The translator's words
TRANSLATORS don’t play second fiddle to authors, insists Angela Rodel, who shared this year’s International Booker Prize with Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov. Rodel, who translated Gospodinov’s novel ‘Time Shelter’, stressed that “all translation is a duet whose true beauty would not be possible without both voices or melodies coming together”. Daisy Rockwell, who shared the same prize the previous year with writer Geetanjali Shree for the Hindi novel ‘Tomb of Sand’, used the analogy of ballroom dancers to describe this rather symbiotic relationship. Likening the author to Fred Astaire and the translator to Ginger Rogers, Rockwell said in an interview that the “translator must follow the author’s lead, but do everything backwards, in high heels”.
The underlying message is that while authors and translators complement each other, the latter has to be a little more mindful too. Translators, after all, have two reputations to take care of: that of the writer whose works they render in another language, and their own. They are the unsung heroes who, while making literary texts in alien languages accessible to readers, also have to tread lightly upon a linguistic and cultural minefield.
Any translator will tell you that the creative process is as agonising as it is exciting, as it is with any writer. To recreate from one language to another with minimal erosion of the nuances of language, culture and context isn’t the only hurdle. It is a challenge to retain the uniqueness of the author’s voice, especially when that voice is dear and familiar to readers in the native language. Now this is tricky territory, because readers and critics in the source language are bound to make comparisons, and sometimes the criticism can be odious. Gregory Rabassa, the English translator of some of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s works most notably ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ even had a name for such cavilling critics: Professor Horrendos.
Marquez though was most effusive in his praise for Rabassa. In an interview with The Paris Review in 1981, the Nobel laureate said, “My books have been translated into 21 languages and Rabassa is the only translator who has never asked for something to be clarified so he can put a footnote in. I think that my work has been completely re-created in English.” Admitting that there were parts of the book which were difficult to follow literally, Marquez added, “The impression one gets is that the translator read the book and then rewrote it from his recollections.”
It’s true that the Colombian writer had his own quirks. Another of his acclaimed translators, Edith Grossman, once revealed that Marquez wasn’t too fond of adverbs in Spanish that ended in -mente (whose English equivalent would be -ly). So this meant that instead of the word ‘slowly’, she had to use ‘without haste’, and ‘hastily’ became ‘with more haste’ and so on.
Closer home, too, it’s a veritable maze for Indian translators. Aniruddhan Vasudevan, who translated Tamil writer Perumal Murugan’s ‘Pyre’, which was also longlisted for this year’s International Booker, recalls fretting over the word ‘aadu’ in an earlier work of the author. While he confidently took the word to mean goats, it actually referred to sheep in the Kongu region to which Murugan belonged. Rakhshanda Jalil, in an interview, mentions how even a simple Urdu word like ‘yaar’ resists translation because when rendered as buddy, bro or the more closer equivalent mate, it acquires a jarring westernised twang. Similarly, Jerry Pinto has observed how the endearing quality of ‘re’ in Marathi cannot be meaningfully supplanted in English.
So while translators grapple not just with the linguistic calisthenics, they constantly worry over the possible desiccation of a work’s cultural import during translation. Often, they have to hammer down their own creative urges and know where to draw the line in their practice. They cannot be bound too tightly to the words in a text, nor stray too far from it. No wonder then that Rabassa termed translators trusty prisoners of the author. But of course, there are exceptions. Jay Rubin, while translating Haruki Murakami’s three-book work ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ from Japanese, is said to have cut 25,000 words simply so that it could work in the American context and be published as a single volume in the US. Murakami himself has translated from English into Japanese several books, including F Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’, which he regarded as a huge creative influence on his career.
Good reading therefore begets good writing. While no translation can be perfect, it is also undeniable that translators act as that sturdy bridge between languages and cultures. And for that alone, they make the world of literature much richer. Rabassa gets the last word when he says that “translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar”.
