A YOUNG TRANSLATOR AT OXFORD

A young man I met at a Zoom book club during Covid turned out to be a passionate translator working in Bengali and Hindi.

Utsa Bose at Oxford

Right at the start of Covid in India in the summer of 2020, Arunava Sinha—a renowned translator of over 68 works of Bengali fiction and nonfiction into English—made an announcement on social media. He had decided to launch a book reading group a couple of times a week to distract people and help them cope at a horrific time in the world and he wondered if there was any interest among his Facebook and instagram friends. I jumped at the chance to meet like minds and engage with strangers. The sessions were not at an ungodly hour for me here in California—around 8. 30 AM PST, if I remember right—and for the first few weeks, the interest ran high.

A young man from New Delhi also became part of our group. The day I first talked to him, I was somewhat concerned that he’d call me aunty. Week after week, we’d read a section of a book or a short story. With every session, I’d wait to hear what this young man had to say at the end of our reading. Here was the runt of the reading pack whose wisdom was way above his station in life. Here certainly was an old soul whose ideas were as thought provoking as his sentences were articulate.

Utsa Bose told us he was a student at Delhi’s St Stephen’s College. He mentioned that he had begun translating stories from Bengali into English. I was awestruck that someone so young had decided to apply himself to translation. I’ve realized over the years that if writing requires thought, translation requires at least twice as much of thought, craft, awareness and emotional intelligence.

Today, I’m sharing a short story—The Postmaster—that Utsa Bose translated while he was in his last year at St Stephen’s. It appeared in Asymptote, a Taiwan-based online literary magazine dedicated to translations of world literature, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama.

The Postmaster is a tale by Rabindranath Tagore that he wrote early on in his writing career. It was published in 1891. A Nobel laureate in literature and the first Asian to win the coveted prize, Rabindranath Tagore’s artistic gifts were innumerable. Apart from his luminous contributions to Indian philosophy, literature and music, he is credited with revolutionizing the Bengali literary scene.

The Postmaster bothers me every time I read it. It’s a story about two lonely souls who are looking for some kindness and affection. Ratan, the orphan, isn’t selective. She is willing to give her love to just about anyone who will reciprocate it. The village postmaster, on the other hand, is selective about who is worthy of his time and attention. During one rainy month, in a moment of utter boredom and weakness, the postmaster offers to teach Ratan to read. As she progresses quickly and learns to read two syllable words, Ratan is hungry for more. She begins to be hopeful for herself. The postmaster and Ratan begin to talk about their lives. She shares stories about her parents and her sibling. He tells her about himself. As he talks about his relatives, they soon become hers too. Their lives seem to intertwine magically until the day he falls ill.

The inevitability of the story’s ending becomes apparent almost from the start. I felt that the denouement hurt me even more with every fresh iteration through the story. I have no doubt it stole a little piece of Utsa Bose, too, as he worked at the translation. I end this with the closing few lines of this fragile tale translated artfully by Bose.

“Denying the erroneous, we turn a blind eye to the dictates of reason. Courting disbelief, we go on, clinging to false hope with unending might. We go on, until the day the cords are cut. Until the day the heart is bled dry and finally cracks.”

I regret not having asked Bose why he chose to translate this particular Tagore story. I did, however, ask him many questions about his interest in the world of literature and translation. His answers inspired and moved me and I’ve no doubt that they will engage and fascinate every reader of every stripe.

Give us a little background of your education leading up to St. Stephen’s College and Oxford.

I finished my schooling in Kolkata, India, and Yokohama, Japan. My undergraduate degree was in English Literature at St. Stephen's College in New Delhi. I'm currently doing an MPhil degree in Modern South Asian Studies at St Cross College in the University of Oxford.

At a time when most people your age flock towards the sciences, how did you gravitate towards literature?

I suppose the movement towards literature (and the humanities) was mostly because I liked reading and because I felt that literature was helping me understand, even navigate, the world around me. One of the biggest challenges anyone studying literature has to face, I think, is the constant defense of its utility. In other words, what's the use, we are asked, of studying literature. My own answer to the question was that literature was the map of life itself, and therefore terribly important. It's true that most people my age did and do flock towards the sciences. While I did find the sciences interesting, I found the humanities a little more engaging. I would say that I was lucky to have parents who trusted my intuition and my instinct and let me study what I liked, more than what most others were doing.

For someone this young, you’ve already read a lot. Tell me how you began reading so widely. Give me an idea of your influencers in the reading process.

I think anyone who likes reading dreads this question. The love for reading is very difficult to explain, and like any form of love, it is too vast, ineffable. My conscious memory of deciding to start reading more happened when I was fifteen. A lot of who we are is because of the place we grow up in, and I was lucky, I would say, to have parents who gave me a free hand when it came to reading. An indulgence both of them were quite liberal in was the buying of books. I was read out of a lot of books as a child, and I suppose that's where the love began, quite inadvertently...but you do have that one book that hits you and makes you believe that, yes, here is something that's important. For me, there were two such books.

The first was Arundhati Roy's 'The God of Small Things', a book which opened up worlds of language for me, making me rethink what can be done with language. The other was Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's Pather Panchali (The Song of the Little Road) which helped me walk back into my own language, Bengali. The journey ever since has been one of finding new words, new worlds.

How did you embark on your first translation project? What and who inspired you? 

My first 'translated' work was a short story by Manik Bandyopadhyay. I had worked on it in the first year of undergrad, and I showed it to a friend who was really encouraging. I never sent it out anywhere, but it made me want to work with more words. While reading the story in Bangla (Bengali), I was struck by its magnetism. It was a brilliant short story, and I wished to share it with my friends, and indeed others who did not have access to the language. There was no translation available, so one evening, foregoing college work, I sat down and started translating it. It was only while doing it that I realized that I had been reading a lot of translated work since childhood itself, be it the Tintin comics, or Asterix. I would say Anthea Bell, the translator of the Asterix comics, Gregory Rabassa, the translator of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and William Weaver, the translator of Italo Calvino were quite inspirational.

What do you find challenging when you work on a translation? Can you give me specific examples of passages, for instance?

There are many challenges when one is working on a translation. But a challenge can be both limiting as well as liberating, even generative. When it comes to Bengali, I think one of the biggest challenges for me is the translation of similes or metaphors, the idiosyncratic elements in a text which are rooted in the culture it is produced. The situation where the word in the original eludes a direct translation in the target language. Every translation is an act of interpretation, and for me it is most important to capture the emotive space that the original is occupying. I had attended a session with Ros Schwartz, a translator who worked with French, and she made the point that the struggle of translation is often the struggle between meaning and music. Words often live with other words, and their beauty lies not just with what they mean, but how they sound, the images they generate. 

I would think it’s really valuable to translate the work of a writer who is still alive. What if you have a doubt about some passage as you’re working on the translation. Does it matter whether you are translating an author posthumously?

Yes, I would agree that in situations of doubt, it is really helpful to have discussions about those passages with the author concerned.

At the same time, I think that in the absence of an author (to consult), it is important to remember that translation is still a form of interpretation, and any text, once published, is as much the reader's as the writer's. In that sense, translators can also operate with a sense of freedom and surplus, to translate the passage as what it meant to them. 

From a publishing perspective, there are, of course editors who work with you on the journey. I have often consulted my own editors when in doubt.

What satisfies you after you finish translating a work?

I am satisfied when I enjoy reading the translated text. A translation should, in my opinion, never be compared to an original. If the translated work does not make me want to go back to the original, and speaks to me in the same way that the original did, I am satisfied. Reading, at the end of the day, should be a joy.

I’m assuming you translate only works from Bengali into English. Do you work from English into Bengali? 

Yes, I do. That traffic (from English to Bengali) is not as heavy as its opposite, but I have tried it from time to time. I am yet to publish any such translation, but it is a direction I am keen to explore more. I have also started reading a lot of Hindi literature, and that is also a direction I would like to walk down some day, to also see the way these three languages work with one another.

What do you do to polish up your Bengali?

That's a really good question. I wish I could give you a definitive answer, but all I do is read different kinds of Bengali. By that I mean not only different writers, but also writers from different periods. It's not important whether I would want to work with these writers in my journey as a translator; what's more important is seeing the different ways in which language is deployed. As I'm currently living in Oxford, the opportunity is quite limited. But I do speak to people at home in the language, as well as listen to songs. Listening is quite important because it shows you how words work with one another. 

Who is your “go-to” writer in English who happens to be your north star?

Again, I wish I could say that I had a "go-to" writer! There are too many. As a writer or a translator, I think it is very important to try to develop your own way of working with a language, a distinct relationship with words. In the past, anything I wrote in English would be heavily influenced by the last writer I read. Lately, I've been trying to find my own voice in English.

What would you like readers to know who, like me, enjoy works in translation? What are some things you think we should remember as we read?

I think it is important to remember that the work that we are reading occupies many different cultural worlds at the same time, by virtue of being translated. Confusion, or even distance is something that a lot of readers, myself included, may feel from time to time while reading a work in translation. But in my opinion, such confusions are important, even necessary. They show the limits of translation, and remind us of the fact that translation is still an approximation. 

What do you feel that the world of regional literature in India can bring that works in English cannot? And as an extension to that question, what is the power of a work of literature that was not originally conceived in English?

I do not know if I would compare the two. I do think that the world of regional literature in India (and many other parts of the world) possesses forms of narrative that are typical to itself. Ours is an oral tradition, and we place a lot of importance on performance and memory. Rhyme is often an important element in a lot of regional literature, as is musicality. There are many different forms of narrative within regional traditions, some of them devotional, some spectacular, some realist. I do not think the lines are clearly drawn between these forms, and so a lot of resultant regional literature combines these different forms to create worlds which are utterly idiosyncratic and indigenous. For example, the work that I referenced in an earlier question, Pather Panchali is named after the Panchali, a devotional oral narrative. This form was predominantly present in Eastern India. The word only appears in the title, and is translated as "song". The coexistence of oral and written traditions, of living in many worlds at once is something in regional literature that I find quite interesting.

At the same time, I would say that languages are tied together by asymmetries of power. English is a powerful language, which is why the continual production of works in regional literature is important. Reading works in regional languages is important because they serve to remind us that there are other languages and linguistic realms out there.

Other works translated by Utsa Bose:

3 Stories: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (Translated) (BEE Books E-Book) https://www.amazon.in/dp/B089CFZZGM/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_6VV89T664E5BF2E6NWSJ

3 Stories: Rajshekhar Basu (Translated) (BEE Books E-Book) https://www.amazon.in/dp/B08BPC78BK/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_WRR4RC3PHW31AVG8SF1Q

An autobiographical essay by Manoranjan Byapari:

https://www.oneating.in/the-tales-of-sri-sri-bhajahari-radhuni/