Imagine shifting the Tower of Pisa into downtown Manhattan and convincing everyone it's in the right place; that’s the scale of the task. … (Tim Parks, translator of Roberto Colasso)
I have two reasons for writing this article about that depressed class in the literary metropolis: translators. One is an astonishingly insensitive remark from a widely-read friend (usually appreciative of creativity) who said, “Translators should have the humility to want to stay invisible. Their reward should be their work itself and that sublime feeling should satisfy them.”
This is like two people winning a doubles at tennis and only one being honoured while the other is told to be content with the honour of having played at all. She refused to recognise the double force of what happens when a reader becomes a writer carrying the power of one culture into another. This is so akin to monolingual notions about afterlives and echoes that I wanted to counter it by stating that any praise or prize for a translation should recognise that it is the result of two literary performances.
The second reason is that I notice a shift in the way translations are beginning to be viewed in India.
Indeed a gratifying amount of chatter has begun to rise gently around the dark continent of English translations of Indian works and articles and interviews have started to appear with various degrees of visibility and understanding. Sometimes the articles are pasted together hastily and injure the truth: important names and institutions are left out, a publisher who did not publish a particular work is credited with it. Someone who has successfully translated more than 3000 pages is not even mentioned.
So, though neither a writer nor a translator may I speak?
Rising from several tons of paper which no one can bear to throw away, are a few thoughts: translation is about creativity, not about striving to echo or copy.
Juggling without spills from one language into another is one of the most difficult exercises of the human brain.
Secondly, translation is not entirely about language. It is also and largely about culture. Land, language and behaviour are deeply connected, language grows from the ethos of its region of origin so that is what you are transpositioning: a whole zone and the invisible milieu peculiar to it.
Sometimes, subtleties escape us completely: just as looking someone in the eye is a sign or test of transparency in most cultures but an act of disrespect amongst the Navajo, there are opacities in literary transfer if one is not familiar with the culture.
Clearly the best writing about a region can come only from its language and shoehorned into a different sort of vehicle — to enable it to travel further — only by a person with uncommon abilities.
Now for the next point, this person, the translator, has to be truly bi-cultural; it isn’t enough to be bilingual though that is the basic requirement.
The translator is a two-world person. So someone who lives and breathes the same air as the writer of the original work and who knows every weed and curse word in his writing may not be the great transformer who builds the phantom image of his text in another language. Because this person devoted though s/he might be to text and writer is not comfortable in the variety of English needed for the text on hand. Likewise, someone whose English is very smart but whose reading and scanning of the original tends to be earnestly bookish may not be the magic bridge.
What publishers and readers are looking for is a bicultural creature, the One in whom two worlds rock and clash, the One who dreams in two languages, the One who cannot look at a line in one language without rich echoes streaming in from the other part of his brain which says, “…and then there’s this line to match ….”
Mini Krishnan edits literary translations for Oxford University Press.
minioup@gmail.com
