Not far from where the parrot sings, there was a land called Monolingua. It was inhabited by Monolinguals who never felt as well as they could be. They weren’t unhealthy; just not as bright and happy as they might be.

They consulted their she-man and she said, ‘You need salt from Altalingua.’

Altalingua was on the other side of a fast-flowing river called Meaning. This was a wonderful river that fertilised their land and gave them water to drink but it was also tricky; there was the Current of Misunderstanding and the Whirlpool of Connotation and the rapids of Literal Interpretation. However, a call went out for volunteers and a young carrier offered his services. He set off across the river in a boat made of wood and on the other side, he was welcomed by the Altalinguals. They were delighted to see him and when he explained that he needed some salt, they said they were willing to let him have as much as he needed but by their laws, he would not be allowed to carry it in any container, receptacle or bag.

‘How am I supposed to carry the salt across?’ he asked.

‘That is your problem, not ours,’ said the Altalinguals. The young man spent the night in prayer to the Gods of Vox and in the morning, the answer came in the form of a cloud. He could see a boat in the fluffy forms sailing ahead and he realised he would have to abandon the boat in which he had come and make a boat of salt. And so the young carrier fashioned a boat of salt and put it into the River of Meaning which immediately began to put out little investigative tongues of water and the salt began to dissolve. The carrier jumped in and began to paddle frantically. The river was fast and the water took large chunks from his boat. When he got to the other side, not much of the boat was left. The Monolinguals were not happy. ‘How little of the salt you brought across!’ they sighed. The carrier shrugged. He would try again. And they would complain again.

I do not remember the moment when I started translating. I do not think anyone ever remembers this moment, so deeply human is it, so intrinsic to every process of language. In every act of language, some translation must occur. Somewhere in the brain, neurons fire across synapses. These electrical circuits draw on memory and imagination, what we know and what we don’t, what we think and what we feel, to construct words and phrases and sentences. Somewhere muscles are moved around in the throat. Breath must be drawn up and forced across the vocal chords. The tongue plays its part, the palate, the teeth. And words emerge. Now sound fare forth and arrive at their destination, another tympanum, if they are lucky. They create another series of neuronal firings, more translations in reverse order and more reactions: a dog may sit down, a friend may smile, a foe may frown. More translations.

I live in a city that exists only in a state of translation. Its name is a debate of translations: is it a good bay or a goddess? Choose and your choice, whether Bombay or Mumbai, places you somewhere, for someone. They’ve translated your choices and aligned you somewhere.

To my left lives a Gujarati family. On my right, lives a Marathi family. In between?

I was in the third standard in Victoria High School, Mahim, when I was asked what my mother tongue was.

I went home and asked my mother.

‘English,’ she said. ‘Your mother dreams in English, your mother screams in English.’

I knew what she meant. Frederick Algernon Trotteville was outed when he pretended to be French by a bad guy who simply hurt him so that he cried out in English.

I went back and told my teacher.

‘English?’ she snorted. ‘Are you Anglo-Indian?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘Then you cannot say English is your mother tongue. Where are you from?’ ‘Mahim?’ I said.

‘You’re one sample! Your name is Pinto. Are you Goan or Mangalorean?’

‘Goa,’ I said.

She wrote down Konkani. It was my first lesson in how you could or could not claim a language.

 

I suppose I should have been prepared for it but I wasn’t. I had just translated Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar. The author had read the translation and he had said, ‘You have made it into a poetic thing,’ a compliment I held close to my heart as we went over the five or six amendations he thought I should make to the translation. The book had been published, the cover a translation of the contents which the designer had not read. (This book designer made it a thing not to read the book. He used only a synopsis. He was proud of this.) The book came out and a launch was arranged.

At this event, I had read a section of it out at a reading and then the floor was thrown open to questions. The first question was: ‘Do you really speak Marathi well enough to translate?’ I was so startled by this that I did not know how to respond. I wanted to say, ‘I stuck the whole thing into Google Translate and it came out the other side and I put my name on it.’

 

I stumbled through a response. I said something self-deprecating and defensive about how I wasn’t sure how well I knew English and when I got to the level of competence I wanted in that language, I should deal with another language and that language would no doubt be Marathi. The person asking the question sank back into her seat, not entirely convinced.

I have often thought of this question because it has come at me at any number of readings or panel discussions on translation. I believe it has something to do with my name. Were my name Jaiteerth Pant, I don’t think anyone would ask this question. But a Roman Catholic man from Goa? Should he be translating Marathi?

I have tried several variants of the same answer.

‘Who can say they know a language? There will always be a word lurking on the next page of the dictionary, ready to slay your sense of superiority.’

‘The quotidian world for me is English. I make pilgrimages to other languages and return bearing blessings as pilgrims do.’

I have given up trying to answer the question honestly because I do not think the question is asked honestly. I have some idea of why it is asked but this is perhaps not the best place to air those ideas.

One day, if I am brave enough to be vulnerable, I might say: ‘How can you ask that question of a writer? Do you not know that most writers often feel overwhelmed by the infinite variety of a single language? Do you not know that most writers often struggle with how inadequate all linguistic resources are when they are seeking to conjure up the specificity within? And how when they invent a new character, they struggle with the language that they must deploy to make her come alive? How they weigh each word she uses so as to be sure she would say such a word in such a place and time? And how much more they struggle when they are taking a character, composed only of words, and transplanting him into another set of words?

He may be as vibrant as a Falstaff, she may be as multivalent as Vasantsena, he may be as she as Orlando, but in the act of translating it becomes clear, s/he is only words and if they are the wrong words, no one will laugh at Falstaff, no one will be seduced by Vasantsena, no one will be disoriented and destabilized by the multiple possibilities of Orlando. This is more responsibility than anyone can assume, should assume. I have assumed that responsibility, knowing what it means. You want to know whether I know enough words?’

I want to say, ‘Do you know what it takes to become a translator? It takes the wanting. You must want to. That’s a good beginning. If you want to, then you start and when you fail, you learn. And you always fail. But you learn to fail well and you learn to fail with grace.’

I am now bracing for the response when my first translation from Hindi comes out later this year.

 

The first book I translated came out of my horror at the state of India’s rural schools. It was the tenth year of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the government sent out examiners to see how the children were doing in school. I suppose most must have come back with pablum but one man went out and actually checked. Heramb Kulkarni, his name was, and he decided to check not just whether the students were in class and being fed their mid-day meal but whether they were being taught something. He watched as teachers explained mathematics incorrectly. He asked students in Chandrapur – one of Maharashtra’s poorest districts – to write down a single sentence he dictated and found that most of them could not spell simple words after eight years of Marathi-medium education. He took pictures of Adivasi students being made to clean their teachers’ homes. He wrote a book, Shaala Aahe Shikshan Naahi.

The book caused a storm. My assistant, Santosh Thorat, brought me a copy and I read it with growing horror. I had long worked with MelJol, an NGO that worked in the sphere of child rights, and by denying them a good education, these children had been denied the right to development. His father-in-law, Santosh told me, was keen on translating the book. I said I would edit his translation. Ajit Wakde did indeed translate it but when I read it, I realised that Shanta Gokhale was right. You cannot correct a translation, you can only translate it afresh. With his permission, I began to do that and soon we had a draft on which we agreed.

A small press agreed to publish it and never did.

 

This should have been discouragement enough. But around this time, I was studying the Urdu script and learning to read and write in it. I was also reading Hindi and Marathi poetry every day and one day, I happened on an article in The Indian Express, in which Shanta Gokhale had been asked to name some of the Marathi language books she had read and liked recently. She mentioned Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar.

I went for a walk and bought the book. I began reading it and the first lines began to play in my head. They were easy to understand, the book is spoken to us in the voices of a young man and a young woman, neither of whom is literary, but it was not an easy line to render into English. But some part of me was trying. I was fiddling with that sentence, teasing it, pulling it and pushing it. When I thought I had a workable solution, I started to think about translating the book. A little while later, I was calling up Shanta Gokhale and asking her, ‘Do you think I could translate Cobalt Blue?’

She said, ‘You!’

There was an exclamation mark at the end of her comment. Had there been a question mark, I might never have tried. (This was a lesson for me as a teacher as well.) After I had finished, I read my translation to Neela Bhagwat who had taught me Marathi when I decided I must learn it again, and then to Shanta Gokhale. When they approved it, vetted it in their different ways, I showed it to Sachin Kundalkar. He approved and Penguin India did actually bring it out.

 

The next translation happened because of another book. Naresh Fernandes, now the editor of Scroll.in, and I had edited an anthology of writings on Bombay called Bombay, Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai. We had included a passage from Daya Pawar’s seminal autobiography Baluta (Granthali, 1978), which we had taken from Arjun Dangle’s magnificent anthology, Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature (Orient Longman, as Blackswan was then known, 1992).

One day, someone called from Penguin and asked if we would like to reconsider our anthology. So much had happened to the city since then and we might want to add some fresh material. I was okay with that but first, I thought, we should look at what we had. I read the excerpt we had chosen ‘Son, Eat Your Fill’ and thought: ‘Baluta must have been translated by now. I should read it.’ Once again, I called Shanta Gokhale and asked whether Baluta had been translated.

‘Not yet,’ she said.

I did not even anticipate my next comment. It came with the suddenness of inspiration.

‘Then do you think I could?’

She was delighted and said she would put me in touch with Pradnya Daya Pawar who also assented and I was off.

 

Baluta was a tough read. I began with a sense of confusion. It was supposed to be non-fiction, right? It was supposed to be an autobiography, right? Then why were there two Daya Pawars in the first few pages? Why were these two Daya Pawars talking to each other? What was going on? Then the narrative evened out and I was carried into Pawar’s world, a world torn between his love of language and the way the custodians of language rejected his kind; a world torn between the familiarity of the village and the lure of the city. The result of such a life was a divided Pawar, I realised, a man split in two, a man who could contain multitudes, out of which two could certainly take the stage to speak to each other.

But there was another reason which Pawar spells out in that first externalized internal conversation. What if you have not seen too many of your kind in the books you have loved? What if you are missing from literature? How do you summon up the courage to write a book about yourself? How will you know that it is a book? Someone has to encourage you to do it. Someone has to get you to the sticking point. Who better than yourself? Once Pawar has got Pawar to tell Pawar’s story, he has done his work. He does appear again in the end but it is a necessary closure. (For details, read the book.) When we launched the book at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Pradnya Daya Pawar said she was glad that I had translated her father’s book for now her son could read his grandfather’s life story. Her son does not read Marathi.

For twenty-five years, I have taught at the Social Communications Media department of the Sophia Polytechnic. Each year, the students put together a magazine which I edit and in which I allow them to write what they want to write about, because they will soon go out into the real world of the media and discover what the agendas of the media are. Mithila Phadke asked if she could interview Malika Amar Sheikh. I had heard of Malika Amar Sheikh as the author of the powerful autobiography, Mala Uddhvastha Vhaaychay (Majestic Prakashan, 1984). I had also heard that she was reclusive and not given to being interviewed. But Mithila Phadke was sure she could make contact and she did. The result was an interesting interview, interesting enough for me to ask Ms Phadke for her copy of Mala Uddhvastha Vhaaychay. This was a photocopy and I read it in a night.

 

Over the years, I grew more and more fascinated by the figure of the revolutionary poet and singer Amar Sheikh, Malika’s father and when Ravi Singh asked me to be Commissioning Editor at Speaking Tiger, I suggested that we should ask Amarendra Dhaneshwar (known to his friends as Nandu) to write a biography of the revolutionary poet and singer. Nandu, I argued, would understand the political context; he would understand the music; he had even attended a couple of Sheikh’s performances. When I put it to him, his wife, Neela Bhagwat, said we should all go and meet Malika as she knew her well.

We went and had dinner with Malika. It was a great dinner and on our way out, Malika said: ‘No one is translating my book.’

‘I will,’ I said.

And I did. It came out as I Want to Destroy Myself (Speaking Tiger, 2018).

 

It was at Shanta Gokhale’s home – her name is a leitmotif, it would seem in this piece – that I heard Ganesh Matkari read out his novel, Khidkya Ardhya Ugdya (Samkaaleen Prakashan, 2011). I enjoyed its urban setting and I thought I could do a good English version of it. But before Half-Opened Windows (Speaking Tiger, 2017) could come out, I read a column Shanta Gokhale wrote in the Mumbai Mirror¹ in which she mentioned a book, Mee Meethachi Bahuli (Rajhans Prakashan, 2015), by one Vandana Mishra. A few days later, I bought the book and fell in love with its easy voice, its unabashed nostalgia, the Bombay it conjured up of theatrical performances and horse carriages to Borivali station. I was also delighted that it was by the mother of Ambarish Mishra, one of my colleagues from the brief time that I worked at The Times of India.

Mrs Mishra was born Sushila Lotlikar. Her father died when she was two and her mother had to train as a midwife to keep the family in food. Then someone threw acid on her back and she was bed-ridden. The family went back to the poverty line but Sushila stepped up. She went to Pandit Altekar’s drama school and got a job at the Bhangwadi theatre, as a Gujarati stage actor. For a while, this kept the family going but since she was only getting second leads, Sushila moved on to the Marwadi stage where she was a huge hit.

 

Then her mother told her that time was ticking and at the height of her career, she retired to marry Pandit Mishra. She was twenty-one. At the time she wrote her book, she was in her eighties and so I worked ferociously at it. She did live to see her book come out in English as I, the Salt Doll (Speaking Tiger again, 2016) but not long enough for me to capture some of her charm on film. She rarely got out of bed by the time I went to visit her but she was vibrant, vital, and as much of an actor as she had ever been. To have captured that on celluloid would have been an act of translation that might have made the world a richer place. But the life of any creative person is always littered with lost opportunities.

My encounter with Baburao Bagul began with Poisoned Bread too. That is what books do. They spawn other books. I read his magnificent short story Death is Becoming Cheaper there and was struck by its peculiar picaresque quality. It remained with me and when I found myself reading Jevha Mee Jaat Chorli (Akshar Prakashan, 1963), I realised that Bagul was an extraordinary writer. His descriptions are almost beautiful, Romantic even; and against these night skies and whispering breezes, the action is savage and described with modernist severity. Death stalks these stories; translating them was painful but the only way through was through. I told myself repeatedly that this was experienced reality; what must lived reality be like?

The truth of the matter is that we only have a limited amount of time here. I have been lucky in that I have the ordering of my time; or at least have had for the past dozen years. I get to decide what I want to do but I have what might be described as an approach-approach conflict. I want to write as much as I want to translate. But then I was on my way to a residency at Wellesley College, USA. Anjali Prabhu, then the Director of the Suzy and Donald Newhouse Centre asked me if I would like to come and spend a term there.

 

It was the winter term which was perfect. Snow silenced Boston. The North-easterners, taciturn at the best of times, put their heads down and hurried past the brown man. The students went about their own business, acting out winter. I wrote and wrote and wrote and managed to get a novel in halfway shape. I had promised myself that this would be time for my novel.

On the way back, I passed through Lillehammer, Norway to spend some time as a guest of the Sigrid Undset Foundation. And perhaps here is an object lesson in why you should read translations. I was at a literary festival and having lunch with a nice young man who said he was from Norway. I said, ‘Ah Norway, the land of Sigrid Undset.’

Mathias Samuelsen goggled at me.

‘You know Sigrid Undset?’

‘Who doesn’t?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t she win the Nobel Prize for Literature?’

‘Yes,’ he said, pleased. ‘But I did not think...’

I explained that my parents had both been denied college by their circumstances. (That can be translated as the kind of poverty that once afflicted the middle classes. There was always enough money to eat but everyone who finished school had to find work. College was a luxury.). And so they made up for it by reading and specially by reading the works of all those who had ever won the Nobel Prize for Literature. My father wanted to make sure his children also benefited and so our bedtime reading was Ms Undset’s wonderfully blood-thirsty sagas.

‘You must come and stay with us at the Sigrid Undset Foundation,’ he said and so I actually sat and wrote the last few chapters of my next novel in long hand in Sigrid’s study while an underground stream ran beneath my feet and appeared in her garden and ran among the trees she had planted.

 

Ten days before I was to leave I received an email from Milind Awad, the son of Eknath Awad, the noted activist. He asked if I would translate his father’s autobiography, Jag Badal Ghaaluni Ghaav (Samkaleen Prakashan, 2015). I looked up Milind and found that he was a professor of English at JNU. I told him that I was taking a break from translation and surely he could translate his father’s book. His answer disarmed me. He said he had tried translation and discovered he was no good at it. I have found myself surrounded by a tiresome breed of men who think they can do anything, they just haven’t tried. To encounter someone with this level of self-awareness was extraordinary.

But it wasn’t that. It was the book. (It is always the book.) It was the voice of Eknath Awad. It was his story. He was born a Mang and the son of a pothraj – the men who whip themselves for your sins. But he was not going to remain a Mang. He was going to get an education. He was going to finish his masters and his Masters in Social Work. He was going to get a law degree but only after the Marathwada University was renamed for his hero, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. (And if you know anything about Maharashtrian politics, you should know how startling it is for a young Mang to have anything to do with Dr Ambedkar who was born a Mahar and died a Buddhist.) But more than that, he was a braveheart; he was going to fight his caste battles in the village. I knew I was going to translate it even halfway through the book because I wanted other people to be able to read it.

And this may be why we translate because we want others to read what we have read, we want them to enjoy this too. We want them to feel what we feel.

I am an evangelist for every book I have ever translated. I want you to weep as I wept for Malika Amar Sheikh, alone and sick with a child to care for in a strange city, still a teenage bride. I want you to exult when Awad strikes a blow against caste and mobilizes people against caste atrocities. I want you to feel the same awe I did for Daya Pawar’s brutal self-examination. I want you to visualise Bagul’s stories as little films as they play in my head.

That is why I translate.

 

It is a moral imperative for me. We live in a nation of hundreds of languages, Ganesh Devy says. His best guess is 1500 and counting. Each language is an island separated by the sea. At low tide we cross from where we live to where we want to go but our crossings are driven by our agendas. I speak Hindi to the cab driver. I speak Marathi to the lady who sells me fish. Perhaps I would have spoken Konkani to my grandmother, were she alive, as so many of my students say when I ask them if they speak their home languages. If we are to understand each other, we must reach out at a higher level. We must listen to each other’s hearts, not each other’s wallets.

To do that we need good translations. Or else we will get those spidery lines of ECGs that are supposed to mimic the fullness, the richness and the music of the beating of our hearts.

 

Footnote:

1. https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/shanta-gokhale/because-life-is-drama/articleshow/43356145.cms, viewed on 08-01-2020 at 15:35:35pm.