“You don’t have your own field to plough, so you go to plough in other people’s fields,” said a commentator about literary translators, in the context of an incident that was discussed widely on the Malayalam social media. Maria, Just Maria, Kerala writer Sandhya Mary’s debut novel that I had translated, had just won the Book of the Year award at the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters (MBIFL). The organisers called me, congratulated me, and asked me to send a video with a message accepting the award. This was played at the awards function. But it was revealed later that the award was only for the author and not the translator. Their initial social and mainstream media coverage also chose to leave out any mention of the translator. Several Malayalam writers wrote public posts about this exclusion. I too wrote an open letter. In the end, the organisers agreed to revise their decision, and the award was shared equally between the author and the translator.
The posts received hundreds of comments from writers, readers, public intellectuals, and random folk who, well, like to comment. Reading the supportive comments was, of course, encouraging, soothing. Equally important was the vitriol; it revealed widely held misconceptions about the idea of literary translation, the act and art of translation, and the role of the translator in the literary ecosystem.
Full marks to the commentator above for his imagination that compares literary translation to ploughing a field. Unpicking it reveals the assumption that translators are not, can never be, writers in our own right. Part of this ignorance comes from apathy, the lack of interest in the translator. And part of it is the fact that translators are often made to remain anonymous in the ecosystem of literary publishing. In an essay “Superlichen”, Jennifer Croft, author and translator who won the Man Booker International Prize with Olga Tokarczuk remarked:
“Our contemporary notion of authority depends upon the existence – still – of a single trustworthy individual. In literature, this figure is the author, the inimitable person who chooses and disposes of words. In this mystical-commercial understanding of literature, translators are necessarily suspect … When translators are truly necessary, they’re ideally neither seen nor heard.”
Another commentator, mildly famous in Kerala’s intellectual circles, compared literary translation to taking money to write PhD theses for other people. “They take the money. But they don’t then come back and insist that they are also given a PhD.”
When it was suggested to him that the two are necessarily different, including the fact one of them –having other people write your PhD thesis – is illegal, he insisted that these were differences of opinion about literary translation. Challenging them would make literature “undemocratic.” A third opinion expressed was this: “You have been paid your kooli. So, what are you making a ruckus for now?” Another quoted the Intellectual Property Act and swore to “teach translators a lesson” through the legal route, obviously oblivious to the fact that the translation rights are with the translator unless they sign it away.
Translators are often looked upon as providers of a service, like ploughing a field, for which they will be given “kooli,” a daily wage. After that, they have no claim to the harvest. (We will, for the time being, keep aside the necessary conversation about asserting the rights of people who work the land to the fruits of their labour). This service is understood as taking words from one language to the other. I asked Daisy Rockwell, author, artist, and translator of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, the first book from an Indian language to win the International Booker Prize, about the misconceptions she encounters. “The most common misconception is definitely a firm belief that literary translation is an act of word-for-word literal rendering from one language to another,” she told me. “Words and phrases are surrounded by invisible forcefields. These can contain countless things: history, culture, linguistics, emotions, religion … A literary translator works to bring these invisible factors into the translation, not just each word and its literal meaning.”
Srinath Perur, writer and translator of the immensely successful Ghachar Ghochar and Sakina’s Kiss by Vivek Shanbhag, echoed this: “The most common misconception I encounter, usually in an implied way, is the idea that translation is a somewhat brisk and mechanical act. I wish this were true.”
Translators work at the level of words, true, but, as Edith Grossman said, they can never be faithful to words and syntax because these work differently in different languages. What is often overlooked is that the art of translation demands of translators expertise in both languages, awareness of the gap between languages, and felicity to take meaning, intonation, emotion, style, intention, and a whole host of what makes the text what it is in one language into another.
I have encountered any number of people in Kerala who quite firmly believe that their language is untranslatable, while also being avid readers of translated literature into Malayalam. This reverential essentialisation, I am finding out, is not specific to Malayalam. It is reflected in the way people view translators and the work they do, and in perhaps the most widely held misconception –that something is, by necessity, lost in translation. Arunava Sinha, award-winning translator of over seventy books from and into Bangla, told me: “To correct it, we need to translate even more, so that they realise they can’t live without translations.”
The debate around loss and gain in translation never really takes us anywhere. In the end, what matters is, as Croft puts it, the “afterlife” of the work. In an interview with Cat Acree for BookPage, she comments that: “What we do [as translators] enriches the cultural ecosystem, the linguistic ecosystem. The original text doesn’t even really matter that much. What matters is this potentially really lovely afterlife that [a work] can have, and all of the echoes and reverberations that it can have throughout that ecosystem.”
But translations are often seen as inferior to the original. Nandini Krishnan, writer and translator from Tamil, recent winner of the Crossword Book Popular Choice award for her translation of Charu Nivedita’s Conversations with Aurangzeb remarked: “People assume that the original is somehow more beautiful than the translated work. And they don’t even hesitate to tell me this, without a thought for how offensive it is.”
It reflects the inherent suspicion that people hold of translations. A suspicion that they forget when they read and enjoy Murakami, Garcia Marquez, Ferrante, and a hundred other writers in languages other than the original in which it was written. In the afterlife provided by translation, readers are able to imagine that a book might transform into something exquisite, perhaps even more beautiful than the original. But, in my experience, it is a credit rarely extended to translations from their own languages.
There have been shifts in the way translators are credited for the work we do. In India, there is now more visibility, and despite the kind of responses discussed above, more appreciation. But significant changes still need to happen. Krishnan reminded me of the recent Crossword Book awards. “Both of us won the award in the translation category. It was our words and the authors’ stories. Both our authors felt we should get equal prize money. And yet we were given half less than the authors.”
Reviews rarely mention translators, and when they do, it is usually a sentence with an adjective –meticulous, able, brilliant, confused, clunky… Importantly, however, the lack of equal credit starts with the publisher. Translators end up doing a whole range of labour, some of which begins before the book is published. “The most frustrating aspect is having to convince publishers to publish a translation,” Sinha told me. “Not on the basis of the quality of the book, but by providing them with an elaborate narrative which contains everything but the actual book.” In her interview with Rhian Sasseen in The Paris Review, Croft talks about having to “shop around” Flights, the translation of Tokarczuk’s book that won them the Man Booker International Prize in 2018, for over a decade. The eventual publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions, still left her name out of the cover – a common phenomenon in the publishing world that led her and author Mark Haddon to start the international campaign Translators on the Cover.
Krishnan talked about a frustration that many translators share. “Publishers wax poetic about this mission to broadcast ‘unheard voices.’ But why not do this grand service themselves, and pay the author and the translator full individual advances against full individual royalties, rather than have them halve it?”
One commentator on social media asked: “Why talk so much about money when translators also claim that they do this because of their love of literature?”
The answer is simple. Every single word that one reads in a translated text has been written by the translator, just as the author has written every single word in the original text. The translated text, then, is a new, rewritten text, a collaboration, co-authorship, between the author and the translator. Disparities in advances, royalties, and prize money institutionalise the misconception that literary translation and translators as inferior to original texts and authors. The status quo will continue until all of us – translators, authors, readers, and publishers – speak up together.
The devaluing of translators is also because of the fact that not many people are aware of the additional – affective and physical – labour that translators do alongside our creative work. We are often called on to do the work of editors, especially when translating debut writers because many of our regional language publishers do little or no editorial work on the manuscripts submitted to them. Except in the rare cases when the translation publisher commissions a translator, we do the unpaid, labour-intensive work of preparing a proposal including sample translations. We act as literary agents, publicists, therapists, and spokespersons for the original language and literature. And if the author does not know English, some of us continue the translation relationship by translating their responses to interviews and articles about the book. The exhausting task of actively working and speaking up for the dignity and recognition of translators has also fallen to us.
And yet, there is hope, as Perur reminded me. There are more readers for literary translations, and an appetite to publish them, at least in India. “Translators are more visible these days. So, interested readers will hopefully end up learning more about how literary translation works.”
I will hold on to that hope.
This article first appeared on Crow & Colophon, a substack of The Bombay Literary Magazine.
Disclosure: Arunava Sinha edits Books and Ideas section of Scroll.
