“Translators are visible now”
The award-winning Assamese translator talks about the rise of bhasha translation
1 How do you define translation?
Translation is a creative process where the translator tries to strike a balance between what the author wants to say and how best to articulate it in the language she chooses to translate into. Every committed translator tries to reach out to the reader in a way that she can relate to the original work without much effort.
2 How do you look back at the history of translation?
From the Middle Ages to this day, the translation of literature has impacted scholarship, the development of vernacular languages, even the national identities around these languages. Translation Studies, a term coined by James S Holmes, emerged in the second half of the 20th century. In India, this creative genre got a boost in the mid-1950s when the Sahitya Akademi launched its programme to bring bhasha literature to readers through translations. Today, many prominent publishing houses in India have consciously taken up projects to bring regional literature to a wider readership. As a result, translators are getting more visibility, and their names even appear on book covers, when they were earlier relegated to the inside pages. There are also literary prizes for translated works as a separate entity. All this augurs well for this field.
3 In 2017, you won the Sahitya Akademi Award for your translation of Written in Tears by Arupa Patangia Kalita. Your latest, The Loneliness of Hira Barua, is also a collection of Kalita’s stories. What draws you back to her writing?
A strong voice against oppression permeates Kalita’s work. Many of her protagonists are women; she talks with empathy about their place in a patriarchal society, their pain. At the same time, they are also courageous figures. As a journalist, I have been writing on women and gender issues for a long time and these stories attracted me immediately. Another aspect that draws me is the way she expresses nuances of feelings with symbols drawn from the flora and fauna of Assam. You never feel cut off from the smell of the land and its people when you read her stories.
4 How did translation enter your life?
My introduction to world literature and to vernacular languages from other regions in India was through translations. I learnt to appreciate good translations and recognized the bad ones as a reader. These were learning steps. To me, translation has been like the exploration of a land where I constantly look at my own language, the changes it has absorbed gradually, the diversity of themes that has seeped into Assamese contemporary literature since I started in the field more than two decades ago. I have been enriched in the process.