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Has the reader’s perception towards translated fiction in India changed?

By Anannya Sarkar
12 August, 2022

From book prizes to social media, here’s a look at how translated texts are gaining currency

If you, like most, are a fan of literary genius Gabriel García Márquez or closer home, are familiar with epics from the subcontinent such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana, you have the act of translation to thank for it. In fact, as leading Indian translators Jayasree Kalathil and Arunava Sinha point out, most of the texts we read are translations but we just don’t know it. To put that into perspective, how many of us actually know who translated the great Indian epics into the languages that we first consumed them in? Did you know that Márquez, in an interview, said that he believed the English translation by Gregory Rabassa of his Spanish text in the cult-famous One Hundred Years of Solitude was better than the original?

Arunava Sinha has 71 translations published under his name and has won multiple awards for his works

Sinha's latest translation is Chronicles of the Lost Daughters by Debarati Mukhopadhyay

Translators are the people who save us from leading a myopic and monolingual existence and yet, their names are often lost in the fine print. However, the Indian publishing market has been witnessing a change, spurred by a combination of factors such as more awareness generated through the Internet and a number of literary prizes that award translations, including the prestigious International Booker Prize that was won by Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand this year, which was translated into English from Hindi (published as Ret Samadhi) by Daisy Rockwell.

Sifting between languages

“I think people read a lot of translations without realising that they are doing so. For example, a lot of people read (Leo) Tolstoy without realising that they are reading a translation. At the same time, I have also seen readers hesitate to pick up translations by newer names,” said Jayasree Kalathil, whose English translation of Malayalam writer S. Hareesh’s Moustache won the JCB Prize in 2020. “While prizes help translators like me gain exposure, it also helps a book written in an Indian language become more visible, which is fantastic. But Instagram and #Bookstagram have helped make these books more accessible,” adds Kalathil, who also won the Crossword Book Award for Indian Language Translation in 2019 for N. Prabhakaran’s Diary of a Malayali Madman.

Meanwhile, the first complete book that the award-winner Sinha had translated was the Bengali writer Sankar’s 1962 novel Chowringhee that was published in 2007. “I had translated the book for Sankar when a French publisher had asked him for an English version. However, this book took 14 years to publish and by then, I had forgotten about it completely!” laughs Sinha, who had started out translating short stories for a magazine called Calcutta Skyline. He now has 71 translations published under his name and has won awards such as Crossword translation award and the Muse India translation award, along with getting both longlisted and shortlisted for a few international translation prizes.

“I WOULD GO SO FAR AS TO SAY THAT TRANSLATED INDIAN LITERATURE IS NOW MAINSTREAM INDIAN LITERATURE. WRITINGS IN ENGLISH ARE ONLY A SEGMENT. IF NOT IN TERMS OF QUANTITY, CERTAINLY IN TERMS OF QUALITY, TRANSLATED INDIAN LITERATURE IS ON PAR AND POSSIBLY, MARGINALLY AHEAD NOW”
Arunava Sinha

While some older book prizes had categories for translations, prizes such as the JCB Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature did away with the difference between English writing and translations. “While translations would often get shortlisted earlier, something changed after Jayant Kaikini's No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories (translated by Tejaswini Niranjana from Kannada to English) won the DSC Prize in 2019. Writers like Perumal Murugan and Manoranjan Byapari were on shortlists thereafter. There’s Gunpowder in the Air by Byapari, which was translated by Arunava (Sinha), was shortlisted for four awards. So the way we publishers and readers looked at translations had changed,” says Minakshi Thakur, publisher, Indian Literature, Westland Books, who has been working with translation imprints since 2007 across publishers.

Award-winning translator, Jayasree Kalathil

Kalathil's English translation of Malayalam writer S. Hareesh’s Moustache won the JCB Prize in 2020

The art of translating

Translating a text, as Kalathil put it, is an act of “co-creation”. Just like how one English translation of Haruki Murakami might differ from another, depending on who has translated it, the approach taken by each translator might differ. Sinha credits his translations to his “text-first” approach, as he says, “I am less concerned about the writer and I go with what the text is telling me, which in turn automatically leads me back to the writer. If a writer has chosen to write the original text in a certain way then my objective is to match my style to that as closely as possible. If I do that well, there is little scope for my style of writing to overlap. It also helps that I don’t write about the kind of things that I translate.”

Kalathil, meanwhile, likes to play around with certain sentences and turns of phrases before she starts translating, in order to best convey the style of each writer. “If you don’t do that, every writer will read the same in English,” she says. However, she admits that it might be difficult to completely rid the translated text of her style. “For example, a certain Malayalam word might have several equivalent English words and the translator chooses which one of those to use, which is born out of their own creative sense,” she explains. But both Sinha and Kalathil emphasise on the importance of being mindful of the fact that translators worked to tell the writer’s story and not their own.

Gregory Rabassa translated many of Gabriel García Márquez's books from Spanish to English

Márquez had famously said that he liked the translated version of One Hundred Years of Solitude more than his version in Spanish

Debarati Mukhopadhyay, a popular contemporary Bengali writer, recently had the English translation of her novel Narach released in the form of Chronicles of the Lost Daughters. Translated by Sinha, the book, in Mukhopadhyay’s words, “needed to find the right kind of person to translate it so that it could reach a wider audience.” And since its release, Mukhopadhyay has been left overwhelmed with the response. “I used to have a lot of loyal readers amongst people who could read Bengali, both in India and abroad, and always felt that the things I write about were really relevant and wanted more people to be able to read them. Since the release of the English version, a lot of people who don’t read in Bengali have been able to read it and give me positive feedback, which has been very fulfilling,” she adds.

Changing perceptions

While Kalathil has been translating books for five years, Sinha has been doing it for longer. Yet both are on the same page about the market perceptions changing towards translations. Sinha recounts how, by 2007, publishing Indian language writers was slowly gaining steam. And since then, he has seen perceptions about translations change drastically. “I would go so far as to say that translated Indian literature is now mainstream Indian literature. Writings in English are only a segment. If not in terms of quantity, certainly in terms of quality, translated Indian literature is on par and possibly, marginally ahead now,” says Sinha, as he attributes this to the diversity of the Indian languages that have much to offer to readers in terms of depth, nuances and quality. However, he acknowledges that the scale might tilt towards Indian writing in English when it comes to sales because of the quantity of books published and the natural affinity of readers towards that segment still.

Thakur credits the improvement in the quality of translations and more awareness amongst reviewers and readers for the changing perception in favour of translations. “Translators who have worked on multiple books also became ambassadors and champions of those languages–and Arunava is a great example of that. Publishers and readers would follow a person like that and keep track of what he is working on,” says Thakur. The brand identity of publishers working on translation imprints to get readers hooked is also key, according to Thakur, who was also part of Harper Perennial, HarperCollins India’s Indian languages’ imprint, from 2008 to 2017.

“I DO BELIEVE THAT TRANSLATORS DESERVE MORE RECOGNITION FROM BOTH THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND READERS. BUT I ALSO DO WHAT I DO BECAUSE I CANNOT DENY THE IMPACT OF READING TRANSLATIONS ON MY LIFE”
Jayasree Kalathil

In a market where fiction is a considerably small portion, translations make up an even smaller one. Incidentally, their returns are even lower as the market is ruled by non-fiction. However, translators like Sinha and Kalathil continue doing what they do as they are driven by their own love for multilingual fiction.

“I do believe that translators deserve more recognition from both the publishing industry and readers. But I also do what I do because I cannot deny the impact of reading translations on my life. Crossing the borders between languages and cultures enriches our world. There are some stories that you read and think that you would love to tell this to a wider audience,” says Kalathil. And as for Sinha, he does what he does because he loves it: “Of course I wouldn’t mind some recognition but having said that, I doubt if a translator’s name would stick in a reader’s mind. Maybe a reader should pay attention to the translator’s name a little but I don’t do it for recognition.”

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