Politics of Translation: Literary Writing
Creative writing or literary writing is a deeply personal exercise. It is the work of a single mind and heart, and is executed through a set of hands connected to said mind and heart intimately, through a honeycomb of veins and arteries and convolutions of ideas.
The above kind of writing is also highly expressionistic, and imprecise. Writers painstakingly build up lofty ivory towers of structures and forms to convey approximations of that thing they feel in their bones, that twisting in the pit of their stomach, the palpitating insensibility of their night-time terrors…
Language can barely stretch to cover every grain of the truth writers fervently wish to impress upon paper.
I believe that, of all expressionistic art, words are the most rude, and probably colorless. They are also the most universal. The written word brings us breaking news, knowledge in all its avataars, and everything we want to know about the Richard Dawkins special brand of ideological dogma. And perhaps that is its source of beauty — its universality even as it is the most personalized, the most ‘for-me-alone’ mode of communication.
When writers write to express their deepest feelings, they mostly do so in the language they think in. It is a seamless extension of thoughts — words and stories flow naturally, the words come closest to precision in articulation. For that reason, these stories pack greater punch. They create universal connections, even as they narrate profoundly personal stories.
Of course, when constructing the story, a writer is hardly thinking of how universal his creation will be or how many people will read it in how many tongues — those things are immaterial and the writer is driven purely by the joy of expression.
Once the work unfolds its wings, however, it gets a life of its own. It carves its flight of purpose into other lands and new languages, free of the control of publishers and its creator. When it establishes it authority or singularity, the work is a case for translation into other languages.
As a writer, and as a reader, I luxuriate in translations. They bear a super abundance of impressions that light up a wholly untapped part of the reader’s faculties. For me, it is like the darker side of the moon revealing truths never earlier suspected, affording experiences never before sought.
While translations are rich in substance and style, the process itself of translating a work from one language to another is fraught with the peril of puns stonewalling the best translation efforts, or other cliff-hangers that defy resolution, and deny any right to the translator for passage into their hearts.
Here are a few specific challenges that translators face with translations.
Sensibility of a language
Every language has a sensibility — an idiom of painting thoughts, ideas, concepts, utterances, stories of lives and description of moments. This is because a language is rooted in a socio-political reality. It belongs to a people of a certain cultural world with a certain set of living norms, values and beliefs. Their words wake up with them each morning, and live through a certain day with certain joys and challenges, and finally retire at night, tired in a certain way…
The sensibility of a language is shaped by the collective history of its speakers, the vicissitudes of their collective journey through time. Naturally then, every language has a different sensibility, stamped and smithed on its linguistic definitions and formulations — these special definitions and formulations, in turn, create the wireframes for birthing narratives of people and places.
It is the translator’s sacred duty to carry these unique narratives over to the translated language, as faithfully as she can. Her foremost responsibility is to deliver the cultural experience of the ‘origin language’ to the reader, through new words in the target language (with its own unique wireframes for expression). It is a provocative challenge. How does a translation convey the idea of a harvest and its associated paraphernalia to a city-smart audience? Does a particular translation bring to life a Russian commune to a 21st century capitalist society?
There are a number of words that refuse to cross linguistic boundaries. In many languages. A few words here from Arabic / Urdu that fall in this list. ‘Insha-allah’ an Arabic benediction, a prayerful wish with no English equivalent. It has a special notion of expressing a wish that the universe in its mercy deems fit to fulfill. We cannot transcribe the full grandeur of its sense into English.
‘Bismillah’ is another Arabic word that remains rooted in its native linguistic soil and refuses to be transplanted into English. There are others — ‘zeitgeist’ in Deutsch, and others too that surface in Google, but I’m not sure of their amicability with translators, and so I desist from including them here.
‘Nostalgia’ is the English word for suffering caused by unappeased yearning to return. Its etymological root can be traced to two Greek words: ‘nostos’ meaning return and ‘algos’ meaning suffering. Nostalgia has different equivalents in various European languages. The Germans rarely use the term ‘nostalgie’, the Greek-derived term, preferring the term ‘sehnsucht’ to describe longing for something not there.
In much the same way, each term has a singular connotation and is used in a certain way to describe a very certain circumstance of separation and longing.
Moods of sentencing
So much of the mood of a literary work is woven with figures of speech — the use of phrases in a non-literal sense for effect. A mellifluous metaphor has the ability to create a powerful impact. A sinuous simile mixes hues of expectancy, or melancholy, or simple joy into paper words. Powerful, potent, figures of speech are weapons of glory for a writer.
“We did not sleep. Morning surprised us as though it was not agreed upon in the solar system, as it came and went without logic and without being expected.”
This is Ramallah, Mourid Barghouti, 24
“Abu Hazim went for me with open arms. He went for me with his white hair and outstretched arms: a running cross. A happy cross running towards me. Our shoulders met two-thirds of the way to his house.”
Ibid., 33
“It is not enough to register the faults of others, the Occupier, the Colonist, the Imperialist, and so on… Does a poet live in space or in time? Our homeland is the shape of the time we spent in it.”
Ibid., 41
It is not unusual for these carefully choreographed minutiae to be untranslatable. There is a reason for this. Metaphors, alliteration, anaphora, assonance and others are fashioned from the sounds and syllables of a language… transporting them to another language is impossible because of the non-equivalence of sounds, phonetic elements, and even rhythm of intonation.
Indeed, I believe English is especially atonal among languages and it presents a special challenge to bridge other-language structures to English.
A translated piece will, at best, create an inspired equivalence, and at worst, cobble a weak semblance of the original linguistic canvas, self-consciously.
In any case, the dynamism and pungency of the original is lost in translation.
Potency of context
Let’s go back to ‘nostalgia’. And Greek mythology. Odyssey was birthed by Greek culture. Odyssey is also the founding epic of nostalgia. Odysseus, the adventurer of all time, ‘is also the greatest nostalgic’. (Milan Kundera, Ignorance, 2002).
How?
Odysseus went off to Troy to fight in the Trojan War and as luck would have it, was forced to stay back in Troy for ten long years. Finally, he sets sail for Ithaca his home where his long suffering wife, Penelope awaits his return even as she manages an ever-present gaggle of suitors.
But Odysseus has more adventure in store — Calypso, a mythological nymph living on the island of Ogygia sees Odysseus and falls in love with his wild tresses and rugged looks. She imprisons him on the island for seven idyllic years. Odysseus, now a well-adventured man of the world reciprocates Calypso’s passion and is awed by her wisdom and magic. But still, at the end of seven years, he admits that he longs for his wife, Penelope and his home on the island of Ithaca.
That is ‘nostalgia’. This is the context of the word ‘nostalgia’ — that wish to return to the finite and known, even if it is the lesser option.
And to answer the question that must form in readers’ minds about Odysseus’s future life in Ithaca after his return. Was his nostalgia rewarded?
In certain versions of the story, Odysseus remains distracted and wandering in his mind as he tries to settle down into an old but new life… the Ithaca he had left before the war is no longer what it had been, nor indeed his lovely wife and their life. Everything had subtly altered during the years he had been away to war. In these versions, he thinks about the adventures he has had, the battles he has fought, his years with Calypso. But he was home at last. And that was that.
To return to our subject at hand, context plays an all-important role in defining the tone of the translation. A deft translation stirs the context into the new work effortlessly, it remains there as a key ingredient and no more.
Conclusion
Translation of literary works is often a life work, and always a labor of love. It requires the comfort of wandering in and out of constructions in both languages. It presumes a deep connection of kindred spirit with the writer whose work is being translated, to be able to slip into the synapses of the writer and sense his feelings even as he first expressed them. A good translation lives and breathes a separate life and yet retains a connection of the soul with the original at all times.
