CAN one teach someone to love? Not to be confused with lovemaking, which can, after all, be parsed into technique if one so fancies. To love is a leap into a void with hope and apprehension in equal measure, and seemingly outside the terrain of choice. And it is only such love that can lead translators to do the work they do, which is why the first lesson of translating is to love. How to love a book, a piece of literature, an author, a language, in a way that will lead one into translation making. The rest – well, there are many tarjuma sutras for that.

I walk into my translation workshop class at the university with the benevolent grace of a cupid who must preside over each of the students falling in love with at least one book, which will not let them sleep in peace until they have started translating it. Can they learn to love in this way? What arrows must I fire, what atmospherics must I create, what music of romance must I play to make them feel that way about a text?

I have an inkling. I must make sure that these students become passionate readers, who read with their ‘mon’ – that Bengali word which signifies an intersection set between mind, body, heart and soul – so that they can feel a text with every sense organ, with every nerve ending, with everything their entire selves can bring to bear on this act of reading. Then, and only then, will they be so much in love that translation will become a necessity.

‘So, professor, how do we begin translating? Should we read up a lot about the author? Read all their books first? Read critical essays?’ S is full of questions, as usual, and the rest are pleased that she’s asking what’s on their minds.

I don’t answer, but I start my students on their riyaaz instead, asking them to translate into English a page from a translation of a Harry Potter novel in their mother tongues. The excitement is palpable, and then we compare their translations with one another’s and, finally, with the original. What we learn, of course, is that the translators from English into the Indian languages took some inexplicable decisions. An animated discussion ensues, and the lessons begin to seep in.

We will go on to do this riyaaz for several more classes, working on snatches of prose, poetry, dialogue, and other forms. We talk about the possibility – and then we try it out – of doing feminist translations of distinctly male texts. The translations are highly ima-ginative, and it opens up their minds to the possibilities. And then we decide it’s time to translate by sound alone and not my meaning. So we translate birdsong. Yes, translate – by interpreting the sounds as conversations. P shakes his head ruefully. ‘Translation is so magical, I don’t think I can handle it,’ he whispers.

 

Before the class can begin, three arms are pointing towards the ceiling.

‘We have to talk about this before we go any further. What happens when we can’t understand something in the text?’

‘What if there can be more than one meaning? Do we pick one when translating?’

‘Do we try to figure out what the writer might have meant, or do we go with what we think is the meaning?’

K has a problem. ‘I love the story I’m translating. I love it so much I am certain I cannot translate it well enough.’ If only K looks around the room, she will find everyone else overwhelmed by the same possibility. (Even me, after all these years, with every new book I start on, even if I haven’t read the book yet.)

So, teaching translation is about teaching the translator to reach into their reserves of determination and of hope. It’s also about teaching them not to succumb to the far, far easier option of not translating at all. How am I going to do this? Only by telling them stories about the great translators, and how they were not fired by some divine genius but by the compulsion of a drug-addict to love-read-translate.

Which, of course, brings me to that most obvious – so much so that it has almost become banal – truth. To translate a text is to read it more closely than anyone else in the universe, possibly even more closely than the writer. For the moving finger, having writ, moves on, but the moving translator has to come back to a line, a phrase, a rhythm, a rhapsody, over and over again.

My students don’t know it at this stage, but many of our classes are going to be devoted to reading their translations with one, and only one objective: does reading the translation turn their hearts to jelly the way reading the original did? For only in that response will fidelity ultimately be tested.

 

Y rushes into my office one morning, trembling with excitement as well as doubt. She does not know that she has zeroed in on a key aspect of teaching how to translate. ‘Professor,’ she bursts out, ‘is it possible that translators choose books to translate because they fit a certain definition, and not necessarily because the book is a good one? Are the Tamil books that get translated the ones that are seen to represent Tamil literature in some way?’

The question, of course, has more to do with how to be a translator rather than how to translate. After all, a translator is someone who will possibly translate more than one book, so that the process of selecting what to translate will become one of the things they will learn to do as they go along. Except in this case the possibility of learning from experience has been short-circuited by a student well-versed in critical thinking. Her question needs an answer at once; it cannot be postponed.

It is, in fact, almost the first question I encounter from everyone in each of my translation classes. ‘How do I know what to translate?’ In my head I was still clinging to the absurd notion, knowing full well it was unrealistic, that I would be teaching a group of people already deeply immersed in the literatures of their own languages – or at least with a passing familiarity with books in those tongues. Instead we have a set of creative as well as analytical individuals with a hunger to translate... what? They don’t know.

And so, the second lesson of translation. Or perhaps the first, or even zeroth. And, incredibly, I see, it is turning into pop psychoanalysis, as every student tries to find a match between their reading personalities and their choice of text to translate. Obviously, I cannot expect them to read a dozen books in a week and pick one; instead, I shift the goalposts. Never mind the story or the characters, I tell them, pick your text on the basis of the language.

This is where I wish I could bring in fellow-translator V.R., who swears he knows nothing of the literary quality or traditions of the books he translates – his only point of entry is the language. But I steal his strategy and tell my students to spend a week reading passages from as many writers in their preferred source language as they can. In seven days, I tell them to the background music of collective groans, they should be able to read sections from at least 25 books, each by a different writer.

 

A week later, they’re back. Whether they’ve taken this crash course or whether they’ve been lucky, each of them has picked a text to translate. They’ve even read a bit of it; some have read the entire thing. And they’re asking that other question I knew would be hurled at me sooner or later. ‘Professor, many translators say they don’t read the books they’re going to translate beforehand. How is that possible?’

R pipes up, ‘Even Gregory Rabassa only read One Hundred Years of Solitude as he was translating it. But how is that possible? What if you don’t even like the book? You told us we have to love what we translate.’ I am tempted to make a Dad joke about ‘love at first sight’ (who can resist a dozen senior teenagers all rolling their eyes?), but I wisely refrain and throw the question back at them for possible explanations. Pursing her lips, S says, ‘Are you saying the first reading is the best kind of reading for a translator?’ At which P argues, ‘But how will we know the context then, the allusions, the subtle references... how will we get those unless we read the text several times?’

I don’t have to give an answer. I only have to ensure that these – and a million other – questions are asked.

‘Professor, is everything translatable?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Yes. Maybe not with perfection, but to a large extent.’

‘No, some things cannot be translated. How will you take an entire culture of one language into another?’

‘You don’t have to. The reader has to learn it. Why should someone in the UK read a Kannada novel under the impression it’s in English and therefore must come from a familiar cultural framework?’

‘OK, but doesn’t that diminish the richness of the translation, if the cultural backdrop cannot be carried over?’

‘Are you telling me every reader in Bengali understands the culture that has gone into every Bengali novel? Every reader has to make their own effort.’

Or, just another five-minute break between intense translation exercises in class.

 

V is insistent that his English translation should retain a number of words in the original Kannada. A long dialogue follows, proving that teaching translation is, like translation itself, a matter of negotiation, of sensitising the translator to the fact that choices must be made mindfully, that they must be defensible, and that they should not ideally come from an external position or dogma, but be intrinsic to the text.

And so the conversation that is going to make help both V and me learn about translations begins. I ask whether the words he wants to retain will take on a very different role in the translated text. ‘What if your readers start interrogating the text because of the presence of these Kannada words?’ I ask V. ‘Surely those words did not force readers to question them when reading them in the original text?’ V smiles. He was expecting this, and he has his answer ready.

‘But professor, why should reading an English translation of a Kannada text not make the reader interrogate the text? How else will the Kannada-ness of the text comes through when virtually every word is in English? What if the reader of the English translation think it’s actually an English book?’

This isn’t going to be resolved, and it doesn’t really need to be. What we’re both (re)learning is that no choice of the translator’s must be by default – and that there are myriad choices, each of them valid provided there is a certain consistent reasoning behind it. This is something of a journey from the notion that there is one perfect translation for every text, and that it is the job of every translator to strive for that perfection.

 

R looked at me one day in class as everyone was engaged in this discussion, abandoning the in-class translation assignment (film sub-titles) of the day and said, ‘You’re throwing us into the abyss and telling us that’s how translation should be. That we should take the responsibility for our choices instead of assuming there is only one right answer and our calculations must get us to it. What is this, professor? I thought translation was like a crossword puzzle, now you’re telling us it’s more like poetry.’

The collateral benefit of teaching a translation class is suddenly clear to me. My students can articulate translation strategies much more clearly than I, who merely plunged into translation more than a decade ago without thinking deeply about it. Now, I am learning from them.

 

P rushes at me as soon as I enter the classroom. ‘Professor, I can’t get the voice.’ Her voice breaks, she is on the verge of tears. I am confronted with the heartbreak of a translator who is in love with a text that’s proving out of reach. She’s transferred the words, the phrases, the sentences with utmost faithfulness to meaning and even tone into the new language, but when she reads it out loud – mea culpa for suggesting this – to herself, she cannot, she says, hear the original in her head. And she fears she cannot do this.

What am I to teach her here? She’s arrived at that aspect of translation which needs an ability that cannot be taught – capturing the voice of the writer in another language. As with everything else, I don’t have a handy guide or a YouTube video to direct her to. I have only insisted that the translation be done and redone and even re-begun from scratch until the translator is satisfied that she has got the voice right.

What we have learnt, all of us together, is how to identify this ‘voice’, how to recognise it by certain characteristics, how to listen for it. As lessons, we have translated the same passage in different voices, an angry voice, a distracted voice, an agitated voice, a languid voice, a disinterested voice... mainly so that we can tell them apart. The lesson has worked only too well for P, for she is convinced that she will never be able to translate her text in the voice it needs.

‘Is it necessary to be a poet to translate poetry?’ I’ve been dreading this question. It leads to an animated discussion on who a poet might be – and then, inevitably to a list of vertical prose writers who consider themselves poets but aren’t really. And then S asks the obvious question: ‘Why is this about poetry alone? Do you also have to be a novelist to translate a novel?’

By now, the class prefers to arrive at its own answers. My own role has become one of a sounding board, when a particular problem throws up three solutions and they would like to know which one I hate the most. (I have often hinted that some ways of translating, no matter how accurate, are loathsome in that they leave no literature in the translated text, only a dreary, lifeless, dictionary-driven congruence.) This suits me, because – though they don’t know it yet – I am not going to, at the end of the semester, grade their work. No, they will grade themselves. For they must learn how to know whether their own translations ae as good as they can be; no one else can tell them.

 

So, a furious argument breaks out, but a conclusion is reached with surprising swiftness. They have turned it around on its head. The quality of the translation of a poem, they contend, will determine whether the translator is a poet or not. After all, D asserts with unexpected vehemence, seconded by A, merely being published in a poetry magazine, for instance, does not make you a poet. You can be a poet without having written a single line of poetry in your life – it’s just that you don’t know it yet. So, if you can translate well, you’re automatically a poet (or a novelist, or an essayist, or whatever your preferred poison is).

Phew.

‘Professor, can I change the text in some places?’

‘And why do you want to do that?’

‘It’s very problematic.’

‘And what will you do’

‘Make it... less problematic?’

At this point, naturally, the rest of the class jumps down M’s throat. ‘I know where you’re coming from, bro,’ says R, ‘but it’s the writer’s text, not yours. If the original is problematic, the translation’s got to be problematic too.’

‘That’s easy to say when you’re not the one translating. Can you imagine how it feels to put my words to these uncool views?’

As before, they’re solving the problems themselves now.

 

The renowned translator DH is on campus. He has translated more books, won more translation prizes, mentored more translators, and talked more translation than anyone, least of all he, can remember. And he is going to demonstrate how to read a text – actually, a paragraph – in order to translate it. First, he reads it out. It takes about a minute, probably less. Then, he writes the whole thing out on the whiteboard. Out of the corner of my eye, I see many of the audience writing it out too in their notebooks, by hand. It’s a trick I’ve passed on – write out the original paragraph before translating it, to get even closer to the text.

Now DH starts examining each word, thinking aloud about its meanings, sound, importance, relationship to other words, and weight – among other things. An hour later, he has not progressed beyond the 21st word. He is breaking down the process of thinking about a text to be translated, and my students are holding their heads in grim despair. Then one of them asks tremulously, ‘Do we have to...’

DH picks up the cue. ‘Oh no, when you’ve translated enough you’re doing all this automatically in your head. But at the beginning...’

Energetic nods all round. They’re in love with this particular paragraph because of all the possibilities in it, and I can see their eyes shining now with the thought that they will be doing this with their respective texts. There’s fear too, and doubt ...it looks a lot like love.

‘Professor, I love translating. Can I do more?’

My job here is done.