When I was searching for a book and was told that stocks were not available but that a “print-on-demand” copy would be posted to me, I tried to picture a time when there was only a single copy of a ‘first edition’. Imagine its value. And the loss of such a ‘book’!
Thousands of years ago, if you were a successful king you could assemble a library drawn from the people you either conquered or traded with. Ashurbanipal’s 7th century BCE library at the Assyrian city of Nineveh was one such. Since he was not above using war booty to enlarge his collection, his detractors said that he might have been trying to gather secret incantations to maintain his power — something leaders through the ages have aspired to do.
Three hundred years later, the Nineveh collection inspired Alexander the Great. Never one to be outdone and realising that the word could be as mighty as the sword, Alexander launched another world conquest, this time a bloodless one: the search for significant manuscripts to fill his library. Ironically, it is the destruction of knowledge rather than the collection of it that this library is remembered for.
There are various versions of who pillaged the great library of Alexandria which its founder did not live to see: did the Romans set fire to it, or was it the Turks who did it; or might it have been a Christian general who burned the manuscripts to keep the city’s bath waters at the right temperature? The latter theory gained currency only because when Christians first became a force to reckon with, they wrecked any form of learning that fell outside the teachings of the Church.
Now what if some of these scrolls and manuscripts had never been translated? Imagine the consequences. No Euclid, no Pythagoras, no Euripides, no Aristotle. Shall we let a millennium roll by before we stop and ask ourselves where the study of plant biology and genetics would be without translations of Carl Linnaeus and Gregor Mendel?
Has anyone heard of Isaac Newton’s translator? Perhaps not. Andrew Motte was his name, the brother of a famous publisher. Newton’s Principia Mathematica first appeared in 1687 and the second edition in 1713. The third edition (1726) was translated into English in 1729. It took another century for it to arrive in the U.S. In between, it travelled through the Dutch language and into Japan, where translators had some difficulty before deciding on ‘movement power’ as an equivalent for the concept of force and ‘weight power’ for gravity. The translators? Forgotten now, if they were ever remembered.
The value of translation in the history of world science and philosophy contrasts starkly and mysteriously with the neglect it has endured in the world of literature. Readers may remember that Sheldon Pollock (now the General Editor of the Murty Classical Library) did not once mention the word translation in his 684-page book on Sanskrit, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (2006), reminding us sharply of the politics of living in a world of languages that do not occupy the same positions.
Even today, campaigns for translation studies and recognition for translators have to repeatedly draw attention to a historical truth — that without translators what Goethe referred to as ‘world literature’ would not have reached the world.
Movers and makers
Translators have transported ideas and images by building, word upon word, a culture, a literature and alternative worlds. When Michael Ondaatje said “Never again will a single story be told as if it were the only one,” he might have been writing the mission statement of Comparative Literature studies.
In the past couple of years, literary prizes have combined with the globalisation of the publishing industry, and an international readership has woken up to the richness of contemporary writing everywhere. Easter Sunday is therefore the right time to remember how the story of Jesus travelled into hundreds of languages from its first telling in Greek; it is also satisfying to be able to mention the last chapter of a book, Jesus in Asia , by R.S. Sugirtharajah, which concludes with a reference to Sarah Joseph’s novel, Othappu.
If not for its translation into English by Valson Thampu, Sugirtharajah could not have drawn on the significance of the Malayalam original. Can this be called a case of ‘movement power’ and ‘weight power’ of a regional story infiltrating world literature?
The writer edits translations for Oxford University Press, India
