August is celebrated as Women in Translation month (WITMonth), an annual reminder that more needs to be done to champion women writing in languages other than English. Translator Alison Anderson and blogger Meytal Radzinski launched the movement aiming to bridge the gender gap in publishing, and to ensure more women writers’ voices are heard.
This 2013 push led to the announcement of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation in 2017. Among the recipients are Yoko Tawada (Memoirs of a Polar Bear, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky), Annie Ernaux (The Years, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer) and Geetanjali Shree (Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell) who won in 2022, sharing it with Marit Kapla (Osebol: Voices from a Swedish Village, translated by Peter Graves).
Gains from translation
What do we gain from reading women’s voices in translation? For one, it opens up a whole new world of experiences and reaches a far larger audience. Writers like Ismat Chughtai, Qurratulain Hyder, Krishna Sobti, Mahasweta Devi, Elena Ferrante, Ernaux would have been lost to those who do not know Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Italian or French if they had not been translated. To give an example, readers who do not read Hindi would not have discovered a character like Rajjo in Geetanjali Shree’s debut novel, Mai (1993), if it had not been skilfully translated by Nita Kumar. It won the Sahitya Akademi award in 2002.
At the centre is mai, the mother, who was “always bent over, said little,” and seemed to be like a puppet dancing to the tunes of so many. “But with even so many pulling her she did not splinter into pieces. She remained whole. She continued to be pulled, but somehow kept her balance within her own control.”
In her Afterword, Kumar writes that mai, called Rajjo, opens up for readers a past of girlhood and freedom, a present of bondage and servitude, and a future yet unknown but full of potential. In a way, the 80-year-old protagonist of Tomb of Sand fulfils that potential by crossing all borders and pushing boundaries.
Mother courage
In her searing works, writer and activist Mahasweta Devi wrote about the time spent among tribals and other marginalised communities. She has powerful woman characters like Sujata Chatterjee in Hajar Churashir Ma (Mother of 1084) who is mourning the loss of her son in the violent Naxalite movement of 1970s Bengal. As she searches for reasons why her son became a number and the revolutionary movement that took him away, Sujata also discovers her own place in a feudal world.
Mahasweta Devi’s short story, Draupadi, also set around the Naxalite movement, highlights the inequality and injustice in the lives of tribals. Draupadi or Dopdi loses her husband in an encounter and as she is surrounded by armed policemen, she enacts a chilling final act — she flings her sari away and walks up to them, making them terribly afraid of an “unarmed target”. This powerful image lingers long after the story is read, and in 2021, Draupadi was dropped from the Delhi University undergraduate syllabus.
Memory and reality
Ernaux, who bagged the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, starts her 2008 bestseller, The Years, with these words: “All the images will disappear,” and then writes a personal narrative of the period between 1941 and 2006 told through snapshots of the past and present.
She talks about books (Gone with the Wind, for instance), photos, films (The Bridge on the River Kwai), songs, radio, advertising and contrasts them with her diary entries.
Through this juxtaposition of the public and private, the French memoirist provides a glimpse of social history and culture over a period of time.
From the late 1950s, she observes: “More than ever people relied upon the acquisition of things to build better lives,” exchanging coal-fuelled stoves for gas cookers, oil cloth-covered wooden tables for Formica-topped ones, old fashioned safety razors and cast-iron steam irons replaced by electrical equivalents.
The shame that awaits
For girls, though, she writes that shame lay in wait at every turn: “The verdict of too loomed large over their clothing and makeup: too short, long, low-cut, tight, flashy, etc. The height of their heels, whom they saw, what time they went out and came in… were subject to all-pervasive surveillance by society.”
Cut to 2000 and Ernaux rues the cacophony and the “profusion of everything, objects, information, and ‘expert opinions’.” No sooner has an event occurred than, she says, someone issues a reflection, whatever the subject: manners of conduct, the body, euthanasia, depression, alcoholism, frigidity, anorexia, unhappy childhoods — “nothing was lived in vain anymore.”
In a sentence easy to relate to as the world has gotten noisier, Ernaux says, “With all the intermingling of concepts, it was increasingly difficult to find a phrase of one’s own, the kind that, when silently repeated, helped one live.”
Her advice to the weary people of the 21st century? “Save something from the time where we will never be again.”
