If the original work leans on post-modernism, or post-colonialism, or feminism, and so on, so too must the translation.
Indeed, translation is, ideally, the art of transparence. They aren’t consciously adhering to a theoretical structure or discipline while writing. But these theories seek to give coherent expression to things that have already been internalised by a writer. It is extremely enriching to apply these theories to one’s reading for a better understanding of how a novel, for instance, might have been framed historically or culturally. All literary theory is valuable in offering new and different ways to read a book. This is not to imply that translation theory is not important. Nor does their work suggest that they have. But with a handful of exceptions, I have not met many translators who actually grapple with the issues raised by translation theory while translating. It is most interesting to apply such questions to a translation and try to identify the choices the translator has made. And yet, no matter how neatly I formulate an answer in my head, when I get down to work I become an organic translator all over again, being led only by the text and by my own use of the English language, which I translate into. Today, just over 10 years after I began translating on an industrial scale, I acknowledge that this is an important question.
These dilemmas never popped up because all the great books I had read in translation – from Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa to Kafka and Camus – had never led me to think along those lines. I was fortunate, because I would then have become too involved in checking the boxes to actually complete a translation.įor instance, I had absolutely no thoughts about whether the translation of Sankar’s Chowringhee should read in English as though it had been written in English, or whether it should remind the reader that the book in their hands was originally written in another language.
I began as an organic translator, without any awareness of the “larger issues of translation” (and there are several of these).
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