Current Issue  Volume 3  No 1&2  Mar & Oct 2006

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Differences between cultures are not located exclusively at the lexical level, but at the level of culture-specific practices, popular beliefs, myths, omens, superstitions and rituals. In songs elucidating Premlakshana Bhakti, the poet uses the myth of Radha or gopis and Krishna, which, of course, has no parallel in the English culture. Similarly, in the story ‘Min Piyasi’ the protagonist sings a bhajan, which draws on the myth of the guru Matsyendranath and his disciple Gorakh. On the metaphysical plane, this myth functions as a backdrop against which the story of the protagonist’s life is laid. Much of the charm and force of the story would be lost if the reader fails to relate this myth to the plot of the story. In such situations, the translator has to assimilate them into English by way of a glossary. Omens like ‘a cat walking across somebody’s path’, decorous formalities like ‘women pulling a veil over the face in the presence of elders like father-in-law’, superstitions like ‘pouring a handful of water on the head before entering a holy river’ to pay homage to it and ‘putting out an oil lamp with the flap of a cloth’ (and never with a blow of breath) are extremely culture-specific and the translator has to resort to the paraphrastic approach. However, at times it is quite likely for a non-native reader to get bamboozled at the sight of conventions like ‘reserving the lump of cow dung’ when the narrative scarcely affords any space for explaining the utilitarian rationale behind the act. In such cases, a translator has to take the help of footnotes and annotations. The same holds true for proverbs and idioms which being repositories of the cumulative inherited wisdom of a speech community carry a freight of historical happenstance and often a plain illogicality which are impossible to map onto another language. In the story, Evening in Paris a woman addresses her husband’s friend as ‘mara bhai’, that is, ‘my brother’. This would definitely confuse the Western reader who is not aware of the Indian cultural tradition that expects every woman to look upon every other man except her husband as brother or father. Footnotes are required to resolve such issues. Sometimes translational problems could be resolved by being purely paraphrastic, however, without an elision of the central historical or cultural signifier present in the idiom because it often bears a metaphorical relation to the character’s persona or serves as a means to evolve a specific motif in the story. In the story Kholki, the protagonist Chandan’s pure and unsullied character is emphasized throughout the narrative with the help of a variety of images. The allusion to Ganges in the form of an idiom is a smart way of reiterating the same. The idiom used is Gher bethan Gangaji avyan. It is translated as

“You are lucky for being able to celebrate remarriage at home only; I had to come as far as here leaving home and parents. In your case the waters of holy Ganges have flowed right up to her devotee’s feet.”

The foregoing discussion reiterates the axiom that though the quest for exact cultural equivalents is futile, translation remains a feasible activity and can be executed with a lesser or greater amount of accuracy, cultural gaps can be filled and elements of one culture can be integrated into another by relying upon all kinds of innovative devices such as borrowing, substitution, literal translation, neologism, omission, addition and paraphrasing.

The Linguistics and Semantics of Translation

            If the problems relating to cultural transference are vexing, the structure of the language poses no less a dilemma to the translator. There is a world of a difference in the syntactical and lexical organization between the Gujarati and English languages. For example, English language has sentences with a rigorous SVO word order, except in the passive voice.  But Gujarati has more inflections by the agency of which the sentence patterns freely vary from SOV to OSV. Due to this flexibility of the word order and greater possibility for inflections, Gujarati sentence structures become more assimilative in nature. That is, a single Gujarati complex sentence can club together more simple sentences than one English complex sentence possibly can. These differences in the syntactic and lexical arrangement between the two languages call for a number of ‘adjustments’ while reproducing the message in the receptor language. Sundaram, in many of his short stories, habitually gives prolix descriptions running through a single long complex sentence. While attempting to transfer such descriptions into a comparatively rigid syntactical pattern of English, simplistic and even an editing approach has to be adopted in order to accomplish accuracy and integrity in semantic translocation. For example, the following paragraph from the story Tarini (The Saviour), broken into two sentences, originally formed one long-winded sentence.

“From the mystical body of the endless sky stretching several lakhs of miles away, the midday sun, with rapt attention, was concentrating its light and scorching heat pointedly on the earth. Raising her devout self out of unflagging hope and unshakable faith the earth had become a hill - the apex of a mountain - and readily positioned herself right in front of the gaze of the sun as if to receive the gracious prasad of that supreme deity.”

Attempts at translating a long-winded Gujarati description running through a single sentence into an equally long-drawn-out English one prove to be futile. Apart from sounding jarring and stiff, such an attempt causes the problem of determining the noun, which the sub-clause refers to. At the lexical level too the distinction between second person pronouns of address in Gujarati like honorific ‘tamey’ and familiar ‘tu’ could not be rendered into English. Again, gender determination of certain nouns like ‘moon’ becomes problematic. In such cases, the contextual, figurative and metaphorical significance of the noun was taken into account. For example, in the story ‘Amba Bhavani’, the moon is shown to be viewing the mesmerizing beauty of Amba and her lovemaking with Amro from above. Moon, which has feminine gender in English, is masculine gender in Gujarati. But this act of secret viewing alludes to the same act performed by Lord Krishna in Vrindavana. It may also refer to the mythical tale of Indra being bewitched by the ravishing beauty of Ahalya who lived on earth.  In the light of these mythical significations, the noun was inflected with the suffix -god and ‘moon-god’ was given a masculine gender.

Furthermore, in Gujarati a verb is inflected according to the gender of the subject especially in the past tense, even when the subject is as genderless as the first person. But English verbs are gender-neutral in nature and so when it came to translating the bhakti song ‘Mere Piya’ the English verb failed to convey the fact that a woman or a gopi is addressing the song to her lover or Krishna. Thus, while the original reads

Mai to chup chup chah rahi

the translation reads

Covertly have I kept on doting

English is not as strong in forming compound words as Gujarati, a faculty that every other Indian language has in abundance. Sanskrit grammar has these tatpurusha compounds. Braj B. Kachru the linguist has rightly remarked that Indian English hybrids are formed on the same principle in order to fulfill a perceived need among Indians for such words (welcome address, England-returned), but are unintelligible to native speakers (Braj Kachru1983:23).

           Furthermore, most Indian languages, including Gujarati, use double adjectives, adverbs, and even verbs either to intensify their meaning or to indicate the boringly or annoyingly repetitive aspect of the action. This comes out very lamely in English. For example in the song, ‘Mere Piya’, chup chup had to be rendered as just ‘silently’ or ‘covertly’. Again, typical Gujarati expressions like dhime dhime, uncha uncha, marak marak, dur dur and many others could not be conveyed with an equal amount of stress and intensity. The same problems occur with transferring the degree of frequency or amount conveyed by Gujarati and English qualifiers and quantifiers. The expressions kai ketloy samay and kai ketlaye varsho could have been rendered to a nicety with literal parallels like ‘how very much time’ and ‘how great many years’, but on account of their unfamiliarity and oddness they are simply translated as ‘how much time’ and ‘how many years’.

            Gujarati is a language that depends on sound to make meaning. Many of its descriptive words are highly onomatopoetic and thus almost impossible to render in English. For example, the phrase for how a small stream (zarnun) flows is zar zar zare. In Sundaram’s poem ‘Tran Padoshi’(A Song of Three Neighbours) the sound of the hand-mill (ghanti) ghar ghar is rendered with words like ‘roaring’ and ‘rumbling’ but with a loss of much of the poetic aural effect.

             Care has to be taken not to fall prey to using the ‘Babu’ English with its stilted, archaic and bombastic idiom, in any form in translations. A translator is invariably faced with the generic problem while translating from a regional language into English. Translating into English is all very well, but whose English? International or Indian? This question once again brings her/him onto the brink of another question. Translating for whom? The Indian reader or the English reader? It is all the time the readership of the target language, which affects the choice of idiom and the structure of the language. Such questions are answered by the translator. However so far as translations from regional language literature into English are concerned, all efforts should be focused upon evolving an idiom which would be a culmination of one which Raja Rao advocated in the preface to his novel ‘Kanthapura’. Almost six decades after independence a translator should daringly decolonize her/his pen from the exotic and even indigenous frowns over the use of footnotes and glossary. Sundaram’s works were translated for both kinds of readers, nonindian and nongujarati Indian, though primarily for non-Gujarati Indian readers who are in a dire need to familiarize themselves with it. A penetratingly discerning and perceptive non-Indian reader will not have the slightest problem in coming to terms with the idiom. When called upon to render the saucy impertinence, the salty tang of a highly localized language, manipulated especially in dialogues, the translator can take liberties with the syntax of the English language. The following example, from ‘Maja Vela nun Mrutyun’ illustrates the point.

“Maja Velo burst into laughter. ‘Sutarfeni! You better give up your

desire to have it. Even its name you can’t pronounce properly.”

It is heartening to note that now the interest of Indian translators is to explore the ways in which the English language can be stretched to contain ‘authentic Indian expressions’ and thus to evolve an idiom which would be exclusively Indian, capable of fulfilling the needs of the native languages and which at the same time would assert the Indian lingual and cultural diversity on an international scale.

 

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