The present paper discusses the issues and challenges
faced while translating the short stories and poems of ‘Sundaram’ (the pen name
of T.P.Luhar) from Gujarati into English. These issues have wider relevance in
the context of the issues in Indian Literature in English Translation. The
issues range from the translation of the
specific aspect of source culture like kinship and community, address terms,
articles of dress and kitchenware, idioms and proverbs, omens and terms from
native medicinal and musical systems to syntax, lexis and a host of stylistic
features. Concomitantly the paper also talks about the generic translation
strategies that could be of use to the translator who sets out to translate a
regional language text into English. The paper also deals with issues like the
choice of idiom, intended readership and the role of translation in
postcolonial India, which are frequently debated, in the context of
Indian literature in English translation.
As a complex act
that seeks to translocate lingual and cultural properties of an exclusive and
unique literary space to a partially or fully disparate space, translation is
identified as one of the most unglamorous and enigmatic human endeavours.
However at the same time, in a world of inestimable plurality, it makes us
aware of the unrealistic prospect of accomplishing unqualified uniformity and
of the advantages of a systematic attempt to understand ‘the other’. In a
country like India
with its long-standing multilingual literary tradition, it is a matter of
regret that most languages are not perfectly comprehensible even to the
speakers hailing from neighbouring languages. National literature in India
is thus separated by semi-permeable cultural and linguistic barriers.
Translation activity is indispensable in India
as a means to build cross-cultural bridges within the country. In the
post-colonial period translation becomes a very important instrument for
negotiating social tensions, language conflicts, social transitions and for identifying
the plurality of linguistic expressions and cultural experience and also for
understanding the remarkable unity underlying them (Choudhury 1997). However,
such a practice has its own pitfalls ranging from the political to the
artistic. The risk involved in the practice increases a thousand fold when one
seeks to bridge the yawning gulf between two languages like Gujarati and
English, which are separated by time and space, and more significantly share a
history complicated by colonialism. Consequently as a translator starts off to
translate a literary text s/he encounters what in popular terms are called
‘problems’ of translation which in turn problematize the notion of
translatability. The problems discussed here are generic in nature in the sense
that every translator who translates from an Indian language into English would
ineluctably face them, partially or fully. These problems can be broadly
grouped under the following categories. i) Translating Culture ii) Linguistics
and Semantics of Translation iii) Translating Poetry.
Translating Culture
The concept of
total or pure equivalence and the idea of the possibility of inter-lingual
synonymy have always dominated translation theory. However, language is not
merely a medium through which experience is communicated but something
inseparable from the experience it communicates since “we see and hear and
otherwise experience as we do because the language habits of our community
predispose certain choices of interpretation”(Sapir 1949:207-214). Language by adding meaning to the world of objects helps
its users to make sense of the world in its own peculiar and restrictive way.
Consequently, linguistic diversity across the world plays a significant part in
the maintenance of corresponding differences and diversities in culture and
mentality of the people of various regions. Any attempt at reformulation even
within a single language has implications for alterations in meaning which
rules out the prospect of having interlingual synonymy. The major stumbling
block in the way of interlingual textual transference is culture, which is
inextricably woven with the language that governs a literary artifact. The
semiotician Julia Kriesteva looks upon a verbal text as an ensemble of diverse
modes of cultural signification, that is, a text as a signifying system
implicates other forms of signification like myths, fashion, indigenous
medicinal system, musical system, festivals, food, metaphysical structure,
rituals and religious practices, superstitions in addition to other textual
structures. A literary text is a sub-system of the cultural semiotic system and
is embedded in the ideological and socio-economic structures of society.
Therefore, a translator has to look not only for verbal equivalents but also
for socio-economic, ideological and cultural signifiers involved in the
creation of a text which being culture-specific are impossible to be replicated
in a diverse cultural tradition. As a result the translator may adopt
appropriative strategy whereby he would appropriate certain terms in his
rendering. Such a policy corresponds not only to a vision of the original work
but also to a more or less precise conception of the readers for whom the
translations are intended. If a translator has a wider readership in mind,
national as well as international, her/his division of cultural properties into
distinct categories of the translatable and the untranslatable may spring from
a desire to reconstitute the specific socio-political and historical milieu
rather than convey specific word-meanings. Very often the target readership
faces no appreciable problem in making out these foreign signs because either
the context makes the signification easy or the term turns out to be so
frequently used that it is appropriated in English-language dictionaries.
“Today,” says Rimi Chatterjee, “the Indian originals…are
now almost universally familiar to most
Western readers. In addition readers have become more tolerant of cultural
difference and no longer baulk at a glossary of Indian kinship terms, food,
flora and fauna and articles of dress and daily use” (Chatterjee Rimi 2002: 25-33). On the other hand, however, such untranslated terms
cannot be reduced to the state of pure signifieds because of their ostensible
alienness to a disparate linguistic sign-system into which they are
transported. Even their lexicalization in certain cases cannot serve to ignore
their identity as foreign entities and the resultant co-presence of cultures
and languages in the translated text. Such foreign terms, whether italicized or
not, and their translations in turn, generate a hybrid space, a space of
inquiry. Carol Meier rightly says the end of translation is, “a further
investigation of how apparently inexplicable things might be comprehended
without making them explicable in familiar terms (and without allowing them to
appear simply different)” (1996). However, at the
same time a translator should not foreignize the translation just for the sake
of doing it. Readability of the translation and its ability to kindle and
sustain the interest of the non-native reader ought to be given topmost priority.
So, at times, a short descriptive phrase to substitute the indigenous noun can
serve the purpose. This is truly the tension, which underscores the translation
of Sundaram’s stories and poems: neither to make the translation a seamless
English text nor to make it an inaccessible foreign text but rather to
constitute a play of familiarity and foreignness so as to produce a text in
which they intermingle. Sundaram sets many of his stories in villages and
tinctures them with local colour by frequently representing dialects, customs,
dress, food items, utensils, and ways of thinking and feeling that are
distinctive of rural areas. Words from these signifying practices had to be
borrowed in target language by the way of glossary even in the face of its rough
source language equivalent posed a tantalizing temptation because at times such
words were suffused with different connotations and moreover the method of
preparation also varied. For example, to refer to the cloth which covers a
woman’s breasts Sundaram uses a variety of terms like ‘moliyo’, ‘kapadun’, ‘katori’ which are nearly the same
as the English ‘bodice’. However, such a
replacement would sound quite facile and unduly simplistic, as it would connive
at all the erotic and sensuous overtones that the original terms carry. The
same holds true for ‘chuni’, ‘kanti’ and ‘nathani’ for all of which ‘nose-ring’ would have been too
inappropriate an equivalent. In stories like ‘Maja Vela nun Mrutyun’ (The Demise of Maja Velo), ‘Kholki’ (You, Blockhe), ‘Mane Khole’ (In the Lap of Moth), ‘Min Piyasi’ (Thirsty Fish), ‘Amba
Bhavani’ and ‘Bidio’ (Bidis),
the author mentions indigenous kitchenware like tapeli, handli, doni, tasni, padio and chulo, delicacies like rotlo, kadi, sutarfeni, maisur, pendo, magas, mohanthal and malpuda. Many of these words have a metaphorical function in the
narrative and fit so well into the overall semantic structure of the story that
any attempt at replacing or paraphrasing them would have dealt a shattering
blow to its symmetrical build. Sometimes local colour manifests itself in the
indigenous medicinal and musical system. Resultantly, words like datan, tamburo, ektaro, sharnai, dhun, and even sounds of tabla-like dhagina tinak dhin are transliterated. The fact that
sounds of tabla, which are called bol
in native musical terminology, have to be transliterated contradicts the axiom
that the language of music doesn’t know cartographic demarcations. Not to talk
of the language of music, music itself has various origins and different
traditions. For example, in India,
we have two traditions of classical music, Hindustani and Karnatak. Each of
them has its own distinctive way of tala, metrical arrangement, and specific
configuration of notes. Again a community address, that is, a noun derived from
the name of a particular caste or community by adding suffixes like ‘o’, ‘an’
and ‘i’ to it, certainly sounds quite bizarre and weird to the Western reader
who is not conversant with the hierarchical hereditary divisions established
among the Hindus under the banner of jati, varna or caste. Therefore, addresses
like loovano, ghanchan, vaniyan, vaghri,
bhangiyo, bhangadi, kacchiyo, muslim vora, thakore, patel etc. have been
transliterated and explained in the glossary. The same is the case with certain
conventional societal addresses specific to rural culture like bapa, bapla, bun, madi etc. which are
emotionally charged terms conveying sentiments of esteem, dignity, intimacy
towards the person addressed. Translating them with ‘mother’, ‘sister’,
‘brother’ and ‘father’ would have robbed them of their emotional exuberance.
Apart from these, traditional kinship terms and conventional stereotypes prove
to be untranslatable because of their being extremely culture-specific. In the
poem ‘Chal’ the gopi sings,
Empty out your pitchers though full of water
Don’t heed sasu’s
injunctions
Here the
replacement of sasu with
‘mother-in-law’ would strip the term of the connotation it has in the Bhakti
literary tradition of the mother-in-law being a severe taskmaster who, in
collusion with her daughter, the nanand,
the sister-in-law, keeps a strict vigil over the activities of her
daughter-in-law, the gopi. Thus, sasu and nanand represent oppressive stereotypes in the Indian familial
system. Allegorically they connote the social norms and constricting dictates
of the mundane world, which hamper the spiritual growth of a devotee. In the
same way, kinship terms like bhabhi ‘brother’s wife’ or ‘wife of the
husband’s elder brother’ and vahu ‘daughter-in-law’ are loaded terms.
In India, bhabhi and nanand share a playful, lively and good-humored relationship. Both
of them, if approximately of the same age, are not just legally bonded
relations but intimate friends so much so that a nanand divulges to her bhabhi
all her secrets and the issues which she hesitates to discuss with her mother.
If the age difference between them is great, bhabhi becomes a motherly figure to the young nanand apart from being a friend. In the story Kholki, the father-in-law calls out for his vahu, to bring water for guests. Here
the word ‘daughter-in-law’ would have sounded too formal and drab as it fails
to convey the feeling of the awe, respect and security on the part of the vahu and a distant and yet fatherly
attitude on the part of the father-in-law that characterize their relationship.
This becomes manifest in the story Mane
Khole, where Shabu, the protagonist, pulls a veil over her face out of
propriety and decorum in the presence of her father-in-law.
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