TRANSLATION, INTERPRETATION AND TRANSCREATION

Niaz Zaman

Translation from one lan­guage to another is burdened with difficulties at the best of times - even for a person who knows both the source and target languages perfectly. Syed Sajjad Husain, for example, whose com­mand of English was enviable, found it difficult to translate Kazi Nazrul Islam's " Bidrohi " because of the poem's "dazzling array of images and metaphors drawn from numerous sources, Indian, Islamic, Greek, and even industrial, strung together in apparent disregard of logic." He went on to note that a literal rendering of "the repetitions, inconsistencies, and paradoxes in Bengali" could not con­vey the superb beauty of the poem but might even expose it to the ridicule of foreign readers not famil­iar either with the idiom of the Bengali language or with non-­Western mythology!' Professor Hussain therefore took the liberty of "pruning" away lines which he thought would not translate well and also reduced the repetitions which he thought would tire the reader's ear in English.

Professor Husain says nothing about the difficulty of translating what is untranslatable: the rhythm and vigour of the Bangla original. Many translators do not even attempt to translate poetry into poetry, but settle for a form of lined prose. However, the problems of translation are com­pounded when translators 'speed translate,' believe that in translating poetry there is no need for grammar, or that, because the target language - the language into which a work is being translated - is not the transla­tor's mother tongue, the translator may be forgiven all mistakes of gram­mar and idiom.

Writing about the problems that attend translating from one language to another, the poet Amiya Chakravarty noted in a paper pre­sented at a PEN Conference in New York in 1971, that the resonance of a language and its cultural undertones are often lost in translation. He stressed that in order to have a "valid" translation; the work must be "done in the language learnt by a poet at his mother's knee, a poet for whom it is the language of his sub­conscious." It is, of course, this same argument that critics have often used for creative writing, itself: No one can be a poet in a language he/she did not learn at birth. Of course, this has been proven wrong. Joseph Conrad, one of the masters of the English lan­guage, whose texts form part of the required reading at all major univer­sities, had Polish as his first lan­guage; Samuel Beckett changed the face of world drama by writing En Attendant Godot in French before he translated it into English as Waiting for Godot ; Vladimir Nabokov, whose Lolita should be read for the delight­ful play upon the English language rather than for its story, was Russian. True, these are exceptions that prove the rule. So was Amiya Chakravarty wrong?

Yes and no.

In a very famous sentence in Kanthapura , the Indian novelist Raja Rao regretted the dichotomy that the English language had created for the writer. As Raja Rao said, he was writing in English, but English was not his mother tongue, it was not the language of his emotions. Today, seventy years after Raja Rao penned those lines, English has become the first language, the language of creativity for dozens of writers in India and Pakistan and for a very few in Bangladesh.

In 1981, Salman Rushdie won the Booker Prize far Midnight 's Children -and Indian writing in English has never been the same again.

There are also young Pakistani writers who hold their own against Indian writers and are also being published in India . Nevertheless, in both creative writing in English and ~ English translation, India far surpassed its neighbours both in quantity and quality.

Why have the Indians surpassed Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in English writing? The answer is rather obvious actually. English, more than their national language Hindi, is their lingua franca. India never discarded English as Bangladesh did. Unlike Pakistan where English is the language of the elite, in India English is very much the language of the middle class as well. Indian movie stars that make their living by romancing in Hindi, speak perfect English when called upon to do so. English is now an Indian language as it is not for Pakistan or Bangladesh . It is through English that a Punjabi speaker reads the novels of Sunil Gangopadhyay.

A good translator is a person for whom the language of translation is also the language of creativity. One cannot be a good translator in a lan­guage one has not mastered and made one's own. All poets may not be good translators, but no one can be a good translator who is not a poet a himself/herself. All good translations must convey not just the meaning of the original in another language but must exploit the resources of the target language to convey not an exact equivalent of the verbal pleasure of the original piece of writing but in an equitable way. When will Bangladeshis translate poetry or stories into English without apologising for their shortcomings? When English becomes the language of their emotions, when they are obliged by circumstances to speak in English even in their sleep, when people in their sleeping and waking moments who a speak English surround them. Or when they are truly bilingual, switching from one language to the other with ease. Bangladeshis, like Indians or educated Pakistanis, are by their circumstances bilingual or trilingual. (As Professor Rafiqul Islam says, most Bangladeshis also have a regional dialect/language.) Unfortunately, this bilingualism is not always good enough in most instances. It is the exceptional Bangladeshis like Professor Serajul Islam Choudhury or Professor Manzoorul Islam who can write with equal ease in both Bangla and English.

The difficulties of translation range beyond knowing both the lan­guages well. One must also know the cultures of both languages, the tradi­tions of the people who read the writing in the original and those who will read it in the translation. Do writers who know both languages translate their own works well? There was Tagore whose own trans­ lations of Gitanjali have been criticised for monotony of style and diction, for retaining only about a third of the poems of the original Gitanjali , for drawing the rest from his earlier works, for only imperfectly paraphrasing the poems in the English version. Much of the force in the original was lost in the English. Yeats, who had enthusiastically sup­ ported Tagore, declared that Tagore knew no English. He went on to note "no Indian knows English. Nobody can write with music and style in a language not learned in childhood and since then the lan­guage of his thought. "Tagore himself felt the weakness of his translation and wrote to Amiya Chakravarty, ‘I have done great injustice to the trans­lations. I could be so careless and insolent simply because they were my own writings."

The problem of being "insolent" was not Tagore's alone. When a cre­ative writer is good enough in anoth­er language to translate it himself / herself there is the under­standable desire not to give it to someone else who might not under­stand the nuances of the writing. However, as we see in the case of Qurratulain Hyder, the Urdu writer, when she was translating Aag Ka Darya , the writer takes liberties with the original text that a translator can­not. Hyder had written the novel in the 1950s, sitting in Karachi . When she came to translate it years later, she was back in India . She thus came to the work of translation a very dif­ferent person from the one she had been when she wrote the Urdu origi­nal. Hyder - or her publishers - were aware of these changes: the fide page notes that the book has been "tran­screated from the original Urdu by the author."

When the writer is also translator, the desire to change-perhaps to improve but also to cater to a differ­ent audience -is also apparent in Syed Waliullah's Tree Without Roots , the English rendition of Lal Shalu . Those who have read Syed Waliullah's Lal Shalu in the original will be surprised at the changes that the translators made in the English text.

Tree Without Roots lists the names of four translators: Anne-Marie Thibaud, Qaisar Saeed, Jeffrey Gibian, and Malik Khayyam: Anne­-Marie had studied Bangla, but not well enough to translate from Bangla directly. In " Wali, My Husband as I Knew Him " an unpublished account of her life with Syed Waliullah, she noted that she had translated this novel "from Wali's own translations into English." Anne-Marie does not refer, to the other translator's mentioned in the English version.

At the same time she pointed out the changes that Syed Waliullah made in the story for the purposes of the translation. Unlike the recent movie version of Lal Shalu , Majeed is not a fundamentalist but as Anne-Marie notes a "crook"- though, as she adds one "driven by hunger."

In the French version - as in the English version which Anne-Marie used for her translation, Majeed somewhat redeems himself. In Anne­-Marie's words, however, towards the end, when the flood threatens to drown the mazar, he decides to remain next to it, as if caught by his own be, not because he is a believer has created, thus attaining a certain grandeur. ` In the Bangla version, Majeed is not alone at the end. He tells the crowd of people who ask him what they should do, "Na farmani koriyo na. Khodar upar towakkul rakho" (Do not be ungrateful: Have faith in God). In Tree Without Roots , howev­er, Majeed is alone at the end. He leaves both his wives at Khaleque's place, asking him to look after them. He then returns alone to the mazar in the midst of the rising flood waters, "a frail human speck standing alone on the edge of a vast expanse of water that merged into the infinite vastness of the sky”.

This change in Majeed's char­acter, apart from lending him certain grandeur, also makes him one of Wallullah's lonely heroes. At the same time, it is possible that Waliullah, writing when Islamic fundamentalism hadn't raised its head; when the enemy of the West was not Islam, but Communism, was doing two things for two audi­ences. For his Bengali audience, like his contemporary Muslim Bengali writers, he wrote about the hypocrisy of persons who exploited religion for their own purposes. Waliullah's significance is that he also understood why Majeed exploited religion: it was the only way to earn a living in a land steeped in religious supersti­tions. However when Waliullah was writing for a Western audi­ence; Majeed became a symbol of the Bengali and perhaps for this reason Waliullah could not wholly condemn him.

That Waliullah had an eye on his Western audience is also obvi­ous from the opening of Tree Without Roots . The English ver­sion has two pages of description for the Bangla original's single opening paragraph. This change was very obviously made for read­ers unfamiliar with Bengal .

The desire to change, to inter­pret, to transcreate becomes even more acute when there is a gap of several years between the writing and the translation. Perhaps these forces were also at work when Syed Waliullah was translating Lal Shalu . He had written the Bengali version in the mid-forties and took up the translation in the mid-six­ties. The man who wrote Lal Shalu was not the same person who translated the book into English. The East Bengali who had trav­elled only as far as Kolkata during the writing of the book had become a world traveller by the 1960s. Thus when he came to translate Lal Shalu he brought his changed sensibilities to the task. (The same thing happens when a writer tries to edit a book after several years.)

However, is a writer justified in making changes when translating his/her own work? Some writers when publishing a second edition of their work cannot resist making changes. The American dramatist Tennessee Williams was notorious for doing so and his Battle of Angels , underwent at least four different major revisions so that each play seems an entirely new one. From the example of Tagore, Waliullah, and Hyder it would seem that writers are their own worst translators and perhaps another person, well versed in both languages but better in the target language than the source language would make an ideal translator - provided that he or she has the makings of a poet him­self or herself. Of course, there is the example of Samuel Beckett who translated his own work. However, Beckett first wrote in French, which was not his first language, before translating it into English. Perhaps the type of drama he was writing had something to do with it. Also perhaps the writ­ing and the translation took place near enough in time for the writer I I and the translator to be the same person.

Translators are not just doing a useful job, being a medium to convey what has been expressed in one language in another. They are also, like the original writer, participating in the act of creating a work of art. Unless they take as much pains in translating some one's writing as the writer took in, writing the original, their transla­tion will be pedestrian. At the PEN workshop, a Translator's Bill of Rights was drawn up. It is a docu­ment that all writers who wish to have their writings translated should read as well as all transla­tors. All I would change is the sin­gle male "translator" to "transla­tors." The Bill of Rights recognises that the translator must always bear in mind that he or she is translating someone's else work and must be true to it: "The trans­lator's chief obligation is to create the work in a new language with the appropriate music and the utmost response to the silences of the original."

However, the Bill of Rights also stresses the importance of the translator's work. This means of course that translators think of the unity of the piece of translation, that they have imagination and that they do their work so faithfully and imaginatively that they become creators of a new work. Translation puts demands on the translator but good translators of literary works are artists, not just skilled craftsmen.

The translator has a privilege but also a responsibility. And when Bengalis-who are fortunate enough to know at least two languages-strive for a true bilingualism, there will be quality English translations of Bengali works by Bengali translators.

The writer is Professor, Department of English, University of Dhaka . She is also a reputable translator and has edited several anthologies.