Layered & complex world of translation

Earlier this month, I found myself in Colombo, Sri Lanka, a place where languages seem to hang in the air like humidity, pressing down on the city in a palpable, almost tactile, way. I had come as a Punjabi translator for the inaugural SALT (South Asian Literature in Translation, a multi-year project at the University of Chicago) Summer School, an opportunity that promised to be remarkable.

As I stepped into my role as a translator of Punjabi into English, surrounded by other translators — each of us tethered to our own languages like lifelines — I couldn’t help but feel that the air there was thick with the echoes of Sinhala, Tamil, Bengali, Urdu and Hindi, a cacophony of tongues that felt at once foreign and familiar. Even English seemed out of place here, as though it, too, was trying to assert itself in a landscape that resisted any kind of easy categorisation.

I felt this resistance in me as I moved through my days there, listening, observing, translating, and yet never quite arriving at a full understanding of where I was, or who I was within it.

In Punjabi, the language of my home and my translation, I’ve often felt a sense of alienation. This feeling likely stems from the underlying tension I’ve always been exposed to — that Punjabi is the other language, not just another language. So, returning to Punjabi after I’ve established alternate careers in alternate languages isn’t merely wishful thinking.

In one of my favourite podcasts, Indy and Dr, the host, Indy, speaks with a representative from Naujawani, an online media platform. Indy poses a question: “If Punjabi is the seventh largest language in the world and still growing, why is there such a fixation among my generation, or the generation above us, on the idea that Punjabi is dying?” Naujawani responds reasonably, “I’d guess there are a number of reasons. Probably, the most prominent is that we are a very negative community because of all we’ve faced over the last 50 to 75 years, including numerous defeats. All these negative experiences lead us down a road where we start to believe we’re constantly under attack, that we’re besieged, and so we resort to tropes like the Punjabi language is dying.”

However, many millennials and Gen Z individuals aren’t anywhere close to believing that the Punjabi language is dying. We have our ways of staying connected to it — through music, literature, films, and translation.

In a translation workshop, translation felt less like a mechanical process and more like meditation. We found ourselves deeply immersed in our texts, feeling the weight of each word, the flow of each line, and the silences between them. I realised that my role was not just to translate the words, but to convey the essence of them — to allow the audience to feel what the writer felt, even if the words themselves were different. This was not a task I could accomplish alone; it required me to draw upon my own experiences, my own understanding of both languages, and the shared history of our cultures — all this accompanied by the companionship of other translators.

While I was a part of the multilingual prose workshop, working on translating some Punjabi short stories into English, there were separate strands of workshops for Bangla, Hindi/Urdu, Tamil and multilingual poetry. In the workshops that solely focused on translating from a single language, the authors whose works were being translated were present in the seminar room. We heard many anecdotes, but the most fascinating reflections came from the Hindi/Urdu translators, who were translating a two-page short story by Asghar Wajahat, which we had the opportunity to hear him read at the inaugural event.

Our co-translators from the Hindi workshop told us that since their group was working on translating the same story, sometimes their days were so rigorous that by the end of it, they had only been able to translate three to four sentences. This made me re-evaluate translation not just as a task to be completed, but as a way of being in the world, of engaging with the complexities and contradictions inherent in any act of comprehension in any given language.

I thought of Kate Briggs’ words in ‘This Little Art’, “If a translation is like a table, then it has known and is open to different kinds of making (for example, both its initial assemblage and its later repeated setting).”

By the end of the Summer School, I realised that Colombo had become a kind of metaphor for the act of translation itself — messy, layered, complex, resistant to easy understanding. I left with a sense of incompletion, of something unfinished, unsaid. And perhaps, that is the true purpose of translation, not to erase differences or to smooth over the rough edges, but to dwell in the space between, to inhabit the tension, the discomfort, the uncertainty. In translating, we are not merely bridging gaps; we are acknowledging them, respecting them, and allowing them to exist.

Colombo, in all its chaotic, incomprehensible beauty, taught me this. And for that, I am grateful.

— The writer is the author of ‘The Yak Dilemma’