Arunava Sinha is a Delhi-based translator literary translator who works from Bengali to English and English to Bengali. He is the winner of the Crossword Book Award for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), and sixty-six of his translations have been published so far, including a collection of Modern Bengali Poetry, novels by acclaimed writers such as Buddhadeva Bose and Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay, and a collection of Bengali short stories. He teaches in the creative writing department at Ashoka University and works as the books editor at Scroll.in.
I met him for the first time in 2019, when I worked as his teaching assistant. In a small class of six students, translating out of Hindi, Tamil, and Bengali, we worked on hearing the voice of a book and how to articulate it in a different language.
In this Zoom conversation, Sinha talks about translating Khwabnama by Akhtaruzzaman Elias, the questions he receives in his literary translation classes, and the publishing industry in India.
Suhasini Patni (SP): You’ve been translating for many years. In your latest interview with Forbes, you said you developed an interest in literary translation after realizing that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was a translation. Can you talk about your journey so far?
Arunava Sinha (AS): It began as an interest in college. I was an English literature student, and as you said, it struck me that these words we’re marveling over when we’re reading Garcia Marquez are really written by somebody else. I wanted to know what writing those words might be like. And of course, it immediately showed me that translation is completely different from what we assume it is. It’s all that is not said but that you are hearing at the back of your head. It is so little about the dictionary meaning because that’s the most easily solved problem. That is what makes a text so rich and what makes translation so interesting.
I had forgotten about translation because I moved to Delhi and switched jobs. It wasn’t until an editor at Penguin called me, asking me about Sankar’s Chowringhee that I rekindled my journey. And it was just at the right age for a midlife crisis, too!
SP: What kind of books did you begin with translating?
AS: I started with the canon, partly because there were not too many translations of the best-known books from Bangla at the time. There were a number of English publishers, and they were hungry for books to publish and there were not enough writers in English. So, it was quite a happy combination of circumstances. There was plenty of variety in the writing in the canon, but if you really step back and look at the big picture, it represented just one segment of possible writing in Bangla. That is what led me to start looking for texts with more diversity, both in terms of the content and the writer. People who wrote regularly did with a certain kind of lucidity which I think was market-facing even if they didn’t tell themselves so. But their books were written to be read by large numbers of people. They adopted a certain lucid idiom. Their art lay in playing with lucidity, but they never became obscure except for some experimental writers. When the field widened and I had other types of books to look for, they were not as bothered about the market. And they wrote in much stronger, much more literary—by literary I don’t mean high literary—but much more of an idiom that only literature can accept and accommodate. This of course has also made translation a more complicated but invigorating task. As you do more of the same thing, you want your challenges to get bigger.
It was partly this that led me to the text, until now, I think was the toughest to translate, which is Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s Khwabnama, which is daunting not just because of the actual language but also because you immediately realize the quality of that book and you are terrified that you will not be able to preserve it in the translated version. I think this was the biggest concern for me. I’m still not sure if it has worked or not. And I don’t think I ever will be. When you’re translating, your real challenge is the language, it’s not the literature. At that point, you’re not thinking of the literature, you’re just thinking of how to get a sentence across. Miraculously, somehow if you do it right, then all the pieces fall into place.
SP: Yes, I thought you’d talk about Khwabnama! You also described the author as the Garcia Marquez of South Asia, if I’m remembering correctly. I can imagine that getting across some of the magical realist imagery would have been difficult. Can you talk about the most difficult book you’ve translated?
AS: The Chieftain’s Daughter was the first formally structured novel written in Bangla. I wanted to give up many times. I think it was published in 1864. It’s Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s first Bangla novel. Remember that he is writing fiction for the first time in the Bengali language. The Bengali language is being introduced to fiction of the kind which the West has already been familiar. Until now the prose has been of a didactic or religious nature. It’s seen a lot of poetry of the same kind. There’s been a lot of drama. And there have been humorous sketches and satirical writing and some travelogues and so on. But never an actual, imagined story, in that sense. So, what language does he use? On the one hand, he wants to maintain a high literary quality. On the other hand, he is writing to be read.
He wrote in this Sanskritized Bengali, which used a lot of words not in the vocabulary of speech at the time. On the other hand, he was trying to bring the language down to the cadences of spoken Bangla. What was more complicated was the fact that his characters in the novel were not actually Bengali-speaking people and they lived three hundred years before he actually wrote the novel. So, he was writing a historical novel in 1860. He’s translating in that sense because he’s putting words from their language, which I’m not even sure what sort of language they would have spoken, but I doubt it would have had much of a relationship with Sanskrit. He has some characters speaking that version, and he has other characters who are seen as lower down on the social pecking order speaking a day-to-day language. He’s got the narratorial voice, which is very epic. So, all this combined gave me the longest lasting headache.
SP: In the years that you’ve been translating, have you seen any change in the publishing industry? There are more indie presses now, such as Tilted Axis, and especially with this whole movement that Jennifer Croft has started about naming the translator on the cover of the book—all of this is global. Do you notice a difference for Indian publishing?
AS: No, it’s not changed structurally in India, in the sense that the translator still brings books to the publishers for the most part. Some editors and publishers do follow certain literatures, usually the literature of their mother tongue, typically Bangla, Hindi, Tamil, and Malayalam. With other languages, it is still pretty much the translators who bring the works to the publishers. What has really changed is the quality of translation and the emergence of excellent translators. Overall, translations are of a much higher quality now and most publishers are also more discerning about quality. What has changed for the worse is, for most of these translations, unless there’s a separate story around them, as there was for Manoranjan Byapari, who is a star in his own right, the books don’t sell very much. So, there’s no reading movement of translations from India outside of a small group of dedicated readers. The concept of reading, say, Malayalam or Bengali literature in particular—as you might want to read Korean or Japanese literature in the West—does not exist. Nor, unlike in the United Kingdom or the United States, are there indie presses that are doing a great job of focusing on translations alone and slowly building a readership for them. Of course, there is also zero financial support from any organization. It’s funny because in India we talk so much about nationalism, and we talk so much about regional identities and linguistic identities, but nobody does anything to support translation.
All of this naturally prevents any kind of training, workshopping, or general mentoring that is so essential for good work to be produced in any field. In India, publishers expect writers and translators to produce work from which they cannot possibly make a living, meaning they’re expected to make a living out of something else. This is my big beef with the way translations are treated. Without proper compensation, you cannot expect the best. That we have the quality of translations that we still do, despite the handicaps, just speaks enormously for the zeal and passion of translators.
SP: You also frequently write about who gets translated. I was wondering if that has changed. As a reader, I’ve noticed an emergence of Dalit publishing. Not just from indie publishers like Navayana or Panther’s Paw, but major publishers too. For example, what was the reception like when you translated Manoranjan Byapari?
AS: I’m a bit cynical about this. I have a feeling that the focus on Dalit writers among the big presses is less out of literary idealism and more out of a notion that there’s a market. The bigger you are as a press, the more focused you are on the market possibilities of any book that you produce. The fact that we have so much data now is also forcing publishers to rely more on it and therefore not experiment. When you know what “works,” you want to produce more of the same—in terms of who is being translated and what is being translated. This gatekeeping based on assuming how many readers there will be seems to completely take away the possibility of a new writer going out there and becoming a big success.
The focus is also so much on the writers themselves. I think literary prizes have done this. Look at the way the awards are structured—the writer has to be alive, for example. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this. The writer should get a lot of the focus, but what about the book? Are the people going to be interested in the book or the person? The market focus has grown due to many extraneous elements—how much social media following does the writer have? I don’t understand how this makes for good literature. With translation, there is an added layer—for a Tamil book say, the question is always, “Is this book Tamil enough?” This means that if someone writes a great detective novel in Tamil, it will not get translated because we have detective novels in English. What we need is a quintessential Tamil book, but what the hell is a quintessential Tamil book? I don’t know. These labels are being tagged on and being used to take decisions because individuals are working under the compulsions of corporations.
SP: You said there’s not a lot of proper mentorships. I know you mentored under the South Asia Speaks Program, and that you also teach literary translation. Can you talk about this? How do you navigate the different modes of writing?
AS: So, there are two aspects. One is that to be a translator you have to be a very close and sensitive reader. So much of learning how to translate is learning how to read. And to read prose differently from non-fiction and poetry. The most important thing is to learn how to open yourself up to all the different possibilities of a text rather than bring it down to one interpretation or even that reviled word—essence. Because this essentialism is so much about reducing a text to one thing.
In my classes on literary translation, I’m usually asked about the cultural superstructure of the language. Students increasingly find that whatever words they use in the language they’re translating into are not good enough to capture the depth and intensity and richness of a particular phrase or allusion in the original language. They say, “Shall we leave it in the original and let the reader find out?” But my answer to them often is that if you as a translator cannot find out then how will the reader find out? They’re not going to put in the kind of effort you are. Sometimes you have to settle for a version of it and also realize that it’s a new language with its own culture and you cannot really take the culture of one language and draft it onto another. The trick is to make the new language accept the translation in a way that is partly understandable in its own culture but also convey bits of the other one.
SP: You’ve recently started translating from English to Bangla, right? Or has that been happening throughout your translation career?
AS: Not in my formal career. But Bangla has always been the language in which I express myself when talking to myself. The act of translation is always happening because we live much of our life in English. Formal translation into Bangla has started recently for me, it’s just been three years, and it’s something I wanted to do for three reasons: I wanted to see what these great works that I’ve read in the English language look like in Bangla because it is the language I grew up in. Second, because they’re not available to readers in Bangla. And the third is to push myself into writing in a language that I’m not used to writing in.
SP: Can you talk about specifically translating Poonachi? What’s interesting to me is that you’re translating from the English version, which is already a translation. How does that affect your own translation?
AS: Both Poonachi and Ghachar Ghochar have been translated into English and into Hindi, so I used these translations as sources. I assume that the text I’m working from is the original text, which is interesting, say in the case of Poonachi, whose translator Kalyan Raman is a friend. I know that his philosophy of translation acknowledges that it’s going to be a different book. So, in a sense you maybe already know you are not really translating Poonachi as it was in Tamil. There’s a lot of handwringing that goes on about this method: you’re working through a bridge language or this is a shadow of a shadow or an image of an image. But I want to think of it differently.
It is right that what a book can be in the language in which it is written is unique because only that language can perhaps express it that way. But to me, a good text is full of possibilities that can be expressed in other languages as well. What comes out in those other languages may not be identical to the original but somewhere in that original there exist the possibilities of other versions which accommodate themselves in other languages. And this is the truth of the world, that we live in various languages and not just one. So, instead of making this ridiculous fetish about something being lost in translation, I figure that translation helps us realize all the myriad possibilities of the text. The more languages it gets translated into, the more those possibilities are unlocked. A good translation will convey not just the words but the silences and what is not said explicitly. Therefore, to me, literature is what is found in translation.
SP: What’s a book in Bangla you really want to see in English but you don’t want to translate yourself? Or something you want to translate, but you haven’t gotten to yet?
AS: My answer to this question has changed over the years. There was a time when I was thinking of highly literary texts. All the works of Kamal Kumar Majumdar, for example, none of which has been translated and I can see why. It’s one of those so-called untranslatable things. Khwabnama was also considered untranslatable. But when I started, I realized that’s far from the truth and this has nothing to do with me as a translator. Great works are inherently translatable no matter how wedded they seem to the language in which they’re written.
There’s a book I hope to be able to translate. It’s a four-volume autobiographical novel written by a man called Premankur Atorthi. It starts in the last years of the nineteenth century with him as a child and then spans forty years or so. The book is sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, which is quite unlike what you’d expect of bhadralok society in Bengal. You’d think of them as being very enlightened but extremely genteel. The novel is very much into the Malayali or South American mode of being rambunctious, full of raw things, and extraordinarily full of life, while narrated with tremendous energy yet beauty. But I’ll need to give up everything else and work on this for a year.
Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern, and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction from Bangladesh and India into English. He also translates fiction from English into Bengali. Over sixty-five of his translations have been published so far in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He has won India’s top translation prize, the Crossword Book Award for translated books, twice, and has been a finalist for several international translation prizes. He was born and grew up in Kolkata, and lives and writes in New Delhi, India. He teaches at Ashoka University and is the books editor at Scroll.in.
Suhasini Patni is a freelance writer based in Jaipur and Delhi. Her short story was shortlisted for the Toto Funds the Arts, Creative Writing in English Award 2021. Her work has appeared in Scroll.in, Cha: Asian Literary Journal, and elsewhere.
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