The first week of August this year (August 5 – 9) brought with it a chance to visit Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, an unlikely setting for a weeklong Hindi-Urdu workshop, as part of a new initiative begun under the banner of South Asian Literature in Translation (SALT) by the University of Chicago for emerging translators across South Asia.
As someone who began translation more than a decade ago without any formal training in the discipline, attending a workshop along with forty other translators was a first, as I had only attended a lone translation workshop a few years ago at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) which was primarily geared to the translation and production of poetry, and that too in a distinct Pakistani setting.
The new translation initiative by SALT reflects the growing power of translation as a specialist subject in its own right. While in the West, there is a long and strong tradition of the value and recognition of translators, we in South Asia, are only recently waking up to the importance of literary translations.
For example, it was during one such session on Anglophone publishing that we learnt from the Words Without Borders representative that in the West the well-known translator Jennifer Croft had led a campaign for her name to be acknowledged and credited as a translator on the front cover of the translated book whereas in Pakistan even some learned critics, writers and publishers opine that it is fine for the translator’s name to be revealed on the first page of the book rather than on the cover. Hence the immense importance of initiatives like SALT.
The forty-odd attendees were placed in five workshops devoted to Hindi-Urdu, Bangla, Tamil, Prose and Poetry. These workshops were led by renowned translators like Daisy Rockwell, who became world-famous when her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Hindi novel Rait Samadhi, Tombs of Sand, won the International Booker Prize in 2022; Arunava Sinha who led the Bangla workshop; and Ranjit Hoskote, the translator of the Kashmiri mystical poet Lal Ded and most recently, the Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir.
The early conversations in the Hindi-Urdu workshop were about trying to rewrite a text such as a poem for a specialist audience with the limitation that it had to be in unrhyming lines. Then the same poem was to be rewritten making it sound romantic or horrific and then one was asked to translate the poem for a reading culture that did not use verbs before finally imagining an audience that would be potential readers of literary translation given a specific locale.
The locations selected or given to the groups within the workshop were Turkey, Nigeria, Singapore and Dubai. As the days progressed, one began to understand and appreciate the value of these initial activities immensely especially when the workshop attendees, divided into various groups began to break down the short story we eventually got down to edit for clarity and re-translate until we got a translation which was as consensual as it was concise.
One of the highlights of the week-long SALT workshop was the session on a conversation with the Sri Lankan Man Booker Prize winners Shehan Karunatilaka and Geetanjali Shree. One came away enlightened with Shree’s observation that ‘A good translation is a replica which is different’ but also surprised by her very candid admission that Tomb of Sand had done more for her Hindi original Rait Samadhi than the latter hand on its own, with more people turning to the Hindi original after the success enjoyed by its English translation. One wonders how popular Rait Samadhi has become in Urdu given that two different translators have translated it into Urdu in both India and Pakistan, from Hindi and English respectively!
A great advantage for us in the Hindi-Urdu workshop was the presence of the writer Asghar Wajahat, a distinguished Hindi scholar, fiction writer, playwright and scriptwriter whose short story Chaadar we attempted to translate, edit and re-translate in the workshop throughout the week.
As we struggled to translate, rework, rewrite, edit and produce a final version of the translated short story to be presented in the group presentation on the final day of the workshop, there were heated but passionate and enthusiastic debates over the import and importance of a particular word, expression or metaphor. Perhaps this group work and collaboration was what the SALT workshop organisers wished to emphasise in the first place – the value of group work in reaching a consensus over the final version of the translated text.
Outside the translation workshop itself, the session bringing all the translation mentors together to share their experiences was the best. Our mentor Daisy Rockwell, famous for her ‘ten draft rule’ for the number of drafts produced before finalising a translation issued nothing less than a ‘five-point manifesto’ where she irreverently turned the received wisdom of translation on its head by emphasising what is discovered in translation rather than what is lost.
She was all for being creative with the text and indeed in our own workshop which she led, she had forbidden us from ever using the expression ‘fidelity to the text’. She memorably quoted the leading translator A. K. Ramanujan who had quipped, ‘Every footnote is a confession of failure.’
Ranjit Hoskote called for adopting an ethic of artisanal humility while translating a text, realising that the text can throw up more challenges for the translator than they thought possible, (over)confident in their mastery of the text. Other mentors advocated for re-reading the text several times and not be overawed by the writer’s reputation while opting to pick difficult texts for translation.
Aron Aji, originally from Turkey, perhaps captured the spirit pervading the emerging translators gathered at the SALT workshop best when he called upon keeping the company of one’s peers in the profession, reading other translations from the source language, perusing works by notable translators from other languages, especially award-winning translators and reading, comparing and contrasting more than a couple translations of the same work to gain some insight into the translation methodology.
The experience of being randomly thrown into mixed-group workshops also proved fun and fruitful, since it allowed us to bond and learn about emerging translators from other languages and genres. I made friends with two translators from Tamil after one of them approached me, learning of my translations of Manto having been re-translated into Tamil in his centenary year in 2012; she later introduced me post-workshop to my potential Tamil publisher, a small feminist publishing house interested in translating Pakistani women writers into Tamil!
While I myself approached the other Tamil translator after learning that she was the co-author of a book of English translations of Salma, the highly controversial and subversive feminist Indian Tamil poet and activist. Something worth mentioning is that these new Tamil friends spoke fluent Urdu and even offered special sweets from Pondicherry!
The translation of the short story we worked on in the workshop was the product of heated discussions over things like cultural nuances and uses of a simple word like Chaadar (also the title of Wajahat sahib’s story) or even what the word shareef/sharafat might mean or convey; and whether the metaphor for speed might be better conveyed by mentioning a more contemporary runner like Usain Bolt who is also a global icon (we ended up with the phrase bolted like Usain Bolt) rather than an obscure Indian athlete like P.T. Usha, eventually it all came together for our group with minimal interference in our translation process from either the writer (Wajahat sahib) or the mentor (Rockwell).
At the end of the workshop, one felt not only grateful for spending time outside the workshop hours with the likes of Asghar Wajahat, whether accompanying him on a stroll to the beach or his expeditions of shopping for the ubiquitous Lankan masalas, discovering how great a photographer he is or even humouring him over a dinner by the sea on his latest novel to be translated into Urdu in Pakistan, the renowned Saat Aasmaan, or being regaled with countless anecdotes regarding his encounters with this or that Indian maharani, or the tantrums of the lead actors during the ongoing Bollywood filming of his latest script as Lahore 1947; and also for those snatches of conversation over multiple lunches and teas involving the latest ‘translation gossip’ about one’s favourite translators with Rockwell; but also for bringing back home a suitcase full of amazing translations from Hindi, Urdu and Tamil and just the one pack of aromatic Lankan tea gifted by a generous host as the exotic ‘souvenir’; and gorging endlessly on the generous trays of mouth-wateringly fresh papaya, pineapple, watermelon and mango not to be found in the same season back home!
The inaugural SALT summer school in Colombo restored the belief in the value of translation, indeed in the primacy of the translated text too, but also of sticking with fellow translators and the benefits of re-reading, re-editing; and many drafts and myriad arguments later, of the beauty of consensus at the end of it. Serendipitously discovering that fellow attendees spoke Gujarati and Pali, the experience also reinforced our belief in translation as an empathetic exercise and that language is the most beautiful thing ever invented by Man.
One also hopes that in successive SALT summer schools every year, languages from other ‘unrepresented’ South Asian countries like Nepal, Maldives and Bhutan will also be represented and in time, marginalized languages from the dominant South Asian countries like Punjabi, Sindhi, Saraiki, Pashto, Balochi, Sinhala, Kashmiri, Kannada, Malayali, Telugu, etc.
One also finds oneself disagreeing vehemently with the Israeli writer Etgar Keret in that translators are hardly like ninjas, if you don’t notice them, the writers are no good! So, dear emerging translators, onwards and upwards to the next SALT workshop come 2025.
(The writer is an award-winning researcher and translator based in Lahore and President of the Progressive Writers’ Association. He may be reached at razanaeem@hotmail.com. He tweets at @raza_naeem1979.)
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)