Being a poet helped me decode such narration: Manglesh Dabral on translating Arundhati Roy’s book

When your novel is about India’s polity, spooling from the Capital to Kashmir to Central India, it is only a matter of time before it is translated into Hindi. With Hindi poet Manglesh Dabral translating Arundhati Roy’s latest novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness into Hindi, the focus is back on language. Roy’s second novel has been translated into over 40 languages and she has said, “This novel was imagined in many languages… and therefore they seem to be returning home in translations.”

Roy’s prowess lies in her ability to not confine herself to the axioms of language. Binaries don’t work for her. She begins her novel with the magic hour or the blue hour, which is the favourite of poets. So, can it come as any surprise then that a poet is translating her work? Dabral says being a poet helped him because Roy’s language and diction are quite unorthodox and personal. He says she is a linguistic magician and can play with the form the way she wants to, taking liberties, coining new words, straying from the known moulds of expression, mixing the sublime with the profane, weaving intricate patterns and demanding the reader to read between the words and behind the sentences. “Being a poet did help me in decoding such narration,” adds Dabral.

Excerpts of Manglesh Dabral’s interview with National Herald on Sunday:

Q. Why did you choose to translate Arundhati Roy’s new novel in Hindi? Would the accompanying fame have anything to do with it?

A. Arundhati Roy’s magnum opus is one of my most favourite novels. Its intense poetic narrative overwhelms me whenever I open the book. So, it was my dream to translate her new novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness into Hindi. Coincidentally, Arundhati too was looking for someone to render her book into Hindi in a way that it could be an authentic version and serve as the basis for translations in other Indian languages. So, she asked me to take up this project. For me, the immediacy and certainty of the theme, the portrayal of contemporary India were the more decisive factors than the uncertainty of fame.

Q. How difficult or easy was it for you to translate Arundhati’s novel in Hindi? Did being a poet help or constrain you?

A. Indeed, it was quite a tough job as Arundhati’s language and diction are quite unorthodox and personal. Being a poet did help me in decoding such narration. I hoped to be able to recreate the magic of the original in the translation, and for this, I have tried to remain close to the text, not to go very far. Only readers can judge the outcome. There are more than one schools of translation, one of them preferring to have maximum liberty with the original, but I opted for the school which favours loyalty. At times I wonder how The Ministry.. would read if it is translated back! Each and every character in the novel has his/her own lexicon—from ordinary and abusive to confessional and philosophical and even delirious. It was a challenge to maintain all that and a good balance of Hindi and Urdu in the translation. Arundhati has coined words such as ‘undeepen’, ‘untree like’ and ‘unknow’ for which I needed to have uncommon words in Hindi too.

Q. Neelabh ‘Ashq’ had translated her first novel in Hindi, and it was widely read and acclaimed. What kind of response do you expect for this novel in Hindi, considering the fact that her second novel did not create the hype that the first novel did?

A. The God of Small Things is, in many ways, a micro-tale of a close-knit family belonging to a minority of Christians in Kerala—the miniscule Syrian Christians. Its geography is also confined to a small spot, Ayamanam in Kottayam, and the unfolding events hardly leave that destined place. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, on the other hand, shifts frequently from one to another space: from a dilapidated graveyard near the walled city of old Delhi to Jantar Mantar, to a newly globalised Delhi, to the condemned valley of Kashmir, its army camps and intelligence agencies, and back to the graveyard eventually turned into a guest house and funeral services. gained instant popularity because it was an acute, passionate poem, a sweet-bitter narrative spread in 200-plus pages, but The Ministry.. is a non-linear saga spanning varied events of metaphorical nature in its 445 pages. Epics usually do not get hyped in an instant, they take time to grow on the reader and the society at large. May be there are other factors too: since its warp and weft consist of our contemporary socio-political realities. Some reviewers even assumed that it was a journalistic novel.

Q. Why do you think readers should read this novel?

A. Many readers will read it for varied reasons. But one common denominator would be that the novel deals with our contemporary history, our recent past. It is an epical political Mahabharat being played out on a civilisational amphitheatre called India. Another reason can be to know how the destinies of a number of broken, banished characters from different places, cultures and linguistic behaviours ultimately merge at one space, how threads of a ‘shattered story’ weave a fuller world at one place called qabristan, and how the life begins to get going at the place that belong to the dead. Third reason can be that it’s a new novel from none other than Arundhati Roy!

Q. Any novel or story is mostly a work of fiction but the characters in Arundhati’s novel are more real than fictitious. Should reality overpower imagination in fiction and how far should it?

A. Novel is an art of portraying fiction, the imagined or, may be a false world as if it were true, but Arundhati at so many places goes the other way around. She roots her novel in a factual or an almost factual ground and turns this factualness into a work of fiction. I think the latter— fictionalising the factual—is much more difficult to accomplish.

Q. Some reviewers have said that The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is too loud, too obvious and lacks literary depth. What do you think?

A. The Ministry... deals with harsh, obvious and disturbing realities of our time. The events are either of political nature or concern the dejected, the transgenders, people with Muslim names, who are being hounded worse than beasts these days in our country, young men of Kashmir who are becoming desperate, depressed or join militancy owing to utter mishandling of this beautiful piece of land by the state powers. Everything here is sub-normal—terrible and tragic. The way of seeing often decides the way of saying. Arundhati Roy begins her novel wondering ‘how to tell a shattered story’, and then goes on to narrate it and at the same time deconstructs the narrative. That way, the novel de-structures the traditional architecture of a linear novel. As Brinda Bose has put it, ‘it’s an anti-novel.’ If you have used the term ‘literary depth’ in the sense of ‘literariness’, I may agree with you, but, then, literariness is passé now. So many significant novels the world over have been written sans literariness.