‘Uneasy Translations’: Rita Kothari probes the practices of doing, reading, and teaching translation

Sundar Sarukkai in his Afterword to Rita Kothari’s Uneasy Translations asks a question: “After reading this book, after immersing in its words, sounds, images, concepts, ideas and poetry, what remains?” It would be equally meaningful and legitimate to ask what comes before a book such as this. To answer it simply, what comes before is decades of deep and abiding engagements with the universe of literature, the act of writing, the endeavour to carry cadence of one language in another and rare sensitivity to what is made invisible by words, what is unwritten, to those feelings and ideas that have a life, rich and enduring, in the interstices of experience and words that describe them.

It is a life in pursuit of words or more aptly as she puts it, ‘shabdon ke peeche’, not just pursuit but a quest to discern what lies hidden in words. The book is not an account of that life, and yet Uneasy Translations is a book written by one who incessantly translates and makes sense of her world and the worlds of others in many tongues.

The moral and ethical realms of translation

Rita Kothari asks a very foundational question about the practice of doing, reading, and teaching translations. Where does the truth of translation inhere? It is not a question of what is gained and lost in translation, the joys of the craft of translation or even of the politics of language. By positing the quest for truth as the central concern, she draws us away from the act of translation to a moral and ethical realm that the translation as practice inhabits and creates.

The first of such places for her is the classroom. Those who teach know the classroom as a dialogic space, a space where the attempt is to blur the relationship between the taught and the teacher while remaining aware of the hierarchy that it represents. Rita Kothari reminds us that for many the classroom is a silent space, not meditative, but where one has been silenced and rendered mute.

Her classroom is a place where Wordsworth and Keats are taught in Gujarati because “English seldom appears by itself in India, there is nearly always a chhaya or shadow of another language lurking behind it somewhere.” In fact, all languages have this chhaya. She argues that these shadows allow words to hide not only from us but from other words. It is this that creates the realm of untranslatability and a possibility – a very disturbing possibility for both the translator and the reader – that the truth of translation may lie ‘elsewhere’.

One of these spaces where one can have interminable conversations about translations is the world of experiences. We have for long come to recognise experience as a form of knowing and knowledge. The book argues that anuvad not as translation but what is said ‘after’ is perhaps best captured between aapviti, what is experienced, witnessed, or tested by oneself and anubhav, what is known to one-self. Aapviti and anubhav makes us sensitive to a willful act of non-writing, as ‘truth hurts.’

An intimate portrait of a translator

In two deeply personal, intimate, reflective sections Rita Kothari takes us through a journey where language is visceral, where it hurts, heals, creates forms of inclusion and exclusion, empowers and silences, where language is as intimate with the body – often gendered and caste ridden – as the skin itself. In these realms what breaks down is intimacy, trust, and sociality. In absence of trust and intimacy translation remains elusive even when linguistic possibilities are available. The translator is drawn to see language as ‘a living text that requires attention.’

The relationship between her Sindhi, English, and Gujarati (and in latter parts her affinity for Hindi) and the affective and social and cultural spaces in which they are tended to and cultivated form the core of these reflections.

How does translation come to inhabit the world of shame that is internal to oneself and humiliation that has external source, unjust in its very origin where ‘excess of hurt has turned inwards into a haunting’? These are questions that Rita Kothari as translator of Joseph Macwan’s Angaliyat (translated as The Stepchild) has grappled with. She tells us about the ineffability and illegibility of shame and how it remains hidden from us because we do not seek to know.

She closes the book with a delightful section on the Hindi film songs and language of deflection and displacement that they create, where dil opens a world of temptation, transgression and often transience.

Posing a grave challenge

Uneasy Translations does not attempt to answer the question of the moral realm of translation through a theory of moral action. What Rita Kothari does is far deeper, courageous, visceral, and intimate. She shows us how she has read words, listened to them, how she has journeyed to a space where language must collide with silence, lives where non-writing was a source of being truthful and where writing the only form that affirmed existence. She has laid bare her craft and very delicately, her life. She tells us as to how she has attempted to create an ethical universe for herself.

In so doing she has posed a grave challenge to those of us who seek to translate. Should we seek to emulate her self-reflexivity, her literary sophistication, her intimacy with language? That may not be possible or even desirable. But what she does compel us to do is try and rescue all acts of translations from mere politics of translation, which can both mute and render invisible the moral dilemma. She teaches us through this conversation about translation is to be alive to the untranslatability of words, not just as lexiconic deficiency but as a moral imperative.

This work makes Rita Kothari the foremost anuvadak, where the act of translation, of saying after, is not imitative and second order journey but one that provides an explanation, explication, enunciation of what has been said through corroboration and quarrel.

Uneasy Translations: Self, Experience and Indian Literature, Rita Kothari, Bloomsbury.