By Sonakshi Srivastava
I am always struck by love. There is always something creative, something potent about this affect. It manifests in different degrees, assuming shades of longing, yearning, desire, adoration, remembrance and all those fragments that Roland Barthes could gather in his luminous A Lover’s Discourse. Once, when I was in an undergraduate class reading Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and discussing how Tridib makes an attempt at measuring love through quantifying the number of steps it takes him to reach May, my professor commented how the opposite of love may be measured not through hate but indifference. I was smitten with this proposal, and dwelled on it for days only to arrive at the understanding that the opposite of any emotion may be indifference. Or, most emotions eventually transform into an indifference of sorts.
Unlike its opposite or counterpart, indifference, love is an emotion of labour. Love requires action, a tug or two at and between the strings of the heart and the brain – it requires work. Love is an attempt at reconciling, accommodating, and acknowledging differences, an attempt at not giving up just yet. Forking away from indifference, love is an exercise in self-reflection. And what better way then, than prompting our translators to talk about their craft by pivoting the question on love? What if they were to talk about the challenges they face(d) while translating a particular noun, a particular verb, a particular idiom through the productive force of love?
Loving does not come easy, and “thin love ain’t love at all” (Toni Morrison). Read below to find out how translators revisited the memory of the first word that they loved translating, how they arrived at that particular translation, and how they decided that it was the “right” choice by working through the labyrinth of love and its valences.
1. Arunava Sinha:
Perhaps you can never know something you love. (Or love something you know?) I realised this with the title of a Bangla novel by Buddhadeva Bose that I set out to translate more than a decade ago. The Bangla word is “tithidore”—which Bose borrowed from a song written by Rabindranath Tagore. “Tithi” refers to a pre-determined date for an occasion, which could range from a wedding to a full moon night. And “dore” is a thread that binds. Put them together and what do you have? Not something that can be translated into a language like English, which has no such thing as a “tithi.” The title under which the novel was eventually published was When The Time Is Right. But it was the very untranslatability that made it a word I have loved ever since. (And listened to that song too ever so often.)
2. Barbara Ofosu-Somuah:
Igiaba Scego begins her novel Cassandra a Mogadiscio with the question, “Amatissima, come si disegna la tua risata?” In English, “amatissima” translates to “much loved,” “dearly beloved,” “well-loved,” or more literally, “the most loved.” Yet, none of these choices fit the novel. In Cassandra, amatissima is a term of endearment that the narrator calls her niece Soraya, to whom the book, written as a love letter, is addressed. What term of endearment, then, could hold such weight? I knew that the title of Toni Morrison’s Beloved had been translated into Amatissima in Italian. I also knew that Scego’s choice to use that word, which appears 15 times throughout the novel, was deeply intentional. I spent months playing with the sentence, hopscotching between sweetheart and darling, my love, or beloved, sometimes preceded by the possessive my, and other times without. In the end, as is my practice to continuously be in conversation with the authors that I translate, I asked Scego which choice she preferred, and she chose, “Beloved, how to describe your laughter?”
3. Beth Hickling-Moore:
Unfetteredby /ʌnfˈɛtədbaɪ/ adj.
Translation of an invented word, “borbolivre,” which combines the Portuguese signifiers “borboleta” (“butterfly”) and “livre” (“free”). Has to work grammatically with the verb “I live”, e.g. “I live unfetteredby X.”
A more literal translation, “butterfree,” sounds like a vegan margarine spread — I have since been told it is also a Pokémon! My chosen translation, which came after much deliberation, encompasses a lot of the sounds associated with the word “butterfly” while also being synonymous with freedom.
Further, it is a nod to what Berman calls “surfaces of iconicity”: in reference to the word “butterfly,” Berman argues that in a word’s “sonorous, physical substance, in its density as a word, we feel that it possesses something of the butterfly’s butterfly existence” (2012, p291) — in the invented compound word ‘borbolivre’, I hoped to replicate such qualities.
Reference:
BERMAN, A., 2012. Translation and the Trials of the Foreign. In: L. VENUTI, ed. Translation Studies Reader. London; New York: Routledge, 284-297.
4. Devanshi Khetarpal:
In one of the poems by Nurit Kasztelan, I spent the past few days translating from Spanish, the words “mirara” and “mirar” appear at the end of two successive lines: “como si mirara/ mi proprio mirar.” I wanted to reflect the sense and meaning of the poem in English. I know very little Spanish, so I looked up the words in dictionaries. And, more importantly, looked and felt the presence of the words on the page, before arriving at the following: “as if I look/ my own looking.” I say “I arrived” because I had been intuiting this choice, before I even became aware of it, for much longer. Loving resembles such intuiting. I cannot remember when, or how, I first fell in love with translating, but there are moments–such as this one–which reignite the memory of that first instance. One day, perhaps, I will arrive at the memory too.
5. Ena Selimović:
The first chapter in the first novel I ever translated, Maša Kolanović’s Underground Barbie, is titled “ratni neseser”—where “ratni” means “wartime,” and “neseser” a toiletry or accessories bag. “Wartime toiletry bag” wouldn’t do: a literal translation, it failed to capture the contextual meaning and it sounded off to me. “Wartime cosmetic bag” lingered in its place, despite reflecting the same issues. I did countless revolutions around “neseser” before settling on “wartime necessities,” which seems now like such an obvious resolution—or denouement, to stay with French, as the word “neseser” enters Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian from French (“nécessaire”). It felt like the words were doing justice to the contextual meaning—in this case, the child packing away her “most prized portable property” (her Barbies and Barbie gear) at the start of a war—and the sound, launching the novel into a series of darkly humorous twists regarding the stuff we take for granted.
6. Haider Shahbaz:
An example of Mirza Athar Baig’s linguistic playfulness in the novel Hassan Ki Soorat-e-Haal, which I translated as Hassan’s State of Affairs (HarperCollins India, 2019), is the word “hairaniya”—a combination of the word hairat—wonder—and bayaniya, or narrative. It is a neologism that anchors the theoretical framework of Hassan’s State of Affairs. Every time Hasan looks at the world, he finds something wondrous that sparks his curiosity: a severed human head in the back of a passing truck, a turtle at a flower shop, blood stains on a mirror. Hasan imagines all the different possibilities that could explain these astonishing things. In translating the word, I wanted to create a neologism in English that would capture the sense of wonder as well as narrative, specifically the kind of narrative that records or lists the different possibilities presented in the course of the novel. I ended up with the word “wonderlogue.”
7. Jason Grunebaum:
गड़बड़ | gaṛbaṛ |
[★ gaḍḍa-baḍḍa-] f.
1 messy mess; confusion; disorder
2 calamity in the koṭhā
3 situation normal all f**ked up
4 shrilly red alert
5 banana peel optional but recommended
6 boarding is now closed for SpiceJet flight SG087 with service to Bangkok, do you know who I am?
7 bellyaches and black holes
8 my cousin is one of those inscrutable boots-on-the-ground etymologists obsessed with pinpointing the exact historical moment when the linguistic twinlings of gaṛbaṛ and jugāṛ split apart like two halves of the same atom, doomed to forever circle one another like a couple of feral cats, when really all they need is a warm spot in the sun and a hot toddy
8. Jayasree Kalathil:
“Ponnuthampuran” in S. Hareesh’s Moustache, one of the many epithets for a king. The king repeatedly referred to as Ponnuthampuran, especially in the chapter “An Unlikely Medicine Man,” is Maharaja Uthram Thirunal, bungling, wannabe-white, with a fascination for everything British and little interest in ruling his kingdom. Importing chloroform from Britain, he even attempts amateur surgery on a courtier. The word combines “ponnu” (gold) and “Thampuran” (master/king). It could be translated simply as “Beloved King.” But I wanted to bring out the ridiculousness of the character as well as the Gollum-like obsession – “My precious!” – that Malayalees as a people have for gold, reflected in the routine use of “ponnu” to denote love. So, I translated it as “His Golden Majesty” and “beloved Golden Majesty.” That it created a short-lived campaign on social media accusing me of “damaging the author’s reputation” by an overly literal translation is a story for another time.
9. Jenny Bhatt:
Khamma (ખમ્મા): “Khamma Ghani” is an everyday Rajasthani greeting meaning “many blessings.” Its origins trace back to pre-medieval times when Gujarat and Rajasthan were regionally more connected. My mother used it when someone coughed or sneezed to say “bless you,” “be well” or “be free from harm/evil.” During the Raksha Bandhan rituals, my sisters and I also wished our younger brother “Khamma, maara veera” or “Be well, my brave.”
In ancient times, a Gujarati king (or queen) was respectfully greeted with “Jaji khamma.” I first translated it in this context for a Jhaverchand Meghani story. Variations exist in several of the oral folktales he collected during his travels across pre-Independence Gujarat to save them from disappearing entirely. Translating “khamma” reminds me of my mother and brings me joy. Yet I feel conflicted because “blessings” lacks cultural context. I may, eventually, leave it untranslated. We see “Ciao,” “Ola,” and such in the English. Why not “khamma”?
10. Jerry Pinto:
I cannot remember loving a word but I do remember an intense and ultimately unsatisfying relationship with “re,” a sound that I had heard Marathi speakers use all my life and which I had accounted for as a rhythm maker. Konkani had “re” too but there it rhymed with mare and snare and dare. Eventually we parted ways. I decided it was a grace note and Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar did not need any more. But “re” haunted my nights and tormented my days…a High Romantic Urdu version of love, perhaps?
11. Jonathan Baines
Leopold Staff, the Polish poet, had a long career. Born in 1878 – a hundred years older than me – he started early and kept at it until he passed away in 1957. His lyrics are used to illustrate three distinct periods in the history of Polish verse. One of the first words I loved translating is the title of an early poem: “Wezwanie.” In my version it becomes “The Appeal.” It was a challenge, in part because the word is so similar to a Polish word for challenge – “wyzwanie.” They’re an intriguing pair: the two prefixes mean “in” and “out” respectively. To begin with I did without the article, but I now feel that it strikes an appropriate dramatic note. The poem’s four short stanzas boast fourteen ellipses – spaces in which an appeal can be heard. I prefer “appeal” to “call” or “summon” because it expresses something about the attractive task of translation.
12. Kartikeya Jain:
My journey into translation started with editing other people’s work. Noting the gaps, mistranslations and misapprehensions of meaning led to the discovery of a new skill, and encouraged me to try my hand at it.
The translation of this particular phrase has little to do with love. Arguably. I was editing a translation of the Manto story Gentlemenon Ka Bursh (Gentlemen’s Brush). It was part of a collection very unlike Manto: pulpy, raunchy and hilarious. And as I discovered: very queer. The setting of this story: pre-Independence Amritsar. A confluence of the sacred and the profane, gangsters and whores, Hindus and Muslims, painters and musicians.
There were no riots, but frequent brawls due to – among other things – amard-parastii gangsters. I don’t remember the original translation, but when I looked up the phrase, its meaning was entirely missing.
Amard: young beardless boy, handsome youth.
Parastii: (from the Persian parastish) devotion, worship, love.
A clear reference to homosexuality. Was the omission because of propriety or ignorance? It did not matter. I made the correction: “boy-loving gangsters.” Reflecting on it now, I note the connection between beardlessness and (the lack of) masculinity: A-mard. Together with parastish, it refers to a practise documented since Ancient Greece.
The choice was easy: “boy-loving” works better than “boy-worshipping” or “boy-devoted.” It was made easier by our history of queer erasure.
13. Mani Rao:
In Kalidasa’s Meghadūtam, an unnamed yakṣa (a demi-god) speaks to a cloud and entreats it to deliver a message of longing and commitment to his lover. In a series of stanzas, he describes the scenes the cloud is likely to encounter, including one of bedrooms in Alakā. In these bedrooms, the yakṣa says, the cloud is sure to see women with their limbs propped on the shoulders of their lovers because they are so fatigued after sexual activity.
The Sanskrit phrase is: aṅga-glāniṃ surata-janitāṃ
“Aṅga” means “limb”, “glāni” means “lassitude”, and “surata” means “sexual intercourse”. i.e., the lassitude of limbs caused by sexual intercourse.
I translated this as “sexhaustion.”
Here is my translation of the entire verse:
Where at midnight
By clear moonlight
Moonstones hung by threads on bed-frames release
The sexhaustion of limbs of women propped
On the shoulders of embraced lovers
Moonstones absorb moisture from moonlight
Then exude it
14. Poonam Saxena:
The first word I remember translating is udas, in a phrase like ek udas shaam (I was working on Dharamvir Bharati’s Gunahon Ka Devta, the first Hindi novel I translated into English). The word udas can have so many shades. The dictionary gives us plenty of choices: depressed, glum, morose, sad, dejected, gloomy and so on. But none of these worked for me in the context of “ek udas shaam.” The word I thought most apt for this kind of mood was melancholic. Sadness, yes, but a kind of reflective, thoughtful sadness. It seemed to suit “evening” — a time of gathering darkness – particularly well.
15. Priya Sarukkai Chabria:
அருள் /arul / grace is the first word that comes to mind, particularly in conjunction with கடவுளின்/ kadavulai / god’s or universe’s gift of endless love. This surges from my decade of translating 8th century teen mystic, Andal (Andal The Autobiography of a Goddess, Zubaan, 2016) and current retelling of her contemporary, Manikkavasagar Ruby Words, with poet Shobhana Kumar. Translation is a practice of calling, communion, and earthing, while being alert to the power equations embedded in the process. We translate not merely words but the sonic skin of one language wrapping another; we touch its textures as if in braille, to find the most appropriate ones and their resonances through study and intuition. Imagine arul as a vast shimming tender dawn sky drowning darkness; the mood evoked is rapturous gratitude. The translator must find ways of summoning this fullness in her recreation for the immersive reader.
16. Priyamvada Ramkumar and Suchitra Ramachandran:
In our story Elephant! the word we tried many variations of was the title itself. The title of the story in Tamil is Aanaiyilla. It is a Malayalam-inflected dialect word. Aanai is elephant. -illa is “is it not.” So, the word literally means, “Is it not an elephant?” However, depending on the inflection it can imply: “Is it an elephant?” “It is an elephant.” “Is that an elephant?” “Wow, an elephant.” “Oh my god, an elephant!” Surprise, shock, doubt, a declaration, an indifferent observation—you get the drift. So, we asked ourselves, what is the dominant mood of the story? Both of us felt that at the core of all the fun in the story, was a sense of wonder, and a child’s wonder at that. And, Elephant! – like the marvelled cry of a child who comes across an elephant trapped in a house—expressed it the best for us.
17. Ranjit Hoskote:
Growing up in a multilingual family meant that I grew up with translation as a constant, natural and intuitively self-reflexive activity. Some words have fascinated me since my childhood, ever since I first heard them, and they remain as elusive to me now as they did then. Of these, I would single out the Urdu word zamānā. As a child, it evoked for me an epic, sweeping sense of the world. The word, when uttered, began in streets and houses, then zoomed up along its syllabic crescendo to palaces and skies. A word evocative of fantasy. Somewhat later, in adolescence, zamānā came to be veined for me with a pensive slowing down of sensations, the need to dwell on details of gleam and patina, embroidery and brush-stroke before they vanished. Now I ask myself what it means, and the answer arrives in many voices: it is a world, a period and a style of living, all of these; above all, perhaps, it signifies an anchorage from which one is drifting inexorably away.
18. Rohan Kar
ଝୁରିବା /Jhuribā
For the longest time, all the symbols comprising this word signed a solitary meaning for me- yearning. So brilliantly diverse is this single sign, that I was happy to lend it to as many contexts as I could. And then once, as I was translating a song, dismayed by my habitual offences, the sign extinguished itself. Initial pleas for resuscitation were met with a stern denial. Then, only when set sail with assurances of reformism, did they finally bear fruit. Now, upon revival, I noticed that the symbols were no longer organized into a monovalent sign- yearning stood firmly hand in hand with lamentation, reminiscence, envy, and many others; perhaps it always had. Ever since, I’ve learned to identify this word in all its inexhaustible capacities- a sensation, a gesture, a motif, and of course, always, a sign.
19. Rohee Dholakia:
When translating, I think of the energy, the music, the context that hovers around a set of words. I enjoy experimenting with words which is why I enjoyed translating
“પિયાનો પર આંગળી ફરે એમ એ ટાઇપ કરે છે” as “she types as swiftly a teenager would text on their phone,” while a more literal translation would be “she types as swiftly as one’s fingers move on a piano.” For me what matters is the transfer of the feeling. I ensure that the meaning, understanding, and feeling of the original is retained even if the words change based on the context. If a reader cries or laughs reading the original, they should do so reading the translation as well. Each person feels differently and therefore translates what they feel about a particular word or a phrase in a particular context. There is no right or wrong way to go about it.
20. Sampurna Chattarji:
That would have to be শব্দকল্পদ্রুম
SHOBDOKOLPODROOM
which I translated as WORDYGURDYBOOM!
This word comes from the world of Sukumar Ray, whose prose and poetry threw an open challenge not just to my skills as a translator moving from Bangla to English but also as a poet who wrote (dreamed, loved, swam, danced, sang) in English.
I arrived at this word by the simple process of listening to the original carefully, and rolling it on my bilingual tongue lovingly.
When I say, as I have before, that I translate by ear, I mean I am keenly attuned to the sound system of the original.
Since I will be replacing it with another entirely different, entirely foreign system, one of the ways by which I seek fidelity—remember hi-fidelity from our analog days? —is by staying alert not only to the meaning, but to the way that meaning is shaped through sound.
It doesn’t always click so beautifully. How did I know it was the right choice? It sounded right, it felt right. Beyond that, all I had was instinct. Unerring and inexplicable.
As I wrote in a poem titled Translations:
No explanation for madness.
From the place where listening
becomes a movement towards sound,
I am following the traces,
quicksilver, joy, sadness,
trawling for the word
that will be exact and unmerciful,
that will be synonymous
with truth.
21. Sanchit Toor:
There are words, and not one word, I remember; two of them follow. These are words that failed—not in making translation possible but in making it to the final draft; the first for my abandoning it for another word, and the second for the project not taking up. I loved translating them and often returned to them as if I owed them something: some finality, some form. First, namī. I encountered it in a poem by the Hindi poet Mangalesh Dabral. “Moistness,” the quality, was my first translation choice, but I let it go in favour of “moisture” in the published draft. While the latter can be observed, the former can only be sensed. Second, mānuṣa, human. As I sat with this Hindi word, I recalled the references to monēr mānuṣa (The man of my heart) in Bengali Baul traditions. The standard usage of “man” as the equivalent word seemed obvious and easy until I was taken with the philosophical ideas of “Being,” from Aristotle to Hegel to Heidegger. Thus, there it was: mānuṣa, the being.
22. Sayari Debnath:
Translating from two languages means that sometimes it is twice as challenging to translate certain phrases and idioms. I still marvel at how some phrases in Indian languages have a direct equivalent in the English language. This, of course, points to the bigger picture of how languages have evolved and that some nuances of speech are similar in various languages. I also feel that one doesn’t just translate a language but also dialects, which is especially true for Indian languages. While translating Chandan Pandey’s short story, Junction, I stumbled across the word “Mohan.” I unthinkingly thought of it as a masculine name and left it as such. But my editor pointed out that something was not right, and upon consultation with Chandan, I found out “Mohan” is often used as a derogatory term to insult a man who one thinks is not “masculine” enough! And apparently, quite commonly used in the Deoria district of Uttar Pradesh. This was one of the more fabulous discoveries I made while translating!
23. Shalim Hussain:
The first phrase I loved translating was “Mou xona suli.” It was in one of the first texts I translated from Assamese to English some 15 years ago. It must have been a poem, because I remember wanting to replicate the wavy rhythm in the original. In the original “x” and “s” sounds are half-rhymes with the “o” passing through them. I translated the phrase as “honey hued hair” which didn’t mirror the original rhythm but created a neat little alliteration. I loved the translation because it had the literal meaning of the original and some of the romantic sentiment too.
24. Srinath Perur:
I’m unable to think of a word that I felt strongly about translating, and I suspect the reason for this is that I don’t think of the word as my unit of translation. That is, I’m usually trying to translate an image or an idea or a mood that is in the original text, not so much the words it is made of. So I tend to feel satisfied or not about larger chunks — paragraphs, pages.
I felt good about doing the bit from which my last-published translation gets its title. A specific idea had to be translated from Kannada to English while ensuring that the words could be plausibly misread as Sakina’s Kiss if written by someone with terrible handwriting. So the words also needed to look a certain way on the page. That was a fun constraint. I recall using a desperate ellipsis to get there in the end.
25. Subhashree Beeman:
While reading the Tamil novel, Paettai by Tamil Prabha, the first word that drew me into the novel was the word Dubashi – one who possessed two languages – an interpreter/translator for the European traders, later to the colony rulers, who facilitated their interaction with the locals. Though I came across this word in a Tamil novel, I can ascertain that this is quintessentially an Indian word that belongs to all Indian languages, based on my exposure to several Indian languages. I toyed briefly with the idea that I would translate it. In the end I retained it as it is. So, this is an instance when retaining the word in its original without italicising it worked, and I quite loved it!
26. V Ramaswamy:
কোথায় পাব তারে, Kothay Paabo Taare, “Where Shall I Find Her / Him” is the title of a story in Bangla by Shahidul Zahir.
This was the first piece of writing by the Bangladeshi author that I read. I was mesmerised by his prose from the very first sentence. And at once I was transported to my days of devouring fiction from the American libraries in Calcutta, which I frequented during my student years. I remembered the novel, Where is My Wandering Boy Tonight by David Wagoner. So the title I gave was, “Where is My Wanderer?”.
I was fortunate to learn subsequently that the phrase in Bangla, “Where Shall I Find Her / Him”, was used by the folk singer Gagan, a harkara, or postman, of East Bengal, in a song in which the Her / Him is Moner Manush, the “Person of One’s Heart”, a reference to God, in the personalised terms employed by Sufi preachers. The tune of Gagan’s song was used by Rabindranath Tagore for his song, Amar Sonar Bangla (My Golden Bengal), which became the national anthem of Bangladesh. So the title I finally gave was, “Where is My Heart’s Wanderer.”
27. Vighnesh Hampapura:
All loves are as precious as the first, and the most recent love is most preoccupying —
because it is also about love, also recent, also overpowering. Vinod Kumar Shukla’s
poem, ‘usne uske sparsh ka anumaan lagaana chaaha.’ In Kannada, one does not
anumaan to guess, as in Hindi; one anumaans to suspect, to have that sneaking hunch,
the coming together into your intuition of random bits of information you can’t discern,
in a way you can’t make out, such that you feel great certainty about it. Here avanu – he –
wants to ‘anumaan’ avala – her – touch: he’s hazarding a guess. More open, less sure,
perhaps even wrong, throwing in one’s lot. He must, actually, ‘uhisu,’ both guess and
wonder.
And he guesses everything — fire, water, sun, ‘antariksh,’ the unfathomable cosmos itself
— as if in preparation for the most important guess of his life. But finally ‘vah uske
sparsh ka anumaan / theek-theek nahin lagaa sakaa’ (‘he couldn’t guess her touch /
accurately,’ as Arvind Krishna Mehrotra translates). Can one tip the meaning, a bit, given
everything, given the denouement, amplify his anguish? All that guessing game, for what?
‘avanu avala sparshada uheya / andaajuu maadalaagalilla’: he could not even approximate
the impression of her touch. Approximate: an addition to the poem that only befits its
tragedy. A hazy sense, removed by three degrees, also impossible, his failure of
translation, like the larger story of his love.
28. Varsha Tiwary:
I came to English medium only at age nine, so the first translation (or rather Dictionary-dependitis) would mostly be aimed at decoding some formidable English sound or the other that a strictly English-speaking class teacher kept lobbing at the class.
Murmuring. Pernicious. Tom-tomming. Incorrigible.
The love grew slowly, when Agatha Christie entered my life a couple of years later.
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