Every Monday I post some of the books I have received in the previous week. This post will be in addition to my regular blog posts and newsletter. Today’s Book Post 24 is after a gap of two weeks as January is an exceedingly busy month with the New Delhi World Book Fair and literary festivals such as the Jaipur Literature Festival.
In today’s Book Post 24 included are some of the titles I received in the past few weeks as well as bought at the book fair and are worth mentioning.
Screenwriter and young adult fiction writer Venita Coelho won the prestigious Hindu Goodbooks Award today at the ongoing Hindu Lit for Life festival in Chennai. Daniel Handler, author of the Lemony Snicket series, did the honours of handing over the trophy. Some glimpses of the evening are given in the gallery of photographs.
Meanwhile Shantanu Duttagupta, Publisher, Scholastic India who has published Venita Coelho’s award winning novel had this to say:
We won!!! Venita Coelho’s Boy #32 wins the prestigious Hindu Goodbooks Award for best fiction!!!! ❤️❤️❤️❤️ Goodbooks.in thank you for this honour!!! Scholastic India Venita Coelho
On 1 January 2018 I had interviewed Venita Coelho. Her young adult novel Boy No. 32is an incredibly gripping book about Battees, an orphan named so after the number given to him — 32. ( In Hindi, the number 32 is called “battees”.) The story is about Battees winessing the presence of a dreaded terrorist, Kashmiri Lall, in his city, Mumbai, and he is now the only one who can help put him behind bars. It is a tremendously well-paced and tautly written book. Impossible to put down once you begin it. Also for the fact Venita Coelho never for an instant “talks down” to youngsters, nor is ever apologetic about the violence around us. Absolutely fantastic!
In this novel intermixing the orphans’ quest for locating Kashmiri Lall with encounters with the eunuchs, the Beggar King, and the horrific complicity of even the adults responsible for them such as Aunty and the cop, is done crisply. The “traditional” bad guys of literature like the eunuch are actually shown to be humane with a little more insight on how their community operates. Equally well-made are the cop and the “aunty” who are so incredibly corrupt, they would do anything for a few extra bucks. Venita Coelho is constantly challenging pre-conceived notions about characters. For instance, instead of giving the warden of the orphanage a name, she is referred to as “Aunty” — a big learning curve for Indian readers who are taught to practically revere an older woman, inevitably calling her “Aunty”, sort of seals this relationship.
My article on “GST and publishing” has been published in the Economic Times on 12 January 2019. The original url is here. I am also C&P the entire article below. I had first written about the impact of GST and publishing within a week of the new taxation system coming into effect on 1 July 2017. My article was published on 8 July 2017. Here is the link.
Publishing is part of the creative economy. Books are made by transferring knowledge, information, data and ideas into a defined valuable product. According to Nielsen, the Indian book market is worth $6.7 billion. It is the third-largest English language market in the world, and many regional language markets are thriving.
It is broadly categorised into school publishing, academic (books and journals), trade (fiction, general non-fiction, graphic novels, etc) and children’s literature publishing. From independent players to large MNCs with varying business models — traditional, self-publishing and hybrid publishing —there is a broad spectrum of publishing firms.
No industry that sells its products commercially can be indifferent to costs. But in book publishing, the input costs are so high that everyone in the supply chain (from publishers to distributors and booksellers) operates on slim profit margins. In some cases, even these don’t exist, as the idea in the book becomes more important to publish.
On July 1, 2017, the goods and services tax (GST) came into effect in India. Many taxes imposed in previous systems have continued under GST, but new taxes have also been introduced. Asignificant one is the 12% tax on author’s royalties that has to be deposited as part of the reverse tax mechanism by the publishing firm on behalf of the author with the income-tax authorities. Unfortunately, publishers do not get any benefit in this arrangement, since most authors do not have GST certificates.
Other input costs, too, have increased, as GST has to be deposited on all invoices raised by vendors to whom publishing services are outsourced. There has been an effective increase of cost across the board of about 12-18%. Given that publishers don’t benefit from input tax credit as books are not taxed, some of the increased costs have had to be passed on to readers by increasing the price of books, which have increased by 10-15% since GST was imposed.
Overhead costs like rents, travel and communication have also increased from 15% to 18% due to GST. Those firms that can afford to pay for extra manpower to contend with the extra paperwork and monthly filing have hired extra staff to ensure smooth operations. But this monthly filing of returns impacts the cash flow of smaller companies badly, at times even bringing publishing to a momentary halt.
Every age of mechanisation has produced more texts, and with it a stupendous growth in reading. First, it was the invention of the moveable type that made ‘books’ easily available and a ‘reading public’ was created for the first time. Then, with the Industrial Revolution, mechanised printing presses sped up publishing dramatically. Currently, we are in the middle of yet another major dislocation: the Information Age.
On principle, GST is a destination based tax that aims to build better cash flows and working capital management for proprietors. Ultimately, it is also meant to help the consumer by reducing the tax burden on the product at point of sale. Unfortunately, the benefits of input tax credit can only be gained if the book is taxed.
Printed books are a non-taxable commodity primarily to make education affordable. For now, there is an uneven taxation policy on the different forms in which books are made available: print books (0%), e-books (5% if it has aprint component) and audiobooks and journals (18%). But, in India, the primary consumed product is the printed book. Survival of firms will depend on how much financial stress they can bear. Perhaps levelling a minimal GST on books across all formats will help contain the financial burden on most publishers. Ironically, technological advancements will further propel the divide. For, only those readers who can afford books — in any form — will be able to access information.
Both publisher and reader have been affected by GST. The question is whether publishing houses on all sides of the tax issue can sort out their differences, and present a united alternative to GoI —one that preserves the key benefits of GST, but removes its unintended side-effects.
Every Monday I post some of the books I have received in the previous week. This post will be in addition to my regular blog posts and newsletter.
In today’s Book Post 23 included are some of the titles I received in the past few weeks and are worth mentioning and not necessarily confined to parcels received during the holiday season.
On the first Sunday of the year I publish an article in the Asian Age on the books to look out for in the year. This article was published on 6 January 2019. Here is the original url. I am c&p the article as well as the portions in red that for the lack of space had to be removed.
India is one of those rare markets that has registered a steady growth rate in book consumption.
In 2019, heavyweights like Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, Elif Shafak, Marlon James and Elizabeth Gilbert will be back with exciting literary fiction titles. Chitra Divakurni’s The Forest of Enchantment, is a retelling of the Ramayana as told by Sita a story of her joys and sorrows, heartbreak and resilience.
Jnanpith awardee Amitav Ghosh’s cli-fi (climate fiction) novel, Gun Island, is about a Brooklyn-based rare books dealer on a visit to his birthplace, Kolkata, where he gets entangled unexpectedly with an ancient Indian legend about the goddess of snakes, Manasa Devi. Cyrus Mistry’s The Prospect of Miracles promises to be a masterpiece of psychological characterisation.
Amnesty by Aravind Adiga is set in Australia and its central character is a Sri Lankan illegal immigrant. Novelist and essayist Mirza Waheed’s dazzling new novel, Tell Her Everything, is a heart-breaking story about medical and human ethics, and the corrosive nature of complicity.
Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh
Saikat Majumdar’s The Scent of God is set in an elite, all-boys’ boarding school run by a Hindu monastic order in late-20th century. Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali is a well-researched, ambitiously imagined historical novel set in the Andaman Islands, used as a prison first by the British and then the Japanese. Malayalam writer Paul Zacharia’s first novel in English, A Secret History of Compassion, is scheduled for release, as is journalist Jane Borges’ historical fiction, Bombay Balchao, which is set in South Bombay and spans eight decades.
Debut novels by dancer and literary critic Tishani Doshi, Small Days and Nights, Joanne Ramos’ The Farm about a luxurious surrogacy facility, Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s I, Anupam and a posthumous publication, Babu Bangladesh! by Numair A. Choudhury are the other titles to look forward to.
Translated literature promises rich pickings this year, especially Krishna Sobti’s majestic feminist novel on the aftermath of Partition, Gujarat Here, Gujarat There (trans. Daisy Rockwell). Historian Upinder Singh’s Political Violence in Ancient India is also being translated into Hindi. Journalist Poonam Saxena is editing and translating an anthology of The Greatest Hindi Stories Ever Told, while screenwriter Nasreen Rahman will translate all of Manto’s short stories.
There’s also Ship of Sorrows by Qurratulain Hyder (translated from Urdu by Saleem Kidwai), and My Life and Struggle: The Autobiography of Abdul Ghaffar Khan (trans. from Pukhto by Imtiaz Ahmad Sahibzada).
Nowhere People by Sabari Roy, translated by Adrita Mukherjee, set in turbulent post-Partition Bengal, tells a story of refugees, uprooted ruthlessly from old East Bengal, who struggle resolutely to forge a new life in an alien land. Five Harry Potter books are to be released in seven Indian languages.
Interestingly the translation landscape is maturing rapidly but the preference seems to be for books from Indian regional languages into English rather world literature into local languages.
Translations of popular international titles, like the Harry Potter novels into seven Indian languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam and Bengali and Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy into Malayalam are most welcome and speak of the growing clout of regional languages.
Non-fiction literature has immense variety. A Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches and Meditation by Toni Morrison spans four decades of her work interrogating the world around us. Suketu Mehta’s In This Land Is Their Land explains why the West is being destroyed not by immigrants but by the fear of immigrants. Gunjan Veda’s A Museum of Broken Teacups: Postcards from the Margins consists of stories of dalit communities that are keeping their indigenous art and craft alive against all odds.
Books on politics score high in 2019, especially with the imminent general elections.
Psephologists Dr Prannoy Roy with Dorab R. Sopariwala are co-authoring a book, while Ruchir Sharma will distil the wisdom of his observations and experiences of 25 years in Democracy on the Road. At 150 million, the 2014 general elections saw the highest number of first-time voters. The Young and the Restless: Youth and Politics in India by social activist Gurmehar Kaur follows the journeys of nine youth leaders.
Democracy on the Road by Ruchir Sharma
Equally relevant is Back to School: A Look at India’s Broken Education System by educator and political activist Atishi Marlena, and former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan’s Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave Society Behind, which discusses the socio-economic effects of globalisation on the state and people.
With the rise of the rightwing, it’s natural that writers are turning to investigate and interrogate not just its genesis in India, but also its impact. Vikram Sampath’s biography of Hindu Mahasabha president Veer Savarkar is in the works, as is the first English translation from Marathi of Spotlight on the RSS (Zot) by Raosaheb Kasbe. First published in May 1978, it was publicly burned by RSS activists. Constitutional expert A.G. Noorani’s RSS: A Menace to India examines why the RSS, the world’s largest fascist organisation, was set up.
My Son’s Inheritance: The Secret History of Lynching in India by Aparna Vaidik will examine mob violence in India and the world. Ziya Us Salam’s Lynch Files: The Forgotten Saga of Victims of Hate Crime will document stories of lynchers and their victims.
Lynch Files: The Forgotten Saga of Victims of Hate Crime by Ziya Us Salam
Mental health activist Amrita Tripathi will publish three books on depression, anxiety and the mental health of youth, while An Anthology of Voices on Mental Health, edited by Jhilmil Breckenridge and Namarita Kathait, focuses on survivor accounts. Lies We Tell by Himanjali Sankar is a novel about mental health, teen relationships and the challenges of friendship, while psychiatrist Shyam Bhat’s as yet untitled debut novel is about the pressures of modern life, depression and finding a reason to live.
Hey kiddo! by Jarrett J. Krosoczka is a phenomenal memoir as it recounts the upbringing of the author by his grandparents, his parents who skipped a generation, as his own mother was a heroin addict and an absent father. The tenth anniversary edition of Siddharth Sarma’s award-winning novel The Grasshopper’s Run is set in Kohima in 1944. Grenade by Alan Gratz is set in Okinawa of 1945 between the Americans and Japanese before the base was established.
Books on gender, such as Fearless Freedom by feminist activist Kavita Krishnan, explores the autonomy of a woman in personal and public spaces, as does Fearless: Stories of Amazing Women from Pakistan by Amnesh Shaikh-Farooqui.
Fearless: Stories of Amazing Women from Pakistan by Amnesh Shaikh-Farooqui
Biographies of successful businessmen always sell like hot cakes. Tim Cook: The Genius who took Apple to the next level by Leander Kahney will in all likelihood do extremely well. Books about travel are steady sellers. Two prominent titles are by Dom Moraes and Mark Tully, respectively.
Pankaj Mishra’s How Not to be a Man is about masculinity, young men and the age of anger. The Life and Times of Rukhmabai: Child Bride, Physician, Revolutionary is a definitive biography of Rukhmabai Raut. One of the first practicing women doctors in India, her landmark case about her marriage as a child bride in 1884 eventually led to the Age of Consent Act in 1891.
An exciting biography to look forward to is The Begum: A Portrait of Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, by Deepa Agarwal and Tahmina Aziz Ayub. It tells the story of Pakistan’s First Lady who began life as Irene Margaret Pant, a Christian, in Kumaon.
There’s also Rani of Jhansi: A Story of Courage, a good accompaniment to the movie, Manikarnika, starring Kangana Ranaut.
Science narratives seeping into lay literature is a recent publishing trend that is very exciting. In Superior, Angela Saini explores the concept of race, both past and present. Nandita Jayaraj and Aashima Dogra’s 30 Fantastic Adventures in Science profile Indian women scientists, while Samanth Subramanian’s The Last Man Who Knew Everything is a highly anticipated biography of J.B.S. Haldane.
Neil Degrasse Tyson’s Letters from an Astrophysicist covers everything from God to the history of science, from aliens to death.
Celebrity publishing is a certified money-spinner. Scheduled titles include two books on Amitabh Bachchan, Kaveree Bamzai’s The Three Khans which focuses on Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Salman Khan while simultaneously examining the Hindi film industry. Other books include Sanjay Dutt’s autobiography, memoirs by model-turned-athlete Milind Soman and Bollywood doyens like Deepti Naval, Rakesh Omprakash Mehra and Danny Denzongpa.
Apart from economist Montek Singh Ahluwalia’s Montek Remembers, lawyer Prashant Bhushan’s My Life in Movements, fashion designers Manish Malhotra and Masaba too are writing the story of their life and work.
Shahbaz Taseer has written an account of his nearly five-year-long captivity by Taliban and the ISIS. Lost to the World is the remarkable true story of Taseer’s time in captivity, and of his astonishing escape. The late journalist Kuldip Nayar’s ringside view of history in his memoir On Leaders and Icons From Jinnah to Modi is eagerly awaited.
Books on sports is an ever expanding genre. Mihir Bose’s The Nine Waves: The Extraordinary Story of Indian Cricket is bound to become the go-to history book on Indian cricket. Speed Merchants: The Story of Indian Pace Bowling (1888 to 2018) by Vijay Lokapally and Gulu Ezekiel is a good addition.
The Patient Assasin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj by Anita Anand
Pakistani batsman Shahid Afridi’s Game Changer is expected to be a candid memoir, as is Sanath Jayasuriya: A Biography of the legendary Sri Lankan cricketer. India’s Football Dream by Shantanu Gupta and Nikhil Paramjit Sharma traces the journey of Indian football, while journalist and filmmaker Sundeep Mishra’s Biography of Dutee Chand is about one of India’s greatest sprinting stars.
Books on Indian history are a rage. India: A Story through 100 Objects by Vidya Dehejia promises to be a visual treat. Which of Us Are Aryans? co-authored by Romila Thapar, Michael Witzel, Jaya Menon, Razib Khan and Kai Friese will be a seminal book. Journalist Sudeep Chakravarti’s Plassey: The Battle that Changed the Course of Indian History argues that the battle turned the fortunes of not one, but two countries. William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy charts the East India Company’s takeover of India and the birth of the British Raj. Sarbpreet Singh’s The Camel Merchant of Philadelphia and other Stories of the Lahore Court is an examination of Ranjit Singh and his times that focuses on a wide array of colourful characters who populated his court.
Political journalist Anita Anand’s The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj is an account of Udham Singh who swore to take revenge for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919. The Delhi Map Book by historian Swapna Liddle will deconstruct the map of Shahjahanabad made in 1846-47. The Deoliwallahs: Stories from the 1962 Chinese-Indian Internment by Joy Ma and Dilip D’Souza is based on interviews with survivors when India imprisoned 3,000 Chinese-Indians and sent them to a disused World War II POW camp in Deoli, Rajasthan. Vivek Agnihotri investigates the death of former Prime Minster Lal Bahadur Shastri in The Tashkent Files.
The story of billionaire Ma Huateng and the company he co-founded, Tencent, reads like a modern fairy tale. It’s tag line on the homepage of the company’s website is “Connecting People for a Greater Future”. LID Publishing that specialises in business books has published a biography of the 14th richest man in the world ( according to Forbes) in collaboration with China Translation and Publishing House.
It is a mesmerising tale of a young middle class computer programmer who driven by ambition, focused hard work and bold strategy realised the potential of the Internet in the 1990s. He also astutely recognised that the pager company he was employed in was a sunset industry but the future lay in instant communication using technology and the internet. Innovation was required in localising existing programmes as most of the population in China was monolingual whereas new apps and programmes being released in the global market were dependant on English as the mode of communication.
Through his grit and determination, astute strategy and long term vision, Ma Huateng was able to build a business empire that within years has grown into a billion dollar enterprise recognised worldwide. Its rise and influence in the global economy is unparalleled. He copies and innovates existing ideas to make his existing customers satisfied. His vast user base is what has enabled him to experiment and be bold in his strategies while also attracting investors who know there is no other player in Tencent in China who has such deep penetration and impressive impact in the country.
Ma Huateng & Tencent is a fascinating account of the man behind the firm who built his fortune on enabling instant messaging for Chinese users to creating a global brand integrating its PC and mobile gateways. Now Tencent is also known for its pan-entertainment services by offering a range of services from online games, books/publishing, reading websites to transforming the more successful works into movie projects. In its early days when word spread about Tencent and its instant messaging, it was registering an average of over 370,000 new users every day!
There is plenty to glean from this book about how to develop businesses, innovate and remain relevant to changing tastes and expectations of customers. Although it is a rivetting read there is plenty not said too about Tencent’s engagement with the Chinese government which as anyone who attempts do business in China is a must. Thus making this book a hagiography rather than a sharply told biography of a successful businessman.
Daisy Rockwell is a painter, writer and translator of Hindi and Urdu literature living in the United States. Her translations include Falling Walls, by Upendranath Ashk, Tamas, by Bhisham Sahni, and The Women’s Courtyard by Khadija Mastur. Her recent translation of The Women’s Courtyard is fascinating since it comes across as a very confident translation as if fiction about women and their domestic spaces is completely acceptable. A translation of the very same novel done nearly two decades earlier is equally competent but for want of a better word, it is far more tentative — at least reading it now. When I first read the translation of Aangan in 2003 it did not feel amiss in any manner but today comparing the two translations it is as if Daisy Rockwell’s translation of The Women’s Courtyard is imbued with a strength influenced by popular sentiments which is in favour of women particularly in the wake of the #MeToo movement. It may not have been done consciously by Daisy Rockwell but it is evident in the tenor of the text. The Women’s Courtyard is a pleasure to read.
I interviewed Daisy Rockwell via email. Here are excerpts:
1. Why
did you choose to translate Aangan?
A friend had
suggested I read it because of my interest in literature of that period and I
was also shifting my attention to novels written by women. I was struck by the
delicate, clean prose and the complex portrait Mastur painted of a young
woman’s life.
2. How
long did it take to translate and edit the text? I wonder how many
conversations you must have had with yourself Daisy while translating the
book?! Or was it just a task to be finished in time?
I don’t think frankly that anyone is usually sitting around impatiently waiting for one’s translation of a classic literary work. My deadlines are all my own. A project of that size usually takes about a year. I usually set myself a daily page quota which I don’t always meet. I had many conversations with myself about this book, and continue to do so. One of the great strengths of Mastur’s novels is that she doesn’t ever reveal everything. One is left pondering and questioning for a long time after. I still have questions that I can’t answer, and that I keep turning over in my mind. Translation issues less so than thoughts about Aliya’s interior universe and motivations.
3. While translating the text did you refer only to the original manuscript or did you constantly read other translations and commentaries on the text?
I consulted heavily with my friend Aftab Ahmed, who is also a translator, and who grew up in the same general area where the novel is set. I would check his responses with the previous translation in English when I was unsure of what was being said. Retranslation is interesting because the previous translation gives you an interlocutor. Even if you don’t agree with the choices the other translator(s) made, you learn to look at words and sentences from a different perspective if you are stuck on something confusing. Every translation is different, word for word, paragraph for paragraph, so sometimes just rearranging things jogs one’s ability to understand. Mastur’s style is not that difficult in terms of grammar, but there are historical items that are hard to find dictionary definitions for and that I had to research. Usually it has to do with terms for items of clothing or architectural details.
4. Do you feel translating works from Hindi/Urdu into English involves a translation exercise that is very different to that of any other language translation?
I think there would be parallels from translating into English from other South Asian languages. A big challenge is that the syntax is the opposite—English is what is known as a ‘right-branching language’ syntactically. Indic languages are left-branching. This is also true of Japanese. When the syntax has to be flipped it can be a challenge, because sometimes that syntactical difference can even be reflected at the paragraph level and one has to switch the order of some of the sentences in the paragraph. Indic languages also tend to have many impersonal constructions whereas English prefers active verbs and subjects. Think of ‘usko laga jaise…’ as opposed to ‘she felt as though…’. Because of this one has to continuously change voice without trampling on the original meaning.
5. Why did you translate the title “Aangan” as “The Women’s Courtyard” when the literal translation of “Aangan” is “inner courtyard”?
The translation of
the title is ultimately up to the editor and the publicity team. I get to veto
options I dislike, but ultimately they choose the title based on concerns that
are sometimes outside of the translator’s purview. “Aangan” couldn’t be called
‘The Inner Courtyard’ because that is the title of the previous translation and
they wanted to distinguish them. An ‘aangan’ is not technically just for women,
but in this context, it is the domain of women. I assume they added in
‘women’s’ to invoke the importance of women’s experiences to the novel.
6.While
translating Aangan did you choose to retain or leave out
certain words that existed in Urdu but did not use in English? Is this a
conundrum that translators often have to face — what to leave and what to
retain for the sake of a clear text?
AK Ramanujan, with
whom I was fortunate to take a graduate seminar on translation shortly before
his death, pointed out to me that in a long novel you have the opportunity to
teach the readers certain words. I take this as my maxim and add to it the
notion that you cannot teach them many words, only a few, so you must make a
choice as to what you are going to make the readers learn and grow accustomed
to. There has been some discomfort with the fact that I translated many kinship
terms into English and left only a few of the original terms. I did this
because there are way more kinship terms in literature by men than in
literature by women. Kinship terms are all ‘relative’ in the sense that one
person’s bahu is another person’s saas is
another person’s jithani is another person’s bari
mausi. If all these are left in and no one has any given names it is
extremely perplexing to readers who do not know the language fluently. I will
often leave a word in and teach it by context but not refer to that person by
myriad other kinship terms. For example the main character’s mother could be
‘Ma’, or ‘Amma’, but I am not going to give the mother all her other kinship
terms because that’s too much to ask. I want the reader who knows no Hindi or
Urdu to feel comfortable enough to keep reading the book. Adding a glossary of terms
doesn’t really help because most people don’t sign up for a language and
kinship lesson when they pick up a novel to read. Readers that do know these
terms fluently tend to speak a style of English in their homes that
incorporates the Hindi and Urdu kinship terms, so they think of these as a part
of Indian English, but it’s not at all the case for Tamil speakers or Bangla
speakers, who all have their own kinship terms that they use in English. My
goal is to create a translation that can be enjoyed by people not just in India
and South Asia, but all around the world. It’s a tricky business but I attempt
to cater to everyone as much as I can.
My policies on what to leave in the original language are not created on behalf of readers who are fluent in these languages, but for people who are not. My Bangladeshi friends, for example, do not know what the words saas and bahu mean. We have these words in English—mother-in-law and daughter-in-law–so I translate them. An example of a word I did not translate was takht. A takht is a platform covered with a sheet where family members sit/sleep/gather/eat/make paan, and generally do everything. I decided that this was a word the readers would need to learn from context. Why? Because it occurs on almost every page, is the center of the action, and most importantly, it has no English equivalent.
7. How modern is your translation of Aangan? For instance did you feel that the times you were translating the novel in where sensitivity and a fair understanding of women’s issues exists far more than in it ever did in previous decades helped make your task “easier”?
I try to inhabit a linguistic system that is non-anachronistic when I translate the voice of a novel. I did not use #metoo-era language, I used a more formal register and kept it less modern. I think infusing the language with a contemporary sensibility would ruin the finely drawn portrayals in the original text.
8. In your brilliant afterword you refer to the first English translation of Aangan done by Neelam Hussain for Simorgh Collective and later republished by Kali for Women/ Zubaan. Why do you refer to your translation as a “retranslation” and not necessarily a “new translation”?
No particular reason—I guess I think of them as the same thing. If I say ‘retranslation’ I am nodding to the hard work done by the path-breaker. The first translation will always be the hardest one.
9. You are a professional translator who has worked on various projects but have also translated works by women writers. What has been your experience as a translator and a woman in working on texts by women writers?
I have translated
this novel by Khadija Mastur as well as her later novel, Zameen (earth);
my translation of Krishna Sobti’s most recent novel is soon to come out from
Penguin India’s Hamish Hamilton imprint as A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat
There. I am working on a translation of Geetanjali Shree’s 2018 novel Ret
Samadhi (tomb of sand) and Usha Priyamvada’s 1963 novel Pachpan
Kambhe Lal Divarein (fifty-pillars, red walls).
When you translate a text, you spend way more time on it than most other people ever will, sometimes including the author him or herself! I got tired of translating patriarchy, misogyny and objectification of women, which are all par for the course in men’s writing. For the past year, I have mostly stopped reading male authors at all, because the more I read and translate women, the lower goes my tolerance for the male gaze. We don’t realize how we’ve been programmed to accept objectification and silencing of women in men’s writing until we stop reading it. It has been very fulfilling translating these fine works by women and inhabiting the detailed layers of female subjectivity that they offer readers.
10. Do you think that the translation in the destination language must read smoothly and easily for the reader or should you be true to the original and incorporate in your translated text as far as possible many of the words and culturally-specific phrases used in the original text?
I think I partially answered this above, but I do not believe that a translation should be so difficult or “under-translated” that a reader puts it down out of frustration. Difficulty and cultural specificity in the original text suffuses many aspects of the writing and is not limited to certain pieces of terminology.
11.The explosion in translated literature available worldwide now has also coincided with the rise of technological advancements in machine translation and neural networks. Thereby making immediate translations of online texts easily available to the reader/consumer. Do you think in the near future the growth in automated translation will impact translations done by humans and vice versa? How will it affect market growth for translated literature?
To be honest, machine translation is horribly inaccurate because it misses nuance and does not understand human experience, culture or history. I do not believe that AI will ever replace human translators, at least when it comes to literature.
[ JBR: Interesting since I have come across arguments that say making texts available is the only factor that matters. Nothing else. This is where Google ‘s neural technology is breaking boundaries. But I agree with you — the human brain will continue to be the supercomputer. It’s a beauty!]
Here is the entire note by the translator, Daisy Rockwell, from her recent translation of Khadija Mastur’s Aangan, translated as The Women’s Courtyard. It has been published by Penguin Random House, 2018.
The note has been excerped with the publisher’s permission.
The Women’s Courtyard has been translated before as The Inner Courtyard, by Neelam Hussain,
and published by Kali for Women in 2001. Retranslation is still a rarity in the
context of modern South Asian literature but the practice enriches the field of
translation, offering readers different prisms through which to read a text.
When I choose to retranslate a work, it is usually because I feel I have
something substantially different to offer from the previous translator or
translators. All the same, I draw comfort and inspiration from the work of
previous translators, who may have seen things differently than I did and send
me scurrying back to my dictionaries and expert friends for more information.
Khadija Mastur’s writing style is spare and elegant. Unlike many Urdu authors she does not favour heavily ornamented writing and turns of phrase full of literary allusions. I felt inspired to reproduce this clarity in English, after seeing that Hussain’s translation struggled with this quality, attempting to elevate the language to a more formal register of English than was used in Urdu. See, for example, Mastur’s description of Safdar Bhai, and the two contrasting translations, below:
Mastur:
Safdar Bhai kitne vajīha magar kaisī
maskīn sūrat ke the.
Rockwell:
Safdar looked so handsome, but so meek.
Hussain:
How tall and well built Safdar Bhai had been and yet how diffident his mien.
Not only
does Hussain divide descriptive adjectives into phrases, but in the case of the
second phrase, maskīn sūrat ke, she
introduces a flowery and somewhat archaic-sounding descriptor, ‘how diffident
his mien’.
These
embroideries of the original, in which Hussain seeks to somehow augment the
original text, stretch even to ordinary narrative sentences, such as the following:
Mastur:
Dūr kahīñ se ghaṛiyāl ke gyārah bajāne kī
āvāz ā rahī thī.
Rockwell:
From somewhere far off came the sound of the bell striking eleven.
Hussain:
A distant clock struck the hour. The sound of its measured strokes rolled over
her. It was the eleventh hour of the night.
Here,
Hussain’s rendition conveys a breathless dramatic tension that is absent from
the original, which merely alerts us to the passage of time.
Hussain
also occasionally inserts new ideas into the text, such as below, where she
actually adds foreshadowing to the original sentence that describes Aliya
worrying about her sister Tehmina Apa:
Mastur:
Rāt kā qissā bār bār yād ātā aur voh
anjām ke khauf se ek lafz bhī na paṛh saktī thī.
Rockwell:
She kept thinking about what had occurred the night before, and was so fearful
of what might happen she couldn’t read a single word.
Hussain:
The inexorable end of Apa’s fated love was before her eyes and she was unable
to concentrate on her work.
Mastur
merely writes of Aliya’s ‘anjām kā khauf,’
her fear of the outcome, whereas Hussain announces to us that Tehmina’s ‘fated
love’ is coming to an ‘inexorable end’. This embellishment on the original text
both spoils the suspense of the story and romanticizes Tehmina’s love for
Safdar by referring to it as a ‘fated love’.
Strangely—perhaps
by accident—a pivotal passage is missing from Hussain’s translation. I can
attest as a translator that it is far too easy to drop bits of a text in the
course of translation. The phone rings, the dog must be let out, one’s
attention is divided—and there goes a paragraph. Usually these mistakes can be
rectified in editing, when one notices that something is missing or when a
transition between paragraphs makes no sense. An extra set of eyes helps too.
In this case, the passage in question is Jameel’s first physical assault on
Aliya. Aliya has been reading about the horrors of Ghengis Khan and his army,
when Jameel comes to speak with her. She tries to make him go away, or stick to
the topic of her exams, when he grabs her and kisses her (or more—the text is
not entirely clear on this point, but it reads clearly as sexual assault).
After this she feels shaken and defiled.
Finally, language changes, cultural norms change and politics change. All great works deserve multiple translations, and English can only be enriched by multiple versions of classic South Asian texts. With this fresh translation, a new generation of readers will be introduced to The Women’s Courtyard, and perhaps a few who know some Urdu will take the plunge and try reading the book in the original.
Lists are subjective. Reading lists are even more difficult to cobble. Today my list consists of the following books. A few days later it may change ever so slightly. But these are the books that have stayed with me over the months.
