‘All translation is difficult’
Ranaangan, a Marathi novel published in 1939, explores the love between an Indian man and a German Jewish woman. Battlefield is the translation of playwright Vishram Bedekar’s only novel
1 What was your first impression of the book? 2 At the launch, you said that it’s a book we should all read. What makes it so compelling?
I read it many years ago and what remained was its effortless cosmopolitanism, acute sense of fascism’s dangers, and prescience.
Ranaangan came out in 1939. It deals with the horrors of othering, how you can turn a whole community into the ‘Other’, how you can treat them brutally and end up carrying the guilt of that treatment, as a society, as a nation. These processes end up hurting both sides. That’s why I think it’s a book we all need to read. I believe that each choice we make as individuals — whether it is a joke we crack, a news item we refuse to read or an event that we try to explain away — brings us closer and closer to the inflection point.
3 The book has a multicultural milieu that seems apt for English. How does the author depict this milieu in the Marathi original?
The Marathi that Bedekar uses is what one might call Punekar Marathi. It is the Marathi that Narayan Surve (whose poems I am working on) would call, with a certain measure of uneasy affection, Saraswat Marathi. But here’s the thing. Chakradhar speaks no German. Herta speaks no Marathi. They must have been speaking in English to each other. Was the dialogue then a homecoming when it was translated into English?
4 What were the challenges in translating the book?
I have always said that translation is the act of settling a family of words in a new culture. You have to take into account the Marathiness of the language, the notions about language with which the text has been created, and the statelessness of English. People talk loosely about how difficult it is to translate from an Indian language into English. My answer to that is: All translation is difficult. All languages are inadequate when confronted with the cultural specificities of sprezzatura, albela, kintsugi and schadenfreude.
5 Some say your translations don’t read like translations. What are the techniques you use to arrive at such a result?
I read the book several times before starting. I write the first draft in longhand. I key it into the computer and as I do that, I begin to feel the irregularities and angularities of what I have written. I smooth out and read the translation to a friend — the first time generally to Neela Bhagwat, who taught me Marathi many years ago. Then I work on it again and read it to Shanta Gokhale. Another reworking. Then I read the book against the translation and see whether it needs some roughing up. That’s when it goes to my editor, Ravi Singh.