NOT LOST IN TRANSLATION
Reading literature in translation has led me to other worlds. Join me in my reading journey.
Something happened during the few months I spent in India’s Chennai (from early December to early February) and it cemented what I had been thinking about all along. I wanted to take my Substack presence to a place where I would be challenged to do work that inspired me week after week. I also wanted to create something of value to my audience. A few weeks after we arrived in India, the whole world was in the thick of the omicron virus. Around us, families and friends were succumbing to it every other day.
On one of those worrisome days, my late father’s man Friday, Vinayagam, stomped about our apartment in annoyance, bristling at an accusation from one of our neighbors. He was mad at the man for telling him that what was a mere cold could well be full-blown Covid. Vinayagam swore that he had just had a Covid test and that he had proved to be negative. “Some people!” he said, pacing the dining room, a kitchen towel flung on his shoulder. “They’ll make an egg into a louse. And a louse into God himself!”
The reference to a louse transported me right away to a dinky bathroom in Paris in the year 1998. On one of those summer days, worried about my children’s itchy scalp, I’d tousled my children’s hair over the bathroom sink only to find lice dropping into the bowl by the colonies. Lice are assumed to be a given in a country like India where the heat, humidity and filth make for a nice mating environment.
Vinayagam’s reference to a head louse took me on a journey to a faraway land and back in time. That is indeed the power of words. Imagine translating adages and idioms, imagine conveying what’s at the heart of an expression so that a reader may imagine it in his mother tongue and in his own environment. That’s what a great translation must do—take a work and distill into its purest universal expression.
Doubling up in laughter that morning, I made Vinayagam repeat the adage for me. I thought about it some more. I began thinking about all the words in the world that needed to be spilled out by kitchen poets like Vinayagam. I considered all those phrases, that, in turn, must be shared with the rest of the world by writers like me.
In the years I attended Jaipur Literature Festival, I’d always been uncomfortable over how regional language events often got poor attendance whereas discussions in English (unless there was star power that was part of the presentation in the regional language) always drew the maximum crowds. I wrote only in English. Yet I was appalled that in a land with 23 languages and several hundred dialects that was also home to some of the greatest literature in the world, literature festivals still drew most of their power from the English tongue.
Viewed against how regional literatures have been perceived in India, I was excited to read an announcement, on January 2nd, about the launch of the Centre for Translation at Ashoka University in New Delhi dedicated to encouraging “an environment of translations between Indian languages”.
With every visit to India and on my other international trips, too, I’ve eagerly sought out literature in translation. They are not often easy to come by even though some of the local writers or translators, it turns out, were mythic figures—with a huge body of work—in the lands I visited. I decided I’d share some of my great finds with my Substack readers.
Every Sunday I’ll share one work in translation that brought some light into my life. I plan to look at original works in different languages around the world and I hope to glean a little more about the world of translation as well.
I begin my first post on translation with CHOKHER BALI, a novel written in Bengali by Rabindranath Tagore. While it was published in 1903 as a novel, it really appeared as a series in 1902 in the periodical Bangadarshan, a Bengali literary magazine founded by Indian novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1872. The translation I read was by Sukhendu Ray, a chartered accountant in the United Kingdom who, after his retirement, translated several Bengali novels into English. I didn’t find Ray’s translation to be a seamless read. Yet, Tagore’s story itself was so compelling that I persisted.
CHOKHER BALI is a story about the members of an affluent family in Calcutta at the turn of the 19th century. It’s also a story about how an educated, questioning woman who has the ability to make a choice can alter the course of a man’s life in a stifling society weighed down by patriarchy, tradition and the illiteracy of womenfolk.
Each time I ran into Mahendra, one of the seminal characters of this novel, I was even more offended by something he thought or did. He never wanted to marry. Yet he decided to do so simply to foil the arranged marriage of his best friend, Bihari. Riddled with envy that Bihari was within reach of a certain kind of happiness that eluded him, Mahendra twisted his friend’s arm, saying that he, Mahendra, would be the right partner for Asha. Mahendra is a peevish, relentless manipulator even after his marriage to a girl as naive as Asha. Naturally, it would prevail even after a young, beautiful widow, Binodhini, entered their home to help Mahendra’s mother with her chores. Binodhini arrived into the house as a morally upright widow but she too succumbed to temptation, owing to her own circumstance and to the machinations of Mahendra.
At the heart of CHOKHER BALI is the fickleness of the human heart, of people who derail the lives of others because of the insecurities in their own lives. In CHOKHER BALI, I also saw the India of then, an India steeped in superstition in which a woman’s life was considered meaningless without a man’s blessing or intervention. Above all, the novel is a reinforcement of the human spirit; it’s a reminder that every sentient being must possess the courage of his conviction and constantly self-calibrate to remain rooted to his own moral codes.
The building you wanted reference for is "Calcutta High Court"