RAJI NARASIMHAN
A valuable collection that raises perennial questions on translation.
Can we conclude that down the years an outlook on translations has developed among us, which leaves us unaffected by the incomplete harnessing of English to native thought?
The first thing one notes in this collection is the variety of stories. Secondly, attention is held by the careful handling of the target language, English. Thirdly, there is Mini Krishnan’s Introduction, demanding exclusive consideration, unfortunately not possible in a brief review.
The cumulative effect of these varied spheres of excellence is renewed emphasis on some age-old issues of translation. What is it exactly that transforms the bi-cultural quality of a translation into a unified product?
A near satisfactory answer to this question is provided by Narayan Hegde’s translation, “Annayaa’s Anthropology”, of A.K Ramanujam’s Kannada original. It is about the shocked outgrowing by the NRI, Annayya, of the very concept of cultural integrity, Indian’s or American’s. Annayya discovers the role of money behind the idealist fronts of both parties. And he seethes with rage.
Does the heat of his rage burn down not only his cultural biases, but the cultural signposts in the story, thereby imparting a homogeneous flavour to the English translation?
Cultural other-ness
Is the sweep of a negative fury, in other words, an asset in making English absorbent of cultural other-ness? This seems to happen in one more story in the collection — Ranga Rao’s translation, “Grandfather”, of Kutumba Rao’s Telugu story “Taatayya”. The language is crisp. The sentences are short and show a certain internalising of the semantics of English.
Kutumba Rao’s story is a satire on the caste system. It is richly detailed, has the easy wit of the pooh-poohing insider. It shows the caste system as not the grim citadel usually visualised, but as a laughable curiosity. Certainly, this is a powerful counter thrust to the monolithic presence of caste. It overcomes the snags of translation that remain despite Ranga Rao’s intelligent handling of his language.
In the other stories, however, there is no dissenting fury. They are mostly tolerant of their cultural bases, even when adverse circumstances thrown off by these very bases confront the characters. Take for instance, Abbouri Chhaya Devi’s Telugu story translated by Jayashree Mohanraj.
The core round which “The Touch” grows is the culture-specific theme of the taboos of touch between father and daughter, and the barriers these can prove to be in the free expression of their natural affection for each other.
Throughout the story a thin but palpable divide is felt between the spirit of the translating language and the subject it tackles. And yet the story goes home. This happens with all the stories in one way or the other. Why, one wonders.
Can we conclude that down the years an outlook on translations has developed among us, which leaves us unaffected by the incomplete harnessing of English to native thought? Have we, in other words, evolved a technique of reading translations? Have we become mature readers of translations, not just writers of them? Take the first story in the collection, “The Sweet Dish”, a translation by G.S Amur of Veerabhadrappa’s Kannada story. Eight year old Basava is sold by his parents to the rich man Gowda, in lieu of debts they can never repay. Basava is not told of this.
His mother feeds him a sweet dish as farewell dinner and sends him to Gowda’s ostensibly on an errand. The boy’s waking to the facts and his futile, frenzied resistance is the climax of the story.
This climax and the statement of stark, endemic poverty it makes register in the reader’s mind instantly, smoothly. And this happens despite the culture specific vernacular terms that swarm in the story, and give the English a subaltern sound.
All the translations are marked by culture specific transliterations, along with a thin bodied but doughty English gamely striving to encompass the ethnic richness of the originals.
Conveying emotion
Even Lakshmi Holmstorm’s translation (“Squirrel”) of Ambai’s story “Anil”, though less marked by transliterations, has nevertheless a heavy load of socio- cultural vignettes that are really speaking, Tamil-specific. The English version cannot but passively relocate these into its own stream.
Nonetheless, the angst of Ambai, private and personal, emerges strong and clear through the different lingua-scape of English. This voice and the emotion it conveys is more than language. It is an ideogram. So is the factor of poverty transmitted by “The Sweet Dish”. All the underlying statements fleshed out by the other translations are also more than language.
Have we then, to repeat the question asked earlier, developed subtler faculties for reading translations? Have we developed a keener sense of hearing, the ability to pictorialise what the ear conveys? Do we therefore, involuntarily infuse the weight of the original into the translation?
Exciting questions! Debatable questions! And this collection of translations is valuable precisely because it raises these perennial questions.