Translators: Literature's unsung heroes

"The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brain wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain, the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language: the speech you hear decodes the brain wave matrix."

That Douglas Adams' legendary fauna from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy remains a fictional fixture, is a loss for mankind. But thanks to the tribe of translators, literary works from one corner of the world have elucidated much joy in diametrically opposite corners of the globe for years immemorial. "The only reason we can access (William) Shakespeare, (Leo) Tolstoy, (Fyodo) Dostoevsky, (Gabriel) Garcia Marquez and so many others, is the translators," says feted writer, novelist and playwright Kiran Nagarkar. "Thanks to the works of Constance Garnett, I knew, even at the age of 22, what an incredible book War and Peace was...what an incredible book Anna Karenina was."

The 74-year-old, whose books have been translated into Marathi, German and French, says translations are "absolutely fundamental to a culture that believes in the word literature". But while translated literary titles have steadily been available in India, especially in Kerala and West Bengal, translations of English titles into regional languages or those of regional works in other Indian languages, is a slowing trend. There is no comprehensive data on how many titles that are published annually in India are translated. For the country's biggest publishing house, Penguin, translations constitute half of its fiction list and almost all of the Penguin Classics list. That's about 27 titles on an average every year, estimates its managing director Sivapriya R.
Renuka Chatterjee, consulting editor of Speaking Tiger, the youngest publishing house on the block which is set to release its first translated title — In a land far from home: A Bengali in Afghanistan — this week, adds: "While many publishing houses do have a slot for translations, this is not likely to be more than half a dozen titles in a year. And we still have a dearth of good translators."

Not lost in translation
Year after year, the Sahitya Akademi, a national organisation dedicated to promoting Indian literature, has been honouring translators for making available published books in the 24 languages it recognises. Last month, it announced the names of 23 winners for translating works ranging from Premchand's biography to Rabindranath Tagore's Geetanjali. Among the winners is a man whose full-time job involves dealing with numbers. But that doesn't stop Guwahati's tax superintendent, Bipul Deuri, from rising early every morning to pursue his literary passion. Deuri won the Akademi accolade for his Assamese translation of Amish Tripathi's debut novel, The Immortals of Meluha. Although the translated book released in 2009 and was well-received, the effort was riddled with challenges. He had to "filter the book 14 times". "It was a painful process. Getting the syntax right was tricky," concedes Deuri, who had translated two other books into Assamese before starting on the Shiva trilogy. "There is no Assamese equivalent for many words, such as seconds, minutes, miles, etc. So I had to be careful in conveying the essence and flavour of the original work while keeping the rural readers in mind."

Unlike Deuri, who took a year-and-a-half to translate the 390-page book, Bangalore-based Padmavathi Rao had to take a hiatus while working on the Hindi translation of Nagarkar's acclaimed novel Cuckold, which won him the 2000 Sahitya Akademi Award. For Rao, a multi-faceted actor, theatre director, playwright and storyteller, who has translated a few of Girish Karnad's plays, Nagarkar's 609-page novel about a Rajput king was a first attempt at literary translation — one she embarked on with much trepidation. Two hundred pages into the translation, both the translator and the novelist realised that her use of Urdu words was unseemly for the characters and the setting since the "Rajputs use a different Hindi". "So I just put it on hold. When I returned to it, I brought an entirely different vocabulary of Hindi with a Sanskrit flavour to the characters," says Rao.

For someone who sits on the floor and uses pen and paper, the revision meant poring over 600 sheets of A5 paper. "It was a demanding exercise. I was re-working it word-by-word," groans Rao. "There was enough perseverance in me to allow this to become larger than anything else in my life." The exercise made her mull over the manner in which Nagarkar writes. "The way he uses punctuation, to the way he personifies colour, to the way in which he gets under the skin of each of his characters, especially women. It was supremely important for me to remain faithful to all of these styles while doing the translation."

Getting it right
Deuri and Rao's efforts are testament to the doggedness and diligence involved in doing literary translations. And yet, a translated title calls for more. "It's often helpful to have two translators work together, or to have a bilingual editor—one person who is stronger in the source language, and one who is stronger in the target," says Rakesh Khanna, co-founder of Blaft Publications, famed for its translations of Tamil pulp fiction. Of the 22 titles that Blaft has published since inception its in 2008, 12 are translated works, including titles from Tamil, Urdu and Hausa (spoken in Nigeria). Speaking Tiger's Chatterjee says there is much potential in expanding the market for translated works. "If you pick the right works, invest in the translation and bring it attention, it could grow into a really successful genre," she says.

Blocking the way
The "investment" in translation that Chatterjee talks about is a rarity. The one stumbling block in the way of getting really good work, she admits, is that translators don't get paid huge amounts. Nor do they get the recognition they deserve.
Even if a book has been translated well, it is questionable whether a publishing house will take it up. "The sad paradox of the situation," says Nagarkar, "is that most publishing houses will translate best-sellers that will make money, and not classics."
Literary translations don't usually sell in large numbers, unless the author or the book is already a big name. By his own admission, Deuri's books (he has translated two other books apart from the Shiva trilogy) have had a good response in Assam, selling 1,000-2,000 copies, a small number compared to the millions of Shiva trilogy copies sold. Stating that 80% authors shortlisted for this year's Man Booker International Prize have been translated into English, Deuri points out the irony: "Most people in our country think of translated works as second-class literature."