Literary translations are portals that open up new sights, sounds, flavours and worlds for the reader to explore and embrace the Other. But can an international prize breathe new life in a publishing world gasping for commercial success?
Let us hope that with the stamp of the Booker Prize on Geetanjali Shree’s novel, it will be more present in the storefront of book-sellers. And after it, other books translated from the bhashas
Earlier, we Indians had to translate into English to reach the West. But now it’s people from the West who are attracted to Hindi literature and are translating our works, says Gulzar
A Bitter-Sweet Experience in the World of Literary Translations: In the global Anglophone market, only the novel and big non-fiction travel. Our best poetry languishes. Let us return to poetry.
The International Booker Prize for Geetanjali Shree's Ret Samadhi put the spotlight on literature and translations, but for publishers, they often fail to even provide the necessary breathing space to stay afloat. For a majority of publishing houses, both indie and big, translation work has to be subsidised.
For years, Indian publishers have sought government help that will allow them to pay translators a decent wage for their work so that literature can speak beyond the borders
'Like some people are driven to write, some people are driven to translate out of an urge to share something of literary value,' says V Ramaswamy who began translating accidentally in 2005.
For years, Bengali has had dominance among other Indian languages when it came to literature translated into other languages. For the late 19th and early 20th century writers, the examples of Bengali writers getting translated in other Indian languages are more than literature from other Indian languages getting translated into Bengali.
The rich world of Marathi literature has been greatly let down by translators who lack creativity and publishers who lack conviction
With a view to bringing voices from faraway places, especially of the marginalised and the forgotten, we have had poetry, stories and reports translated from Hindi, Punjabi, Assamese, Tamil, and Kashmiri in recent issues. We will strive to enrich readers with more regional poetry, literature and stories from all across the country in the coming editions.
Of finding new cultures in translated Russian novels, having a private language and the joy when these two worlds meet
To deliberately misquote Dilip Chitre’s poem Lost Images, a lifetime is not enough to realise what it means to be a translator
‘The translator is the traitor’, they say in Italian. Such was the distrust and paranoia in Europe for translations that scholars were executed for translating the holy word. Five centuries later, an Indian author won a major literary award in the UK and shared it with her American translator, making it an apt occasion to discuss the status of translation in world literature.
'There are so many languages to learn, we all are grateful for careful, serious translations of texts in languages that we ourselves cannot read,' says Wendy Doniger.
