T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: Lost in translation

In the last five years or so, I have taken to reading English translations of novels in Indian languages because they are now available in large numbers. Everyone is publishing them, from Penguin to Oxford University Press and a host of others in-between. What joy!

I too once translated something from Hindi to English about a dozen years ago. It happened like this.

I had written a review of P N Dhar's book Indira Gandhi, The Emergency and Indian Democracy in this newspaper. In it I had mentioned, in passing, how so few Indian bureaucrats wrote their memoirs and why more of them should do so.

A few days later, I received a call from B N Tandon, a close friend of the family who from 1969 to 1976 had held the trust of Indira Gandhi as a joint secretary in her Secretariat - the Prime Minister's Secretariat (PMS), as the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) was known then. He was of the 1951 batch of the Indian Administrative Service.

He asked me to meet him at once, which I did. Pointing to a large pile of diaries on the floor by his desk, he said he had maintained a daily record of the goings-on in the PMS between November 1, 1974, and July 14, 1976, when he was sent off to another ministry.

"They are in Hindi and I need a translator to get them published in English," he said.

I offered to do it. Volume 1, which describes the first half of 1975 (till the Emergency was declared), came out a couple of years later. I did not, however, translate the second volume.

The book was widely reviewed and many opinions were expressed. But only one of them has stuck in my mind.

After running down Mr Tandon for having the temerity to record his version of the contemporaneous events, the reviewer, a well-known editor and a Congress lackey, wrote the translation was "very poor".

My deliciously Tamil name perhaps gave him courage. But, as the man said, what's in a name?

I have, however, been wondering ever since as to how you judge a good translation. If you haven't read the original, how can you tell whether a translation is good or bad? And if you can read the original, why would you bother reading a translation?

Getting it just right
Be that as it may, the market for translations lies, I suppose, in having very eclectic preferences and an innate urge to find out more about your fellow citizens. The newly available translations have certainly revealed to me that there is nothing intrinsically superior about the Anglo-Saxon lens on life, which had been the standard one I used till about 2008. That lens, I realised, misses more tricks than it turns.

The problem still remains, though. As you read the translated novels, the doubt nags you constantly: is this what the original intended to say? Has the exact nuance been captured?

After a while, though, you tend to develop an instinct. I can now tell a faithful translation from one that is less so. Arunava Sinha's translations of Bengali novels, for example, are superb. I suppose part of that comes from being an Indian, the cultural empathy that exists between us all. We can tell when we start getting the right feel while reading.

There is, of course, the technical part about which I know nothing at all. Presumably, however, just as with anything that is technically good, here also good technique becomes apparent.

Poor old English
But good technique can't compensate for the poverty of a language. For example, one of the biggest problems is the anaemic nature of English. Quite often, it does not have a word that captures the exact nuance.

Hindi, which is the only Indian language I know to speak, read and write, outdoes English by a mile. I daresay other Indian languages are the same. Urdu, I gather, the version that existed until about 25 years ago, outdoes them all in the fineness of its vocabulary.

So, is there a female word for fellow, eg, felli? In Tamil there is aval. In Telugu, I am told, it is sakhi or cheliya. In Marathi there is gaday. In Hindi, Punjabi and Malayalam, however, my spies tell me, there is no female equivalent for fellow.

Anyway, let me conclude by telling you a problem I faced when translating Mr Tandon's diaries. He used the word "chaatukhor" to describe the sycophants of the Congress party. But you tell me: how close does sycophant come to the sheer despicability conveyed by the word chaatukhor?

And that perhaps was the problem. I had to make do with sycophant, which failed in conveying Mr Tandon's deep contempt for them.

Maybe that is what annoyed the reviewer.