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Jyoti Panjwani has translated two postcolonial works, Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Bengali novel Herbert (1993) and Popati Hiranandani’s Sindhi autobiography Munhinjiya Hayatiya Jaa Sona Ropa Vargq (The Golden and Silver Pages of My Life), 1982. Panjwani’s translation of Herbert is published by Sahitya Akademi Press (The National Academy of Letters): New Delhi, India, 2004. The Golden and Silver Pages of My Life is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.—DMM

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DM:

I start by translating word by word, but I try to remain mindful that I must be aware of idiomatic expressions that should be considered as units of meaning to be translated. Typically, I first create a very rough, almost word-for-word translation in which for some words or phrases I give myself several choices of translation vocabulary to use. Then, when that draft is done, I do a second and a third and so on in which I chip away at the roughness of that first draft.

Usually, I translate phrase by phrase while preparing the first draft, which goes through several (8-10) revisions till I feel I have been able to capture not only the meaning but also the emotion/s in the source text. I also make sure the translation is very readable to both native and non-native readers. Apart from this purely linguistic or textual aspect of the process of translation as a way of finding semantic equivalence between texts, what truly surprises and fascinates me the most about the process of translation, whether it is that of a novel, poem, play, short story or an autobiography, is that it entails not only reading about a mode of life, but actually living it for the time one is translating the literary work and beyond. That mode or those modes of living become a part of ones newly re-constituted ‘self.’ Each time I translate something, it becomes me, and it changes me. Therefore, it is important, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak advises translators (I understood this only after I began to translate) in her essay “The Politics of Translation,” to translate only that which they really love because “The task of the translator is to facilitate this love between the original and its shadow, a love that permits fraying, holds the agency of the translator and the demands of her imagined or actual audience at bay.” (Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine. Routledge: New York and London, 1993, 181.)

Very. My position is usually as a scholar/translator, and, as such, I'm very interested in communicating as clearly as possible in English what the source text expresses in its original language.

I try to remain as close to the source text as possible. Translating non-western and postcolonial literary texts, especially of minority cultures, without succumbing to the demands of the readers of dominant cultures is a way of asserting and thereby preserving independent and differing worldviews. The act of translating that remains completely faithful to the language of the source text and refuses to simplify, essentialize, or exoticize is, like a lot of postcolonial writing, subversive and a powerful tool of negating foreign cultural domination. Numerous examples of postcolonial writing can be cited to support this point, but I will mention only a couple. The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (1958) is full of Igbo names and customs, which by the author’s own acknowledgement is his way of reclaiming and preserving his cultural and traditional roots. In the first two editions (1958 and 1959), Achebe offers only a brief one-page glossary of these names and terms, hoping that his readers, even from dominant cultures, in order to reach a clearer understanding of the novel will have to make further efforts to find out more information about the Igbo society, hence allowing that culture to be preserved in the cultural memory of the world as well. (Simon Gikandi wrote a very detailed Introduction to the novel and Igbo society that appeared much later, in the 4th edition (1996) of the novel.) Another example of a postcolonial writer resisting Western cultural domination is that of the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o who, after writing in English for many years, decided to write in his native language Gikuyu so that his work could be read by the people he was writing about. His refusal to write in English becomes a strategy of resisting imperialistic demands of foreign cultures that want him to say what he wants to say in English. Instead, by choosing his national language, Ngugi compels his foreign readers to undertake or rely on translations if they want to read what he has to say. Also, when Ngugi wrote his novels like A Grain of Wheat and Weep Not, Child, he used many Gikuyu words and phrases without offering any explanation and thus remained faithful to his own culture even while writing in English.

By the same token, I’ve also translated the autobiography of the Indian postcolonial woman writer Popati Hiranandani, from Sindhi to English, as it is, retaining all the cultural details including several references to names of people known only to the older generations of the Sindhi community, with the hope that it will inform younger Sindhi readers (most of whom cannot read, write or speak Sindhi) about their community and its struggles in post-partition India, and this, perhaps, could become a way that a dying culture, tradition, and language could be repossessed. Translation, in this sense, like postcolonial studies, becomes an important branch of cultural studies.

How well do you know the languages you translate into or from? What aids do you utilize in the process of translation? For example, do you ever look up words and phrases in a dictionary? Have you ever used computer-aided translation programs? Do you ever double-check the finished translation with others (native speakers, linguists, etc?) for accuracy?

I translate from French and Italian. As an undergraduate, I had five semesters of French, followed by passing two “niveaux,” or levels, at L'Institut de Touraine in Tours, France. After that, I took a French translation course in graduate school. I first became interested in learning Italian when I was teaching English as a second language to Italian NATO pilots in a program at my university. In graduate school, I began my Italian studies by sitting in on a couple of basic courses, then worked for seven years with an Italian tutor.

When I translate, I have a selection of dictionaries that I consult. Since I am typically translating from sixteenth- or seventeenth-century French or Italian, I often consult dictionaries specializing in the vocabulary of those periods. When I am unsure of original meaning in a text, I do consult native speakers who are also scholars of these periods.

The four languages I translate into and from are Hindi, Bengali, Sindhi and English. Hindi is the national language of India and was my first language in school. Sindhi is my mother tongue. English was my second language in school. Finally, Bengali is the regional language of West Bengal, a state in eastern India, and since I grew up in Calcutta (now renamed Kolkata) the capital of West Bengal, it was taught as the third language in school.

Yes, I do look up some words in the dictionary and use the thesaurus to find a different or better word that I feel might convey the meaning of the word in the source text more accurately or would just sit better in the translated phrase or sentence.

No, I’ve never used any computer-aided translation programs.

Finally, yes, I always request at least two native and non-native readers to read the second and the last but final drafts of my translations.

What are some of the problems you've faced in translating your particular works? Are there certain words that are simply untranslatable? How do you deal with neologisms, idioms, and puns?

Since I work with French and Italian, Latin-based languages with which English has a great deal of affinity, I seldom find words or phrases that are simply untranslatable. Even if direct translation makes no sense, it is usually possible to come up with a word or phrase that expresses something close to the expression in the original language.

Although it is not always possible with lengthy prose pieces, for example, I really like it when translations are published on facing pages with the original texts. Then, you can judge for yourself the accuracy of the translation and the choices that the translator made.

For me, a successful translation is a felicitous combination of fidelity to the original expressions of the text and smooth readability in English.

The first thing I would like to say here is that just because a translation reads well does not always mean that it is a good translation. In my view, a good or successful translation is one that has also been able to convey the interests of the author of the source text. A translator can do this by interviewing the author and having him or her read the translation. In case the author is not alive or available, a good translator can convey his or her interests only by imagining them. It is therefore useful, in such cases, to encourage and read multiple translations of the source text to be able to reach a more accurate understanding of the interests or concerns of the author of the source text as imagined by many translators.

Because much of my work is concerned with comparative literature, translation is often a part of academic writing for me. Translation is a joy in that there are always “ah-ha!” moments in the process when I finally “get” something that I've been puzzling over. The frustrating part, of course, is the tedium of puzzling over difficult words or phrases or deciding how best to handle printing errors or marred passages in the early texts I'm usually working with. In general, translation is rewarding for many reasons, not the least of which are that it introduces literature to new readerships and it facilitates new academic endeavors for scholars who might not otherwise have access to the works in question.

In the context of translating postcolonial Indian texts, I feel that a lot of my academic work, on Indian and postcolonial Indian feminist texts, in the U.S. has been and continues to be like translating (transporting, informing, explaining, describing, interpreting) one culture to another culture. Very fittingly, I also got my first taste of translation while writing my doctoral thesis, where I had to translate several long and short passages from Mannu Bhandari’s (b. 1931) novels, play and short stories from Hindi to English, and Ashapurna Devi’s (1909-1995) novels and short stories from Bengali to English because English translations of most of their works are to this day not available. The activity of translation, thus, is an indispensable means for me to engage in all my academic work, including teaching Indian literature.

So far, this creative activity has been only joyous and, for me, this joy lies in the creative experience of translating, of weaving afresh webs of stories but with threads that are different from the ones in the original.

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