Presuming that we have been bitten by the bug and in a mad rush to allow our supposed creative juices to flow, we often forget to ask ourselves the basic question whether we have a story to tell. Or more importantly do such stories that we fabricate with such fervent intensity require telling at all?
Given our hasty impulse to narrate in whichever form, spoken or written, enacted or expressed through cinematic mode, don’t we often overlook the premise or the context? The question acquires a special relevance, when we choose to narrate in a language that we were not born into. It was a language that was thankfully thrust on us by our colonial legacy. Heritage handed us our native tongue from the time we heard, understood and then babbled those words that floated around us in the immediacy of our houses. For many belonging to the elite club of ‘brown sahib bachcha party babalog and babylog’, like pet dogs they are addressed by their mummies, nannies, daddies in the now ‘not Queen’s language anymore’ but in native Indian English. For we have robbed the English of their language almost completely so, in the last quarter of the last century. Since the emergence of Salim Sinai, the Midnight’s Child, Indian writing in English has been toasted and upgraded to first class status.
It’s not that no one dared to write in English before the Satanic Generation of typists with frenetic pace, sitting before the starchy page and creating the word as a visual image on the screen rather than the shared intimacy of the paper with the pen. Overwriting, disfiguring words liked no longer and using arrows or asterisks to mark corrections, has almost faded from memory for our generation. At best they use the pen to sign loan documents or to sign cheques and autographs. It was not as if the fountain pen pushing natives had nothing to do with the language before. Bankim Chandra, the first Indian novelist wrote his first novel Rajmohan’s Wife in English two centuries ago; Madhusudan Dutt first tried his hand at verse in English before he retracted to write in his native tongue. Tagore won the Nobel for his own arcane, archaic and quaint translation of his collected songs, Geetanjali. The Mulk Raj Anand’s, R.K. Naryanan’s and Khuswant Singh’s espousing neo realistic, humanistic and simplistic texts were published by the local press as in those days since it was deemed as a politically correct thing to do for writers from the ex colonies. Some even managed to be bequeathed with pithy epithets and sundry praises from the Commonwealth.
Then Rushdie and the entire generation rose with Salim Sinai’s nose and Indian writing in English was celebrated with great hurrah and hullabaloo by the Brits and more. The Booker was the colonial pat on the back for those, ‘blighty fellas who learned our language rather well eh!’. Literary agents descended on Indian shores in hordes in search of such precious, precocious talent – the blessed few with fantastic stories to tell. Unheard of amounts were reportedly (as journalistic parlance puts it) doled out as advances so the writers could retire to places as queer as Malibu or Scottish castles to spin yarns about the magical, mythical India of snake charmers and rope tricks or about quaint urban universes peopled with garrulous storytelling mad hatter decrepit uncles with fetishes or neighbours who love to dig their noses while retelling their sexual odysseys, to cut a long story short, essentially tales with third world recipes. For Indian exotica--- Goa, the backwaters of Kerala, by lanes of Byculla and Lama Boys at Dharamsala, nowadays sell well. So do tales about spices, myths of djinns, sahibs fornicating with brown girls or gay princes’ pining for their macho malishwala lovers, the aroma of frangipani, the succulence of farsan, the tantric rituals and yogic postures, pearls of Zen mouthed by shepherds. The West relishes such Karmic colas with a dash of Kamasutra thrown in here and there to add the essential erotic twist to soul searching mumbo jumbo.
This is not a diatribe against the entire community of authors who have carved their place in literary history without the condescension of this two pice anonymous writer’s banal banter. Rushdie, Seth, Amitav Ghosh or Arundhati Roy’s singular gem can survive beyond the jejune criticism of frustrated cynical critics who are not blessed with the felicity of playing ping pong with language with such feline splendour. Sadly enough they to have to succumb to the need of the hour and recede to the backwaters of Kerala, the Sunderbans inhabited by Royal Bengal Tigers and Mohua collectors, drawing rooms of the mad Bawas of Bombay, the valleys of Kashmir or the old world charm of Calcutta infested with its Bhadraloks and aunts frying fluffy luchis to ensnare the Western reader hungry for quaintness and otherness. It is ironic that even those who command such hefty advances that can fetch villas in France and yachts on the Mediterranean have to yield to the diktats of publishers and literary agents guiding them about stories to tell.
This is not such an uncommon phenomenon as we might be fooled to believe in. Patrons through centuries have had made to order works of art that are celebrated as masterpieces. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Tagore have had to sing paeans with paint, stone or words about potentates who helped them flourish. Even the virulent Ted Hughes eventually had to accept the anachronistic title of Poet Laureate before he died. That is not the point. Don’t we all cow down or buckle under pressure of ground reality. But doe that stop weavers of yarns from telling tales that go beyond jargon and verbiage? What happens to the angst of the present times; the reality of the now seeking surreal expression?
On the other side of the spectrum you have Shobhaa De and her brigade of brigand raconteurs who thrive on trivia, sleaze and kitsch. The murky tales of perversities lived in mansions of the rich and famous, the wild parties featured on page three become the subject that sells following the footsteps of American bestsellers. Those are vapid tales of so called urban ennui, mere gibberish best meant for gossip glossies, now published as stories that will change lives forever ---huh! Chetan Bhagat who cannot construct a sentence that will leave a lasting impression heads the bestseller list week after week with his gawky college kid prose. The powerlessness of the narrative in this segment calls for public flogging.
So where does that leave us in search of a voice that will tell us about our predicament without seeking recourse in esoterica? Beyond myths of exotic opulence there exist two parallel streams of contemporary reality; the metropolitan dilemma of corrosive lives, the power games of economics, politics and cultural hegemony alongside the subaltern reality of class struggle, racial strife, fundamentalism, casteist and gender politics. Where does that fit into or figure in the matrix of narratives written in English in the present times.
With slight knowledge of vernacular literature, Rushdie dismissed the entire corpus of literature written in several Indian languages. This is a blemish of those who live lives severed from the immediacy of circumstance. The contemporary masters of fiction in regional languages are continuously coming up with gems chronicling passages of contemporary Indian history in the making offering rare insights into the human predicament. They largely go unnoticed beyond the immediate environment of their specific cultures, for sheer lack of translations. Young writers who both familiar with their works and blessed with the felicity of conjuring words in English choose to hone their skills as original authors as the moolah and universal recognition lies in that realm. Forget the classic case of Russian, French or German masters who have been translated so adeptly, one often wonders what would have happened to contemporary masters like Marquez or Kundera had they not been translated with such fecundity?
Admitted, that the onomatopoeic resonances of myriad languages of million hues are culture specific. That is exactly why the lyrical mysticism of Tagore remains shrouded in mystery for the likes of Khushwant Singh who dismiss his greatness. Yet today, the English reader is familiarizes herself or himself with quaint words courtesy an appended glossary. Those stories thirst for retelling and never reach the universe they so hauntingly sketch. For lack of a suitable translator, the Marquez’s of our world are lost for the rest of the world. More than the burning desire to tell a story, the ambidextrous Indian authors with a fair command over both English and the vernacular languages they were born into, now want to bask in the new found glory of originality and fame that comes with well marketed fiction in English from India.
One wonders what impetus prompts those translators who rework texts of European or South American or even Japanese and Chinese masters to indulge in such an exercise. Maybe it’s a vicious cycle – the glory of the first endeavour at translation might have yielded profits and that goads them on to attempt the next best work and so the cycle continues and a whole industry thrives on translations and handsome advances and royalties received and shared with the authors. But is it merely the lure of lucre that turns the wheel continuously? But a nagging doubt still persists whether such a literary attempt has only got to do fat pay cheques. Or is it the desire to help the story an international passage simply because the translator believes in and is inspired by the text. The truth lies somewhere in between.
One is reminded of the German poet Heinriz Heine’s famous lines where he proclaims that those who seek originality should chew a spider’s web since that is a completely original product secreted from the spider’s womb; but he loved his honey knowing fully well every drop is stolen from the pollen of flowers. The visual arts don’t need paraphrasing as they are self explanatory though culture specific subtexts can yield extra pleasure with a critic’s note; subtitling cinema is by far an easier job, though the culture specificity does get lost at times. But with literature it’s totally different. Literary works are often transcreated to suit the felicity of the language it is translated in and is by far a more daunting enterprise. Though fame is in short supply for such an effort, creative satisfaction surely isn’t. What else prompts this exercise where financial returns are not that lucrative? It must be the pride those interpreters take in reaching out what they savour in their native tongue. Beyond ephemeral glory there is a genuine need felt, to reach out those stories in the alien language they are familiar with or if they have learnt the alien language and have fallen in love with it, they want to share the experience of masterpieces of the acquired language with people who can only read such translations in their native languages.
An able translator does not merely become a word processor replacing sentences of the original language with words from the language they are translated from. Often, they transmute the ideas of a particular culture specific language to make it palpable for those for whom the cultural sub texts may be lost otherwise. At times they retain the original words of the original text for the sheer beauty of its sound and sibilance and add a glossary to explain a particular word with a phrase to make the foreign word understood. Sometimes, the inflexions of idiomatic expressions peculiar to the original language are changed to retain the flavour of the idea contained in those expressions. There content becomes more important for better communication. The role of the translator is that of a re-interpreter rather than that of a mere facilitator. Images, ideas and formal constructs are transliterated to embellish the original text. When Boris Pasternak translated Shakespeare into Russian, he created a whole new dimension by adding resonances peculiar to his own language. Shakespeare was made more intimate for the reader and Hamlet’s existential angst acquired equal poignancy.
The problem we face in India is that most authors with authority and command over English, most of those who have studied in Christian Missionary, Anglo Indian schools, have slight or virtually no knowledge about the written text in their mother tongues though they speak it at home, that too very sparingly. We don’t have writers of the caliber of a Pasternak who can easily straddle both the worlds with equal dexterity. On the other hand, the acknowledged masters in regional languages feel intimidated to translate their own works despite some of them having a moderate command over English. They fear chastisement from their own stock and shy away from translating their own works. They feel the intensity of their expressions just might be lost if they attempted to transcreate their own texts. Even Tagore stopped translating his own works after a point when he was criticized for his efforts. Tagore’s archaic and Victorian knowledge of English prevented his translations from becoming contemporary.
Inter language translations have been widely practiced with texts of regional languages being successfully translated into other Indian languages. Sarat Chandra and Prem Chand have been virtually translated in all the major Indian languages. Celebrated English, French, German and Russian classics have been translated into Indian languages by celebrated writers poets and academics but not vice versa. The convenient excuse that such works are simply untranslatable is a bandwagon we need to abandon. If Baudelaire or Rilke could be translated with such grace why not a Jibanananda Das or a Vaikam Bashir or Amrita Pritam. The initiative by the Sahitya Academy, the government body which has attempted such an onerous task has by and large been a disaster as these works were commissioned to pedantic professors of English Literature in government colleges. With due respect accorded to them, these academics often turn to pedagogues and most of the times have no flair for conjuring regional texts into contemporary English as their education has made them stick to an effete and long dead language. The English they learnt and teach is anachronistic in a modern world. Most of the times, they have no connect with the contemporary modes of expression. Having taught Edmund Spenser or Keats for thirty years, their senses are dulled and the magic of an ever evolving language is lost on most of them. They might be able to offer collated critical insights into the works of a Byron, Pope or Donne but most of them cannot even relate to anything written post the Second World War. Caught in a time warp, they are still stuck in the ‘Queen’s language’ mode.
Those rare writers who are blessed with the felicity of prancing words can just spare some time and thought, dispossess themselves from the burden of individuality and originality and journey through the texts of regional masters and create for them a window to the world. In doing so, this new breed can truly embellish their own repertoire. We are waiting for that realization to dawn. The world will savour the heritage of stories already told and relish them as new. The connoisseurs owe this much to the civilization to which they belong.
