
- Emi Yagi’s Diary of a Void (Penguin) is a hilarious debut novel. Set in Japan, it follows Shibata, the only female staff at her new workplace. When she is assigned menial tasks, she announces she is pregnant. Suddenly, she does not have to work overtime or serve coffee, but she is on a nine-month deadline.
- Fairy Tale (Hodder & Stoughton) by Stephen King revolves around 17-year-old Charlie who has to take care of his alcoholic father. But when he is bequeathed a large house and the key to another universe, he has to make decisions that have unprecedented repercussions on the fate of the world.
