International Translation Day 2025: Stirring stories, serving texts

As someone who has been cooking for family and friends for 45 years, and translating literary classics for a dozen and a half imaginary readers across the globe for 40 years, I don’t see much of a difference between the two activities. These two preoccupations have kept me alive, literally and literarily, over the past four decades, their energies flowing into each other.

I am not the first to make the connection between women and translation; Sherry Simon and Lori Chamberlain, scholars of Translation Studies, have got there before me and written eloquently about the close connection between issues of gender and translation. I am only extending the connection to cooking, something routinely seen as women’s work. I propose to draw out the essential constituents that make up the art of cooking and invite you to read it as my take on the art of translation. 

What does cooking mean to you?

Cooking means different things to different people. Pratibha Nandakumar, a feminist poet in Kannada, has this to say: “Cooking, I love it best;/ For, it is the outlet for all my rage and fury./ Peeling, pulping, pummelling, and pounding/ Crushing, mashing, squeezing, and grinding/ Roasting, boiling, frying, and stirring/ When I serve it hot hot on his plate/ He relishes it, smacking his lips!”

As for me, I wax eloquent when I start talking about it. Once, when I had taken his favourite gojju, a sweet and sour dish made with orange peel, to Prof U R Ananthamurthy, he asked me if I had made it myself. I said, “Yes. Waking up in the morning, if I can meditatively cook, my being is at peace.” And, he said, you uttered a line of poetry just now. My schoolmate, a girl who had to cook for her three brothers, morning, noon, and night, once said she wanted to invent a pill that would fill their stomachs for the rest of their lives and that way, she didn’t have to cook at all!

The impact of translations

Likewise, translation has been defined, understood, practised and read so differently over space and time that translation theorists have had to accept defeat in imposing a singular, normative standard for defining and assessing translations. Rather than discussing the intrinsic quality of translations, the current trend is to ask more intelligent, productive questions that focus on the impact of translations — such as what do translations do in and for a given culture, their impact on cultural politics, and their role in times of war and peace. 

Translation is the art of rewriting that ranges from faithfulness to betrayal, mechanical transfer to inventive co-creation, and domestication to foreignization. The art has manifested itself in so many hues and shades that diversity is its hallmark. Much like the food we make, every translation is the result of unique individual choices about the text and the approach tempered by the translator’s context and cultural politics. Do we ever ask why Bendre didn’t write like Kuvempu, or why Tolstoy didn’t write like Dostoevsky? It’s the same with the creativity of translation.

What’s the menu?

A question that one confronts every day. The answer: Well, it depends. What did I cook yesterday? It is better not to repeat that. Then what are the veggies in the fridge and the ingredients in the pantry? You cannot plan a grand bisibelebhat with your toor lentil pot empty, nor a fresh cucumber salad when all you have in the fridge is shrivelled cabbage.

Then again, you must look to the health of the family. If your child has a bad stomach, you don’t want to be frying papads or making jamuns. Also, should there be a guest, what should one choose? A spicy, hot chutney that is good on the palate but brings tears to his eyes? If a friend from the Hindi heartland is visiting, should I make a Kannadiga speciality with its unique avarekayi bean, which may be so exotic that it tastes strange to an alien tongue, or should I make staple roti-dal-subzi, which may be her comfort food? One can go on… the point is simply that the choice of dish depends on the context — the time and place; the location; the purpose of your cooking; the time and energy you have; and the taste and needs of those for whom you’re cooking. Hasn’t our translation guru, A K Ramanujan, argued that considerations of context are crucial to the Indian way of thinking?

Further, the factors that determine one’s choice and mode of translation change depending on the two languages involved, especially if one of them is English. Ramanujan offered one kind of model in his influential Speaking of Shiva, fifty years ago. His attempt was to take the author, the text and its context to non-Kannada, Indian and Western readers. But lately, the trend is to make the readers walk to the author. Between hospitality and hostility, there are a range of possibilities available to the translator depending on her purpose and politics. So, what’s the menu?

What does it take to cook?

Cooking is a composite art, which demands that you work with your head, heart, and hand in unison. You need to know what the dish should taste like and how to get at it. Not only does it require you to cut, chop, grate, and grind with your hands, but you also need to follow the right procedure and honour the diktats of cooking time. No two cooks worth their salt cook in the same way, nor do their dishes taste alike. It could be the same recipe, same ingredients, even the same kitchen. Yet there is always a difference between the two. Why, even the same cook cannot easily produce the same effect on two days. That padam, that hada, that unique kai-ruchi, that balance defies all chemistry. Then, to get it absolutely right, one has to add that one last essential ingredient — a pinch of love. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Translation, much like cooking, is an organic, holistic, contingent phenomenon — always already provisional, subjective, and context-bound. So, at all times, the part-whole relationship governs the process. Translatory moves are based on the map of the terrain and the destination. Macro decisions and micro decisions need to crucially meld in the right combinations to create that undefinable, intangible, elusive “spirit” or ‘rasa’, or ‘rasam’ in question.

What’s in a name?

If I am serving that quintessential staple of the Kannada diet-saaru to a non-Kannada person, what should I call it? “Please have some lentil soup.”  Ayyo…ayyo… how can you? Where is soup, that mleccha concoction, and where is our raamarasa like saaru…, the purists would scoff. Alright, in the hope that your foreign guest is somewhat familiar with ‘madrasi’ food, you might try the word ‘rasam’. But where is your authenticity, I say?

As a staunch Kannada cook who has also learnt Tamil Iyengar cooking from my mother, I know just how different the two are: one is from Mars, the other from Jupiter. And to add pure, home-made ghee (or should I say, clarified butter) to fire, the Kannada nationalist in me fumes within, at the oppressive regimes of dominant, homogenising neighbouring cultures. So, should we domesticate or foreignise?

Conversely, when I visited Italy recently, it was a revelation that the subtle, thin-crust pizzas of Italy barely tasted anything like what I have been consuming under the same name, paying through my nose. The pilipili Italian pizzas in Thayappanahalli, South Bengaluru, adapted entirely to suit the spice-loving Indian tongue, bore no relation to those pizzas in Italy. And I’m not so sure that I regret it. Similarly, consider the case of the fried rice in Shanghai, which looks like a fourth cousin to our Indian brand of Chinese fried rice. Such creative adaptations speak volumes about India’s entrepreneurial spirit. The clientele determines the name and nature of the cuisine.

So, what shall we call it, this dynamic exchange between languages — bhashantar, rupanthar, veshantar, kaalantar, deshantar? Translation, trans-creation, adaptation, or rendering?

But why cook at all?

Well, did you have a choice, as a woman? Is it not the sacred duty of a woman — especially a wife and mother — to look after the gastrological well-being of her family? Isn’t she born as a woman to seek just this fulfilment? Can there be a better purpose to her life than ‘full-filling’ the tummies of her family members, morning, noon, and night? More importantly, what’s the fuss about when she is naturally endowed with the skill? What’s the big deal? As the saying goes in Kannada, “When there’s ingu (hing) and thengu (coconut), even a manga (monkey) can cook.”

But when the woman is not able to cook, then you hire a cook for the same job. There are wages to be paid. The scene changes altogether when you call that person a ‘chef’. The job is pretty much the same, but the dishes go by fancy, ‘europhane’ sounding Indian names, as in our molaghu tanni becoming mulligatawny soup. You have to pay fancy prices for fancy names. And there is a pay packet to be paid out with impressive incentives and perks to the chef.

Thus, while there is some compensation for the cook, and incomparably more for the ‘chef’, there is no recompense whatsoever for the ‘grihadevata’, the ‘angel in the house’, as Virginia Woolf put it. So why translate when it is not a paying proposition? So why translate when invariably all the bouquets go to the author and all the brickbats land on the translator’s lap?

The answer cannot be in the singular. Different people do it for different reasons, just like cooking. Speaking for myself, I do it for the kick I get out of it, for its masti.

Translation as an enterprise

With the globe becoming more round, local cuisines have had to turn multi-cuisine, transforming purist homemakers and cooking specialists into hybrid cooks. Identity-based rhetoric of yesteryears has given way to hybridity and intersectional melange. Moms, who are unable to compete with dominant brands, are jumping on the bandwagon, saying, “If you can’t fight them, join them.” Packaging and presentation take precedence over healthy and tasty content. What was once a wholesome cottage industry has become a corporate business with glitz. AI is beginning to snatch the business from human hands.

Over the last two decades, translation has become an enterprise, with big-time commercial publishers getting into the fray. Markets rule what needs to be translated and how. Only short texts, nothing exceeding 200 pages, preferably in units of 10 pages. Your door-stopper classics have no place in this economy, as everything — readership, time, attention span, energy, memory — is shrinking.

But there is always a silver lining, right? The translation of Indian literatures is coming to occupy a central, if still unequal, role in cultural exchange. With many more avenues for publicising one’s translation through the digital media, literary festivals, on-line journals, and review spaces; with several substantive awards being instituted, not to speak of the two recent Bookers, and with many agents and publicists ready to invest in your work, translation has now become a visible and valued pursuit, despite the shadow of uncertainty cast by AI.

Now, the poor, self-effacing translator who had lived in the shadows all her life, quietly engaged in the joyous, if thankless, and organic act of co-creating a new text, has had to suddenly morph into this visible persona of a “creative writer”, most deservedly, sharing in the recognition and reward with the author. I, for one, would not complain too loudly about this particular challenge of translation!

The author is a bilingual scholar and translator who has taught, published, and promoted Indian literatures in translation. Her inwardness with Kannada literature has found its best expression in her English translations of ancient, medieval and modern classics.