I started reading I, Anupam just after having finished Tiger Woman — both translations from Bengali, the latter by Arunava Sinha — and the contrast was unflattering for the former. The translation here is so turgid that I struggled to finish the book although I had once been enthralled by Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s Ami Anupam . It is hard to believe that Dev Sen has a role in the translation.
The translators of I, Anupam seem to be fond of footnotes explaining Bengali words — they seem unaware of the present trend to leave most words untranslated (think Amitav Ghosh’s fiction), or to list the meanings of obscure words in a glossary at the end.
Most of the footnoted words here do not need explanations at all. For instance, the Bengali honorific ‘da’, appended to names, which, I am sure, all of India is familiar with. Or the words ‘puja vessels’ — who doesn’t know what puja is? Bafflingly, words which really could have done with a translation — the Sankrit shlokas Dev Sen uses, for example — remain unexplained. And then there are these unwieldy sentences: “It is so natural for people to be deceitful and mean, just like flaws and confusions.” What does it mean?
Ami Anupam was one of the first novels to refer to the Naxal movement in Bengal and it was published in 1976, when the movement was still on. Dev Sen does not delve into the psyche of the activists: instead, she ‘exposes’ Anupam Roy, a fictitious representation of one of those intellectuals who, with their high falutin lectures on revolutionary change, fuelled the youth into action, often pushing them to their deaths, while they stayed safe in their bourgeois lives.
In the first part, Anupam is a suave professor and columnist, secure in his sense of self, sure of his effect on men and women alike. Then things start unravelling — he betrays to the police one of the young men who had sought his protection and then he starts questioning himself.
As the impressive voice with which he had inspired his readers and students turns out to be hollow metaphorically, he starts losing it literally too.
I, Anupam is a study in bad faith and inauthentic living. It reads like a Sartre novel — the mansplaining man surrounded by his acolytes, and his absolute aloneness when his world crashes. If it seems a bit dated now — most of us hardly have any ideals to lose these days — that’s a comment on our times rather than on the novel.
anusua.m@thehindu.co.in
I, Anupam; Nabaneeta Dev Sen, trs Paulami Sengupta, Tias Basu and the author, Thornbird/ Niyogi Books, ₹395
