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‘I’m a coward at heart’
Translator of Sunil Gangopadhyay’s novels and author of The Inheritors, Aruna Chakravarti shares her experiences in writing at The Readers’ Circle meeting last week at Words n Pages, at the end of the India Bangladesh Festival
of Books and Writers
Sanam Amin
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Aruna Chakravarti: Visiting Bangladesh was a distant dream for me. And I’m very grateful, very happy to be here. I’m not into the academic aspect of translation, I translate largely by instinct. There are mainly two issues I have grappled with and tried to find my own answers for — in the end, if a thing sounds right, I write it. The first is fidelity to the text versus readability. It is something I grapple with each time I begin and I believe that the balance should be in favour of readability.
I remember once an author made an impassioned speech in front of me about how he chooses each word from a thousand and so a translator should not take liberties and tamper with his words. But for a translator readability is very important. Of course I don’t mean to say that the nuances should be left out to make it the Queen’s English. Searching for this balance is like the search for El Dorado — forever sought, forever eluded. Secondly, translating cannot be a mechanised exercise. A kind of mutation occurs. When I translated Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s Srikanta, I found that the English sounded more impassioned than Bangla in a passage where an argument about women’s position in society was taking place. English is a stronger, harder-hitting language. But I realised that some of my own frustration had crept in. So often the author’s sensibility creeps in, a total result of transference and also of the time. Srikanta was written in the 19th century, and I was translating it with a different awareness.
I was a creative writer in my childhood, I wrote short stories and even a novel that was a clear and simple imitation of Enid Blyton. But when I signed up for literature and learned to analyse writing critically, I realised what a poor writer I was. For nearly 25 years I did no creative writing, only academic writing. Then suddenly I discovered translation, and the sheer joy of it helped me find my way back to creative writing. With translation I could hide behind the author’s name and tell myself that if it’s bad it’s the author’s fault, if it’s good it’s my credit. I always say I’m a coward at heart.
I stumbled on translation by accident. It happened at my sister’s house, where there was a Rabindra sangeet ghorma. There were some guests from Gujarat and Maharashtra — Gujaratis and Maharashtras love Rabindra sangeet. They asked about the meaning, and as I was an English teacher all eyes turned to me. At first I hesitated but with every succeeding song, I became more and more confident. Then I was asked to do the translation of songs by a publisher — so that is how I began.
Sunil Gangopadhyay says ‘She is the author of Those Days and I am the author of Shei Din,’ which is very generous of him. I had to abridge the novel, and I tried not to delete portions but to compress them.
Writing fiction also happened almost by accident. Someone from Desh magazine came to take my interview and at the end asked me whether I would do any creative writing in the future. I answered ‘yes, why not?’ and he asked me ‘What will be the subject matter?’ I didn’t really think about it, I just said ‘maybe autobiographical.’ The next thing I knew was that Desh magazine had printed an article saying ‘Aruna Chakravarti’s next project is a book about her family.’ Then I was forced to think about writing a book. I didn’t know where to start, but I told myself, Dickens began David Copperfield with ‘I was born.’ And The Inheritors begins in a similar way, the first line is also about a birth.
I wrote it in a very irregular way. I thought of a family, and telling the story of a family over generations. Then I thought of a diary. She comes across a diary — how does she come across the diary? There was no linear progression.
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