MATCHBOX

KD: Warm greetings, Ramaswamy Sir, I hope you’re doing well. 

First of all, many congratulations for the growth of your translation work “Talashnama” and for being in the longlist of the JCB Prize for Literature. How does it feel to see serious works of translation being received so well by the readers of the subcontinent?

VR: Thank you! I began translation by chance in 2005, and now, almost two decades later, one can definitely say that translation of Indian Bhasha literature has woken up, as it were. Speaking of the JCB Prize itself, the winning novels in the last two years were translations. So it is all very cheering and encouraging … and yet there is so much more to be done. 

For instance, not all our languages are well represented when it comes to translation. Quality may also be an issue. Also, from looking at just literature in Bangla, I have no doubt that we have just begun skimming the surface of our literary wealth. And when it comes to translation into English, after all, English occupies a marginal space in our country. Literature may not be something that the masses relate to, but it is meaningless if it becomes the preserve of a tiny section either. The overwhelming section of the population of India lives in the world of languages which have been reduced to dialects, or bolis, by other languages. Hindi is foremost in that respect. But most sobering of all, I would like to reiterate Subimal Misra’s sobering thought: what the hell is literature in a society of mass illiteracy?

But coming back to translation, the key challenge is that of works being translated from one Bhasha into another. Translation into English or Hindi may aid that, but from my own experience I can say that Bhasha to Bhasha translation will result in something closer to the original than English. So Bhasha translators need to find multilingual associates who can help them in their work, as translation associates. 

I am an independent translator, meaning, like an author decides what to write about, I choose titles that I think I should translate. Which I think are important. Literary translation may not yet enable a livelihood in India, and I am fortunate that I have been able to pursue it despite that; but I hope there will always be people who have an urge to translate, and do so, and become, remain and grow as independent translators. Ultimately it is people who determine everything, not the government, not the market; and so notwithstanding whatever the government, or bodies like the Sahitya Akademi, or large publishers may or may not be doing, people’s literary endeavours, undertaken in an activist vein, must be there, and grow ever stronger. In this regard, one finds hope in the fact that publishers’ decisions to bring out translated works have been vindicated, a readership for Indian literature in translation has come up and is growing, publishers devoted to translation are coming up, and print and e-journals publish translations. But I am also cheered by the fact that small literary festivals devoted to serious discussion of Bhasha literature take place, and most of all, that people are becoming interested in translating. In short, an ecosystem is coming up. Rather late in the day, I would think; given the multilingual, multicultural nation that India is, “Translation” should have been a primary subject of public policy and intellectuals’ concern from day one! Nevertheless, it is a positive development, and as I said, so much more remains to be done.

KD: We do see how publishers are focusing on translational pieces now more than ever. For a new-age reader, what should be the criteria to judge between a good and not-so-good work of translation?

VR: It is a reader who judges the quality of a work, But there is also the literary sense, taste, and awareness of the reader, all of which are honed through extensive reading. So there has to be a “culture” of reading. I began reading in my childhood, and it grew and grew through four decades of my life. What would draw a reader? The language. The quality of the writer’s prose. The social, political and historical significance of the work. The intimate baring of the soul. The imagination and envisioning power of the author. The readability of a novel. Whether it draws you in, and grips you. A novel may have a story, but that story may be set on an epic canvas, on a continental landscape. Does it address the key challenges of the day? One could go on like this. Someone else may produce another set of points. All of which provide us a lens through which to read a literary work, and evaluate it. Literature enthralls!

KD: Translators have to keep in mind the vibe and feel of the work they’re translating. How is it different when it comes to translating works of Indian regional writers and those of other countries? 

VR: Every work is set in a place! And a place is not a passive background, it is an entity in itself, with a history, social ecology, diversity, stratification, dynamics etc. Speaking of myself, my translation practice emerges from my being embedded in my place, Bengal, and I cannot see how major works that are steeped in the culture of a place can be translated without an engagement that goes deeper than mere superficial linguistic familiarity. I translated Shahidul Zahir, of Bangladesh. He is known for his unique prose style, the setting in the historic old quarter of Dhaka, and for catching the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the Bangladeshi folk. I guess I imbibed this implicitly since readers say that I have done justice to the author. Similarly with the writer Subimal Misra. 

When we read writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Jose Saramago, or Kenzaburo Oe in English translation, we think we are reading the author, but actually we are reading the translator’s rendering of the author’s words. It is the rare reader who remains aware at all times that it is a translation, and marvels at the translator’s work. The translators of such writers too have done something exceptional by bringing something completely foreign to us and helping us make it our own. Reading great works in translation may be the best way of getting inspired to translate! 

KD. As a translator, what are the basic things you always keep in mind while reading the story you’re going to translate and while you’re working on the form of art?

VR: Actually, I rarely read what I translate in advance. And that is because I never read (past tense) anything in Bangla, and after I began translating, all the Bangla reading I did or do is for translation. I read as I go through the first round of translation. And there will be several rounds of reading thereafter. A translator reads unlike any other reader. The reading is so close, so microscopic. All you have in front of you are words, and sentences. Everything that the author conveys is through that. So my way is to concentrate on the words and sentences. I should add that I select particular authors and books to translate, and in the case of writers like Misra and Zahir, who are masters of prose. So it is not my business to tamper with what they have done. I must either convey exactly what they write, or not do it at all. 

Regarding “form” – that comes from the reading. I simply follow the original, I move along with it. That may be humorous, or quirky, or sombre, or cryptic, or be in a colloquial oral storytelling style. I read a sentence over and over, looking for the first word to begin the English sentence with, and the words to follow that, in a particular sequence, and with appropriate punctuation marks. Thus I render what I think is the exact equivalent. But having done so, one can also pause and think about whether the same thing can be said differently, although what is said is the same. That means the translator has to suspend movement, forward movement, in favour of thought. He or she simply dwells with a sentence, and through a process of osmosis, something like a tender newborn baby emerges. 

While the first round of translation is crucial, one must return to the original text repeatedly to make sure that nothing has been missed out or misread. Then there will be several rounds of reading and editing the translation. Using whatever literary aesthetic one possesses, towards giving the translation a “quality.” When you are translating an important work, there can’t be any hurry, and no amount of effort is too much. 

Speaking of “art”, if a great work of literature is called “art”, and if that work is read mostly in translation and accepted everywhere as a work of art, then that is also because of the invisible act of translation by translators. That can also be entirely a labour of love. I think art cannot be separated from love.

In this context, I would like to say that co-translation is important too. Because two is better than one. It produces a better result. Two people can share the ownership and the labour, so that the final work is a gem. I am fortunate that my very first experience of joint translation, with Shahroza Nahrin (we translated Life and Political Reality: Two Novellas by Shahidul Zahir), was a very rich and productive one. We are currently working on my final Zahir book, the novel ’Twas Full Moon That Night. The novel is simply a display, an exhibition, of literary and prose artistry. It is like watching a daring acrobatic act. Or a splendid fireworks display. Shahroza is the lead-translator on this. I want to think that we shall leave no stone unturned and stint no effort on this project. We shall strive to make the translation too a cherished work of art.

KD: “Talashnama” dissects religious bigotry, rigidity, hatred and claustrophobia through multiple characters and their stories which happen to be against love. 

What, according to you, drives a human being to see hatred with filters and justify violence in a pretty normal way? 

Also, why and how does the conditioning of a thousand years of religious bigotry stand strong before love that too remains constant? 

VR: Perhaps this question has haunted humanity from the very dawn of civilisation. But looking at India in the last ten years, we have seen that there is an entire industry, apparatus, and ecosystem of hatred, which works round-the-clock, year-in and year-out. And digital technology has been appropriated by this industry. Then there are orchestrated events, such as the lynching of Muslims for allegedly possessing beef, or simply for being Muslim. The criminals behind the Bilkis Bano atrocity are freed from prison. During election rallies, the Prime Minister does not balk at vilification of Muslims. And the lapdog media amplifies all this. In short, hatred has become a goal and an instrument of state policy. All this is on one hand. And on the other hand we have a large number of Hindus in urban India who lack any human intercourse with a Muslim in their lives. We have seen through history, and in the last century, how a people could be so “otherised” that they are not even considered human. Just forty years ago, we saw the carnage against Sikhs in Delhi following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. This debasement of humanity – whose heart bleeds for that? Does a nation need to have a social policy and means to build a better mentality among its citizens? Think of what was undertaken in (West) Germany after the Second World War.

Coming to the second part of your question – I am currently translating the 1950 monograph by the scholar of religion, Kshiti Mohan Sen, which I have titled “Hindu and Muslim in United Endeavour”. Prof Amartya Sen – the author’s grandson – has been speaking repeatedly about this book in the last five years. This business of a thousand years of religious bigotry is actually a creation of our recent history! And in India, if we set aside the Muslim question for a moment and look at the issue of “caste”, we can see how caste and communalism have become welded together and morphed into a system of apartheid. India is the motherland of apartheid, and the ideal of an egalitarian society is not something a good number of Indians would subscribe to. So that is where “love” comes in! Love is like gravity, it exists. Like if a human suffers a cut, s/he will bleed, love too is inevitable. So it is the human faculty of love that great seers have relied upon and then built upon, towards progressively creating a higher human being. But like with nutrition, the denial of the nourishment of love that the human needs for his growth and health, the smothering of love, can produce a stunted human being, who is fuelled by hate.

KD: The extremist version of every religion gives us drastic results. Under what circumstances, the extremist teaching and its preachers (irrespective of one particular religion) gets the opportunity to dominate over the mass of a particular country?

VR: The lack of human intercourse enables the broadcast of lies and the spread of hatred. A Hindu can spend his or her whole life without a single substantive human encounter with a Muslim. Can you imagine what a bizarre situation that is! And yet, for centuries Hindu and Muslim have coexisted, and as Kshiti Mohan Sen reminds us, worked closely together, to create art, literature, music, architecture etc.

KD. What is your take on the censorship of strong ideas which are directed towards the dogmatism of religion? Why in a world that runs on artificial intelligence (AI), we still have to worry about fundamentalism? Is the world of AI, especially social media, more favourable for the fundamentalists? How do you think the whole system operates to misguide an entire generation?

VR: I guess it is time to come to the main point. Which is “power”. That is what it is all about. The battle for power, and its downstream outcomes. And as regards social media, I already mentioned that digital technology has become a handmaiden for the broadcast of hatred. In Bangla there is an expression about scoring a goal in an empty playfield. The communalists face no substantive opposition or resistance in their dastardly project. We need enlightened folk, enlightened messages, enlightened actions, which produce calm, peace, and humane feelings in the human breast. But right now we are in a state of a no-holds-barred war against the “other”, and such an ideal would be laughed at by most. Nonetheless, a stream of such enlightened endeavours will continue to work in society, as it has for a millennium. And this too shall pass, as all things must.

KD: How is the rise of translational pieces working for the development of the entire literary community of the world? 

VR: I have devoted myself to translating voices from the margins. After I translated Memories of Arrival,  a refugee memoir by Adhir Biswas, it occurred to me that works like this were of profound significance. These are voices and stories that were never heard before, they emerge out of silence. How does the domain of literature deal with this? By measuring it with its own yardstick? Does literature have anything to do with matters like power in society, marginalisation, and cultural silencing? As I saw it, such works veritably turn the world upside down. When someone from, say, Britain, reads Adhir Biswas, or Manoranjan Byapari – I think it would expand their consciousness considerably, it would alter the way in which they look at the world. Or consider Shahidul Zahir, whose fiction, while being inspired by magic realism and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is entirely indigenous, Bangladeshi. When someone in Europe reads Zahir, the work is a literary, cultural and political ambassador of Bangladesh. It educates the reader. It helps in building a better world, of equality and fraternity.

KD. What are the books which you strongly recommend young and old readers to go through to understand the nuances of translation? Also, could you share three most important books which helped you to nourish your literary mind or vision?

VR: I am at a loss with this question! Perhaps reading as much of literature in translation as one can may be good preparation for taking up translation. One needs to have read a lot of excellent writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, so that one has imbibed something, and possesses a sense of quality when it comes to writing.

Regarding the three books – this is such a difficult question. Nevertheless, I think the ones I would like to mention are: The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass, which I read in 1980; The Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison, which I think I read in 1991; and Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!, by Kenzaburo Oe, which I read in 2005.

KD. Lastly, what do you think about the Usawa Literary Review?

VR: I think I have contributed a couple of times earlier to the ULR. I feel a friendship with the journal. From my son Rishiraj, a mushroom farmer, I learnt something about the fungal world and its role in ecology. So journals like the ULR are vital elements in the world of literature; it is because the former exists, that the latter can exist.