Seeing what we want to in the mirror

GJV Prasad
Author-translator

IT is always so that when we live in times of stress, insecurity and disharmony, we look back with nostalgia to the times we may not have thought of as wonderful by any standards, definitely not at that time. No student thinks of school days as a golden period! But the past only looks so good when the present sucks. We yearn for simpler days, more idealistic days, less discriminatory days, less divisive days, or simply days when we were young and unaware of the complexities of the adult world. We may even be nostalgic about the times we didn’t live in, times that may not have existed at all. We need memories of good times to bolster our determination to be optimistic about the future. This is true in the life of a nation as well as in the life of a people.

We have so much translation of classical and religious texts because people think they might find answers to their angst there, or because people may want to read into those texts their version of their civilisational and religious moorings. This may be a need of the translators themselves and/or based on a reading of the market by the publishers

I used to hear, in the days of my childhood, old people lament the coming of Independence, saying that things were so much better in the days of the British rule (how odd that sounded, how wrong). All that they were saying was that things were not good in the present from their point of view. After all, Independence was always referred to as Partition in the North — “We came here when Partition happened”, “Before Partition” or “After Partition”. Partition was not an occasion to celebrate, and Independence had caused it! Obviously, things were always better before Partition as if milk and honey flowed through their backyards. For people who had lost so much materially, it was always much more than that. It was their days of innocence, their days of certainty of their place in the world that they had lost. Even if the days didn’t look so innocent to many others.

This looking back can become obsessive. The so-called “progress” takes us away from various locations, spatial, temporal and spiritual. We can move from one place to another in order to better our lives, or we can stay in the same place and see everything change around us. Time flows through us and sweeps us up and batters us constantly. We will always miss the innocence of yesterday, we will always miss what we think of as its “stability”. But physical movement and displacement come with real losses — the slow loss of a culture, a language, a set of life practices, even the pulls and pressures of local politics and social tensions. This loss may not matter to those who had nothing to lose materially, who were excluded into, or even from, the margins of society. But it may still matter if they feel excluded and alienated from the society they have moved into. Deprivation at home could look better than deprivation elsewhere — at least you had a rudimentary support system, at least you knew your position there. How terrible this sounds, but such is our society. However, some of us may succeed materially and still feel un-homed, feel that you have been cut off from your roots. That you need to connect.

To those in this position, the world of performance, cinema, literature and electronic media can become important sources of compensation. Keeping in touch with your language, even if through various mediations, can become an important factor in your construction of self, in your search for your identity. This is where literary translation plays a major role. A puzzling question asked by scholars over the years is who reads translations into English from Indian languages. One telling reply was people who knew the original language, who took great pleasure in criticising the translations for imagined or real acts of omissions and commissions. Translations into English for people who knew the original language seemed absurd.

However, what about generations that had grown up elsewhere, who had grown away from the language of the regions their parents and/or their grandparents came from? What about people who may speak the language, well or rudimentarily, but cannot read it at all? They may desire to understand where they come from, even what the present scenario is out there. This is where translation helps, to let people renew their own connections or to forge new ones to the regions of their origins. When my translation of Ambai’s latest collection of short stories came out in English as ‘A Red-necked Green Bird’, many Tamilians from outside Tamil Nadu, who are unable to read Tamil, wrote to me thanking me and letting me know how much they enjoyed reading a collection of Tamil stories and asking me to recommend translations of novels and short stories. I did this with enthusiasm and many have kept up with the reading. There were also those who read the stories in Tamil and then my English translation to see how well I conveyed the ambience of the stories and the writer’s style in English (with one notable exception, many loved it, finding my English, Indian enough to convey our realities). They are not the ones looking back but the ones who are looking into the future to speculate how non-Tamil readers may (mis)apprehend the text!

Does that mean that the current spurt of translations into English is because of this looking back, this need to connect, among large communities of un-homed Indians? In my opinion, we have so much translation of classical and religious texts because people think they might find answers to their angst there, or because people may want to read into those texts their version of their civilisational and religious moorings. This may be a need of the translators themselves and/or based on a reading of the market by the publishers. This need for a new forging of identity may be a created one, by the market or political forces. This is the reason every cinematic or literary retelling of the past (even recent past) immediately evokes a strong reaction — it is the perceived politics that creates the problem. You see active translation around you to create this new reading and understanding of our identity. You can see it in our iconography, in cinematic adaptations, in the translation and the reinterpretation and recirculation of literary works, in our public discourse. All this helps us to see what we want to in the mirror — there, that is who I am.

Join Whatsapp Channel of The Tribune for latest updates.