Translations have expanded the idea of literature in English: Arunava Sinha

As the past decade has witnessed more and more translations from diverse Indian languages into English, with many going on to win major awards, Arunava Sinha, one of India's most prominent translators feels that this has ensured that readers get to hear unique voices from different places.

"We are now reading literature that we would normally not read -- Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali... the list is endless. Translations have expanded the idea of literature in English. Writing in English is one of the many forces, earlier it was the only one. Now one can witness an immense diversity in linguistic expressions," Sinha, who won the 'Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award' at the recently concluded Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) tells IANS.

This two-time winner of the 'Crossword Translation Award', who translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and nonfiction into English with 68 translations having been published so far, says that he realised during his college years that translation was a very distinct activity. A student of literature, he would study translations on his own. "I used the practice to understand the process. After I left college, I was in Calcutta where there was much demand to translate Bangla short stories into English."

But while translating, is it tough not to leave one's signature? "I don't think so. It may be problematic for people who consider themselves writers. For someone like me, who does not have the ambition to make it as a writer, I am quite happy to keep myself invisible in the book -- translators like me have no style; we take up the style of the writer. Of course, I am quite impressed by someone like Jerry Pinto, an accomplished writer who is also a remarkable translator."

With many private universities offering writing courses, Sinha, who teaches creative writing at Ashoka says that the aim of most of these programmes aim to inculcate the skills of academic writing in students. "But creative writing is not something that many universities have started. Of course, it is a great thing, it allows students to learn, write and to find out if they are writers, it gets them back into reading which is great. It creates a unity of writers. You express yourself in a different way," says the translator who is currently working on autobiographical stories of Sankar -- essays written between the ages of 17-80, covering different stages in his life.

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