Translation tightrope

Often called India’s most prolific translator, Arunava Sinha was recently honoured for his enormous body of work. He chats about the global attention South-Asian writers are getting now.

Arunava Sinha has translated countless Bengali fiction and nonfiction into English. He was honoured with the sixth Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award last year for his body of work. It is not often that a single translator can be credited with more than 70 translations. Sinha has also been awarded the Crossword translation award twice, for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011). Excerpts from an interview:

South Asian works are suddenly receiving worldwide attention. What does this mean to you?

It means a great deal obviously. Because it draws attention to the fact that there’s great literature from this part of the world that can be read by people all over the world. And if it opens up doors and windows for our works in translation to be read elsewhere, it means everything. This is what we work for.

How do literary prizes contribute to the visibility and growth of translators?

Beyond the word-of-mouth publicity, [with the prize there’s] suddenly a boom … an explosion. And it’s happening outside of this ecosystem in a sense that people who normally don’t follow the world of literature suddenly become aware of the fact that something like this has happened, so obviously even if a fraction of them end up looking at the book or reading it, the number of readers and buyers increases dramatically. And when these are translated books, then automatically, it raises interest and demand for the work of translators as well.

What do you think governments, literary communities, and organisations must do to promote translations?

Well, we’ve seen for example what Korea has done. They’ve literally taken their works to the West where there was zero awareness and they’ve done it by taking the initiative to reach out to book fairs and publishers directly, providing grants and training, and keeping a continuous stream of activities going. As a result, large numbers of books translated from Korean found publishers and got international acclaim, and now it has acquired its own momentum, so certainly there’s an opportunity for that.

But remember the Korean government did it for their literature without any larger political agenda. You always worry when it comes to South Asia because you never know what a government will do. Because they don’t seem to be interested in art and culture; they’re interested in furthering something of their own and that becomes a little worrying.

How do you select the ‘right’ candidate/book for translation?

It’s the books you love and you want others to read. The other aspect is to look at books from marginalised writers who don’t have a large voice. Third, of course, is that the publisher has to accept and agree to publish it.

Let’s talk about specific books and writers. So, what compelled you to engage with the works of Manoranjan Byapari?

He works outside the framework of literature in India in the sense that his work doesn’t come from a literary stream, it comes from his life experiences. And he writes in a raw and unmediated fashion with great power and insight, so it certainly shows you how powerful writing can be. He’s creating his own literary idiom and that’s what’s terrific about his books.

What do you have to say about Manada Devi’s An Educated Woman in Prostitution? How do you translate a book which has a contested history?

That was a remarkable book. She wrote it in the 1920s at a time when even having a voice would mean that there will be a lot of resistance. And she wrote freely and honestly, without any kind of pretension and without making herself out to be a victim, while making it clear that she disapproved of what she was doing, saying that she had no choice as she was pushed into it — so it’s a very powerful piece of writing.

And you don’t really have to spell it out in as many words, you provide the context — how it has been disputed and what the history is. Whether it’s one person’s story or several persons’ story or completely imagined is secondary; one thing I am certain of is that the book was in no way written by a man.

What’s that one thing you badly want to translate?

There’s one, and I hope to be able to do it because it’s massively ambitious. Four volumes. It’s Mahasthavir Jatak (1944) by Premankur Atorthy. It’s sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, a coming-of-age story set between the early 1900s and 1920s. It provides an incredible view of India of the time that we tend to associate with the freedom movement and colonial rule. The story has a different arc and trajectory, as lived out by the narrator and his friends.