Writing Is Translating Is Writing Is Translating

As a writer I know one thing. The most exciting, both for its pain and ecstasy, is the site where two expressions meet or collide. It is there that inspiration sparks and from it creativity arises. This is the site where the inarticulate meets the articulate, where one language meets another. Where translations of all kinds occur.

A fluid site. Not a fixed entity meeting another fixed entity and resulting in a fixed translation. It is an ongoing, unfolding process. No rigidity, nothing finished. Any communication or translation – which is also communication – moves from an already existing but fluid meaning and reaches and creates a new narrative.

In that sense all communication is miscommunication and invention! But just as that does not invalidate the need for communication, so also translation remains a powerful, valid and exciting reaching out, from one to another. It is a dialogue.

The issue tabled for discussion here is selection, translation and transmission in the field of Hindi literature. But as it operates from what may be called the outside, I want, in addition, to try and dialogue the same process as it operates internally. The trajectories of selection, translation and transmission within me, before they form a body of writing which may be received, read and shared by someone in the world.

I shall speak of myself, but in the belief that my story is not my story alone. That it is the story of my moment – of a certain historical juncture – and therefore of some of my contemporaries as well.

No writer is as unique as she might like to believe! The writer’s interior comprises a universe where there is constant shifting across available linguistic and cultural registers, historical moments, and much else. Bound to it, every writer also aspires to break free of that already given universe. It is this aspiration and its manifestation which makes her somehow unique, even though she is not!

Take writers like me. Bilingual from childhood in a formerly colonized and now formally decolonized part of the world. It is no ordinary bilingualism. It is not about to-ing and fro-ing from one language to another, like perhaps some of you present here do with French and English. It is about to-ing and fro-ing between one mixed, hotchpotch, khichdi language to another mixed, hotchpotch, khichdi language! English-Hindi-dialects mix to dialects-Hindi-English mix! Given that each constituent of these mixes brings along whole worlds and views, what can we seem but intensely confused people?

But, no, I shall not leave it at a self-disparaging note. Our attempts to resolve this confusion or babble is what makes for the enrichment and renewal of our worlds.

Sometimes in ways perceptible, but a lot more otherwise, my writing self is involved in incessant translation. Involved in moving and communicating between different sensibilities, indeed between different modes of making sense of things.

From the never easy moment of choosing the language of writing to the always agonizing act of writing, there occurs an embroiled interplay of selection and writing, of translating and writing.

Expressing any impression in words itself is a translation – the inarticulate is translated into the articulate. But in words of what language, becomes another level of selection and translation. And then there is yet another level – the translation from words of one language to another language.

I am going to talk about Hindi and English, the two languages I am constantly translating my experiences into. (For another Indian similarly placed, it might be another Indian language and English). Will I be able to show which experience I translate into Hindi, which in English, and why and when? I really don’t know. But at least I will indicate the problem.

I would have loved, in the context of this discussion, to dilate on the formation of my relationship with Hindi and English. For lack of time I must state briefly that almost until I chose to write in it, Hindi was literally ONLY my mother tongue since, that was what my mother conversed in, and I had just elementary formal education in it. English I got, from early childhood, through a schooling that reinforced an unequal relationship between the two languages, giving English the higher status. So much so that on learning I write, it was mostly assumed that it must be in English! On learning it was Hindi there was and still is sometimes, amazement and responses of the following kind – wow, Hindi, how exotic, or Hindi, how stupid when you can do it in English, or Hindi, good good, be patriotic, or Hindi, how brave of you to be willing to be isolated and poor. Etc.

The point I am making is that it is not seen as a natural choice that I am writing in my own language! Normally if one was writing in a foreign tongue there would be this curiosity and surprise. This is the classic colonial condition!

In a conventional sense I learnt no language well, being unmethodical in Hindi and skewed in English But that also spared me, and others like me, from the fallout of a formal, orderly, systematic training and purism. It gave us the chance to learn anew, in adventurous and unconventional ways, either or both of these languages.

From the cultural uprooting a new process of individual and collective being has sprung. My moment encapsulates hybridity. In fact this is a condition of modern times but it follows different routes to arrive in different societies. In my case it comes swathed in all the problem layers of a colonial past.

A continuity had been broken. No language therefore has simply been given, to us. There has been an intervention, and thereafter we have had to retrieve and reconstruct the language, our own and the foreign too.

It is almost by accident that some of us chose Hindi and some others English. ‘Almost by accident’ I say, because it might not be entirely so. The osmosis of the world around, the politics-economics-culture of language and protest, the sound of the Hindi that I heard, over and above the veneer and sophistication of the English that I was taught, may well have had me ‘chosen’ by Hindi! Romance has its own mechanism and dynamic. Perhaps the look of it the tonality of it, gave it a sex appeal which attracted me like English did not! Maybe a certain unavailability of it also fascinated me.

Not that English was more mine. It only appeared so. Most of us acquired a skin-deep English veneer and lost the English language in it.

When I started writing, the two languages – Hindi and English – were entangled in me in a colonial hangover. My earlier drafts show English words and even passages where my Hindi vocabulary beat me and I let English carry on the flow to weed it out later. Even my Hindi was sometimes a translation from English, and my syntax was often English. And some things had to be left in the language they were first imagined in, or else the weight changed. Mujhe tum se pyar hai was not ‘I love you’!

I learnt on the job. As many in India do. The license comes first, then the practice and from it the training! The driver, the engineer, the doctor all kill a few and then become experts at saving, if they so choose! Thankfully I killed no one. Except, some might say, the language!

But I will say I infused into it new blood with my new consciousness and intent and adventure.

I should not pretend there was no resistance, no received conventions to surmount. A senior Hindi writer once ticked me off about putting any set of words together. There is, he said, something called shabda maitri (friendship between words), and only two friends may be put together. I was young, a bit too pesky perhaps that evening, and so pointed out to him his clothes – a pair of western jeans with an Indian kurta. That is my generation and moment, I said, and we look good. Sound good too.

What began as incessant translation, this way and that and that way and this, is marked by greater conscious choice now. The centre of my location has shifted considerably away from English towards Hindi. And the sources of translation have diversified. Hindi is a vibrant language, fed by an active and varied literature in ever new voices bringing in their lineages, as well as by the dialects surrounding it. Hindi is happy to borrow from whatever tongue it comes in contact with.

So am I. We are both – Hindi and I – naturally pluralistic, hybrid, eclectic, and derive our richness from that.

It does not, however, always work just happily. I do feel persecuted sometimes by this need to translate in my head. I do not know what chance it is, or design, that a particular thought may choose English words and not Hindi. But once that happens, I know that now the original thought has worded itself in English, to say it in Hindi I can only take recourse to translation! I have lost that thought in Hindi forever! It may not always be a problem. But on occasion, when I am with my writing and something profound and powerful seeks utterance, I wish it to word itself originally in Hindi, and let English come in translation, rather than the other way round. These are the risks of the trade and we handle it as best as we can. Sometimes appropriating the almost literal translation to make it an integral part of our language.

II

I now turn to the literal process of translation, one in which a text is translated into a different language. Writing, to start with, incurs a loss and change. In the transmutation to language, something is changed and lost. This occurs yet further when the writing involves translation from one language to another.

This loss or change may be differential between different languages, depending on the closeness of linguistic proximity and also on the closeness of thematic proximity. Thus an Intizar Hussain, the distinguished Pakistani writer, comes to us quite pure, with just a glossary of some heavy Persianized words to tide us through, because of the sameness of Urdu and Hindi. But even Intizar Hussain in Panjabi or Bangla will incur a loss, and in English much more so. And a Nirmal Verma with his lonely, modern, alienated, individual lends his Hindi to English in greater facility because of the same resonances in themes and concerns in, for example, English modern literature.
 
Languages carry live lineages of a region and its tonalities and shades. The same word denotes different sensations. Water and sun and shade mean different things in Rajasthan and Assam. Propriety and conduct also shape words. Sexy, sensuous, sensual in English have easy, light currency. In Hindi they get conjoined with kama, kamottejak, kamoddipta, and the weight changes, the concept changes.

It is all very exciting, and very problematic. Just like communication. What is said and what is received. If I may put it eccentrically, translation involves a molding of the mouth and its corollary is a molding of the ears. My mouth, your ears. Both to be trained. Speaking as well as listening.

Allow me to try and list some different kinds of journeys translations need to make.

1. As with Intizar Hussain from Urdu into Hindi where language is already similar.

2. As with Nirmal Verma from Hindi into English where modern sensibility is resonant in both languages.

3. As with translation of remote, already ‘unreal’ time texts, such as Sanskrit texts, into a current language, where the translator trains to go to another on THEIR terms and not to fit them into her modern terms.

4. As with ‘different’ world texts but of our own time such as Renu, Krishna Sobti, Rahi Masoom Raza or Shree Lal Shukla. To go to your contemporaries without your own frame to fit them in, is a challenge. To declare them exotica and accept/reject them on that basis happens most widely here.

There is one more thing about today – the huge pedagogical concern with post-colonial literature in the West that is reinstating a margin and a centre by putting up a tableau with English writers, to the exclusion of most others.

Let me tell you a story. But I must, as a necessary prelude to the story, remind you of the grandiose statement in which Salman Rushdie claimed that nothing worthwhile is coming out of India except in English. Reminiscent of Lord Macaulay’s imperialistic arrogance that a single shelf of a western library was worth more than the entire literature of the East. Now the story. At a dinner recently, a sensitive and erudite Indian intellectual remarked that real accomplishments in contemporary Indian literature belonged to those writing in English. He called, by way of example, Krishna Sobti’s Mitro Marjani a poodle and, compared to that, Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies an Alsatian.

I wish to share with you also my experience in western countries as a non-English writer. In England last month I was introduced as a vernacular writer, in Italy as a local language writer. What is English in England and Italian in Italy? Why do these epithets not apply to the ‘writers’ in those countries?

These stray tales go to make a story and take us to all the steps that together make a text, from its inception to its reception. The molding of the mouth to utter and the tuning of the ears to hear a bare story does not create a text. A whole space of fluff and boost and weave and frame around it, is what creates it, iconizes it, canonizes it. This is the space of the market (in its largest sense), the place of exchange, the place of mouths and ears in relationship.

Today, more and more, one market dominates and possesses the power and resources of publicity and knowingly/unknowingly assumes it is the central and even the only stage! At the other end, the hangover of the hegemonic colonial connection induces otherwise critical minds, like Rushdie and the Indian intellectual, to pronounce their suspect verdicts. Is it not the ignorance and narrowness that, paradoxically, the opening up of the world has led to? In such a situation why would Krishna Sobti not lose out? Hers becomes a bare story shorn of all its ‘environment’, that would hold the fragrance and texture and cadence, indeed the rich body of the text.

Therein lies the importance of translation and transmission yet more. And the challenge of it. To translate, in an ongoing process of creativity, a text along with the atmosphere wherein it can breathe.

Let me return to Krishna Sobti. It is no accident that only a fraction of her fiction is yet translated. The reason lies in the difficulty of rendering the unique and challenging flavor of her Hindi into another language. Her idioms, styles and forms – forever changing from one work to another – require of the translator as well different kinds of expression. See the throbbing original in Mitro Marjani: ‘Manjhali kulhe matka hans di – wah ri bahen farebti! Is kaljug mein to puja hi gaud-gadant ki to tu hi kyon sach bole. Chhutki mala to chor pitari mein aur sas-jithani ko ye chakma! Tu hazar totechashm devrani, par aurat ki jun par gehna gatta sambhalne ki vidya kise nahin aati? Ari jadu ke jor tu mala kaleje mein bhi chhipa le to bhi use dekh lene ka mantra Mitro ke pas.‘

The sarcasm and the vitality sound so listless in the English translation, which reads: ‘Mitro laughed – Wah sister! Why would you be truthful in these dark times of Kalyug? Even pujas are faked and forged nowadays. Artful little liar, stashing away the chain safely in your thief’s cache, how easily you fool your saas and your jethani. Which woman lacks the art of hoarding jewelry? But even if you hid the chain in the depths of your black heart. Sweet Phoola, know that Mitro has the power to spot you.’

I am not dismissing translation, but only trying to point to the need for translation to encompass the atmospheric space – larger than just the bare obvious text – to be able to make an impact.

All art forms, literature included, aspire to embrace ALL art forms. Music, image, architecture, all. Literature is always MORE than its content. It is structure, it is texture, it is cadence, it is rhythm. And, like I said earlier, if a translation loses on these elements and if the ‘senses’ of the receivers are not adequately tuned, Krishna Sobti could appear a poodle and Ghosh an Alsatian!

Of course, ultimately, we can only write in the language we write in, and take in our stride its location in the power map of our time. Hindi is my centre, and all the problems associated with it are my world. And each one has to find the way herself, to make tactile and communicative her translation from the inarticulate to Hindi, and from Hindi to another language.

Perchance I find myself translating my own novel Khali Jagah these days. From writing in a ‘hybrid’ Hindi to translating in a ‘hybrid’ English I have landed myself in a mess! My bilingualism does not help in switching from a play with one language to a play with the next language.

This novel is not narrowly culture-specific. It belongs anywhere, to a contemporary pain. It deals with terrorism, which is global, ubiquitous, like the market. How ordinary human lives get distorted, disjunctured, and lost, anywhere, when a bomb becomes its quotidian reality, is the novel’s exploration.

Yet it has a rhythm of its own that I am struggling to translate. Already expressed eclectically, even borrowing from non-Hindi and non-English tongues, what variety of tongues do I introduce in the English and in which arrangement? A repeat eclecticism, I fear, can sound gimmicky, but without that play with tongues and rhythms it might become a ‘poodle’!

There are puns and jokes and proverbs and film songs and sher-o shayari, which are sometimes expressed with a new twist and tweak. How should I bring another level of the same with English? What arrangement should I give the languages in the new mix?

Here are a few specimens. Playful ones: ‘Yahi wo jagah, yahin par kahin aap hum se mile the; WO BHI AKELI AUR HUM BHI AKELE THE.’ Prosaic words unless you know they evoke Bollywood songs and you might almost sing them as you read!

Or: ‘Ek wo milna ek ye milna!‘ (Firaq Gorakhpuri)

This simple sounding mix: EK FAIL HONE KA CHANCE, DUSRE SANS PHULNE KA. Fail aur phul.

Or the serious: ‘Zameen se mamta bhar upar…‘

Finally, a joke. Like all jokes, this one, too, carries a message. I heard a greeting in a southern Indian State. It was formed out of translations across different Indian languages into English.

‘Hello, how are you, I hope?’

The answer too slithered across linguistic and cultural registers, and was: ‘Somewhat, I think.’

Excellent and expressive! But taken literally and rigidly, it is nonsense.