When borrowed tongues enchant

Languages are almost magical – their construction, their grammar and their diverse usages. It is a power that one wields unconsciously. And to know multiple tongues is to live many lives. How do mere mortals do that – they make do with translations. But sadly, many of us are losing our tongues.

In spite of it all, we have editors such as Mini Krishnan, who has made it her life’s mission to work with mostly translations. She dons multiple hats - translations for Oxford University Press (India) and is Consultant Editor, Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University (Tirur). She has been publishing translations of Indian literation for at least 25 years and if you ask her why, she says, “Because in them lie our own histories, our sense of identity and belonging.”

Having grown up in Bangalore, English became her tongue and in her words, she became a language orphan. After post-graduation in Delhi and a stint at Macmillan India, Krishnan made up her mind to try and publish some of the modern Indian fiction in English. She began with V. Abdulla’s translation of Malayatoor Ramakrishnan’s Verukkal (Roots, 1982), but no one was willing to publish it. Eventually, the MR AR Educational Society agreed to do it. What began as just a personal project slowly took root; it began at Macmillan and then moved over to OUP. She has now completed 102 translations and it includes titles such as Intizar Husain’s A chronicle of the Peacocks, Rahi Masoom Raza’s Topi Shukla, Sarah Joseph’s The Scent of the Other Side and Bama Faustina’s Karukku. Excerpts from the interview:

Could you trace the rise of translations? What kind of translation requests come now?

The respectability of translations was established only in the 1990s. It held hands with the women’s movement, the rise and rise of Dalit consciousness following the Ambedkar centenary celebrations, and the deep consciousness of ourselves as a post-colonial civilisation moving away from an agrarian way of life to an urban-centered population. Parallel to this was a situation where millions were not really affected by the presence of English in our midst for nearly 200 years—the peasant class. We had the computer on the bullock-cart situation.

Indian language writers who peaked in the 1990s crystallised this churning and smashed open our medieval mindset by applying Western norms to them. The sense of identity that we seemed to be searching for suddenly seemed possible through reclamation and reinterpretation of our own past and our own stories. It has excited a large number of translators who, a generation ago would have been unwilling to tackle what was not viewed as ‘literary’ writing. That mindset was partly prejudice (which I’m delighted to say has dwindled rapidly) and partly out of a sheer sense of linguistic inadequacy. In fact, in her translator’s note to Cho Dharuman’s Koogai (2015, OUP), Vasantha Surya has said that this is expiation for having failed to recognise Bama Faustina’s work when it was offered to her in 1998. What is disappointing in this zone is that not a single Dalit translator is the equal of non-Dalit translators. If they are around, I haven’t met them yet. Let me also for the record state that the first ever collection of Dalit writing in translation was planned and published by Priya Adarkar of Orient Longman (Orient Black Swan now) in 1992.

In the anthologies, you have edited how do you make the choice of stories?

There are different kinds of “editing” of anthologies! One is when I invite someone else to make the selections (which is the category most of the anthologies I’ve published fall into, like Short Fiction from South India and the mammoth anthologies of Dalit writing from Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam covering 89, 78 and 56 writers by nearly 80 translators), and the second is when I make the selections and then invite someone else to write an introduction or prepare notes for study (like Listen to the Flames). There is a third kind — textbooks on translation education which I help write not just edit. (Words, Texts & Meanings, and Word Worlds are examples)

What kind of stories come to you for translations and editing? And from which language do they come the most and which language the least?

We have, at least, a century of fiction to transfer into English but over the years there has been a change in the kind of fiction translators either offer to translate or accept on commission. Around 25 years ago, the generation of translators who are now in their 80s came to me with fiction that had themes of social change and the struggle of an old way of life being overtaken powerfully by a new. They had (I feel) a better grip on their own languages and the history of their own literatures. It was also slower times without so many pressures and distractions. People had time to read, to re-read, to reflect, to discuss to have second and third thoughts. That is not the case today. The languages that have a vigorous Indic language – English translation industry and tradition are Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam and Kannada. The least would be Kashmiri, Sindhi and Gujarati and the languages of the North East: Bodo, Mizo, Assamiya.

What is the difference between the younger and older translators you have worked with?

I’ve answered some part of this question already. What I find in the younger translators is that they are no longer in awe of ‘correct’ English ‘standard’ English and so on. They have overcome the mistaken belief that a dialect or Dalit language is somehow defective. Young translators are willing to take risks and make a great effort to meet their writers. What I find less encouraging about most of them is that they are in a hurry and impatience often ruins both work and relationships. Nor are they as familiar with the culture of the source text as older translators were. They are less willing to recast, to research, there is often “Oh! let it go as is” attitude. And boy could they do with some lessons in courtesy!

There has been a considerable increase in translations. What is your opinion of the translations that are being published?

At one-time people like myself were nervous, watching translations being marginalised but today, rather, it is overproduction which makes us worry; the result, predictably, is a drop in quality. Publishers are in a tearing hurry to get this or that memoir or the latest collection by X or Y out before something similar hits the market. And the profession of editing is virtually an endangered one. It pays so badly that most people who would probably make outstanding editors drift into jobs in journalism. This is creative suicide. Some of them even line up translators before they finish their new works.

Who are the talented translators you have interacted with?

Vasantha Surya, Abhirami Sriram, J Devika, Deeba Zafir, Subashree Krishnaswamy, Velcheru Narayan Rao, Arunava Sinha, Lakshmi Holmstrom, Susheela Punitha and Malini Seshadri would top my list. Valson Thampu is probably the most brilliant but he gets bored easily. Among non-Indians: Daisy Rockwell and Frances Pritchard. All of them are extremely creative people themselves and poetry-crunchers.

There are hierarchies within and between languages, does that affect the choice of language and text for translations? Is that why a lot of texts are translated into? How do you work around these language hierarchies?

Well, do you want to be read outside your language island or not? If you do, then English is the obvious language to move into especially if your writing is both literary and political. While the market is king, the market can also be shaped. My suggestions and the works I source have to get past a publishing and marketing committee.

What is your way of relaxing? How do you distract yourself and then come back?

Vedanta is my source of strength. I’ve been a student of it for 28 years. I wouldn’t call it relaxing because you better be prepared to think when you undertake a study of the shastras! But it instantly puts the world into perspective and strengthens me to absorb personal and professional disappointments. My other great interest is watching serious films, historicals, in particular.