‘I find the constraints of the original text liberating to work with’: Translator Rahul Soni

Rahul Soni, associate publisher at HarperCollins India, is also an accomplished translator. His translation of Shrikant Verma’s renowned book of poetry, Magadh, was originally published in 2013. In May this year, the translation was revised and the second version was published by Eka, an imprint of Westland Books. In the same month, Penguin reissued Rahul Soni’s translation of Geetanjali Shree’s The Room Beneath Their Feet, ten years after it was first published.

A long-time translator and editor, Soni spoke to Scroll about revisiting Magadh after a decade, his translating philosophy, editing translations, and what makes him take on a translation project. Excerpts from the interview:

You have been translating for over a decade now. Tell me about what set you off on this journey.
My first steps into translation were with Magadh, as it happens. A friend had recommended the collection to me in 2007, and I started translating it almost immediately, before I had even finished reading it in its entirety. I didn’t think of it as a translation, then. I thought the poems were doing something special with language, diction and syntax, and I wanted to see if I could learn to do the same in the language I wrote in, that is, English.

At about the same time, I had – with the same friend – started a bilingual literary journal (which went on to become quite multilingual over the course of the next few years) called Pratilipi. In the course of running a bilingual journal, translation came to occupy a larger space in my writing – we used to try and carry as much “content” as possible in the two languages we were most at home in, English and Hindi, which meant we ended up translating a lot of work, and many different kinds of work. That, I think, was indispensable training.

Pratilipi lasted a good four years – we published over a dozen issues, and a number of books in translation as well before we both moved on to other things. I was later involved with journals like Almost Island and Asymptote, for both of which literature beyond the mainstream and literature beyond the English language was critical. I was also involved with the writers’ residency Sangam House, where again – largely because of the presence of co-director Arshia Sattar – translation was a key focus area. Eventually, I ended up at HarperCollins India, handling the literary fiction and translation lists.

I continued translating through all of these years, and all of these engagements, as well as the interactions with my co-editors and writers, were incredibly important in shaping and honing my ideas of literature and of translation. But I think that initial, intuitive approach still remains valid for me (if, perhaps, more nuanced now than before) – that of approaching the act of translating as a writer, as writing – something so fundamental that one can (and one sees it happen so often) lose sight of it under the looming idea of “translation”.

While translating fiction affords some liberties, I suppose that is not the case for poetry. You’d have to be faithful to the rhyme scheme, meter, syntax, punctuation, preserving the figures of speech. Does following the text so closely while translating poetry feel restrictive sometimes?
The word faithful is a fraught one, and one that keeps coming up in the context of translations – what does it mean to be faithful to a text? I think every text and every translator brings to it their own answers, it’s a process of constant negotiation and one can’t make generalised rules for it. For me, I think, what I like to aim for is to try and replicate the effects of the original in the target language without adding or subtracting anything – that is ideal.

This could at times mean taking liberties – is changing the order of words liberty, for instance? I know some who’d argue that it is. What about changing the order of sentences? There are things that one language allows you to do which may not be possible in another. Or what might be natural in one language might come across as extremely forced and awkward in another. What does one do then? And so on.

The other thing I try very hard to do is to resist interpreting. As a translator my job, I feel, is not to impose meaning on a text – if there is ambiguity in the original, the same kind of ambiguity needs to be preserved in the translation too, for instance.

I don’t see that fiction – or prose, to be precise – necessarily is easier or offers more leeway than poetry does. Verse, because of its visual form, often makes these things more apparent to a reader in a way prose doesn’t. There is rhythm and repetition, there is considered use of syntax, punctuation, etcetera in all good writing. Literary writing is not just about conveying information or an idea or a story – it involves craft, and harnessing language to convey it in a particular way; it also involves an engagement with form, and with literature itself.

It may seem that I’m straying too far away from the question, or talking about something that is too basic, or obvious but it isn’t. My point is that a literary translation also needs to measure up to these standards – a literary translator, I have said elsewhere, “must, before anything else, be a writer. But that is not enough. A translator must be at least as good a writer in his or her language, and in the same ways, as the author of the original is in his or hers.”

Coming back to the question, though – it isn’t always possible to replicate rhyme schemes or meter or to preserve every figure of speech, while also retaining the right tone or voice. One needs to find the right balance between a number of factors. For Magadh, as I say in my translator’s note, “My attempt has been to retain the rhythms and repetitions of the original without losing its spoken, dialogic quality. To come up with an English that can carry these notes naturally, without sounding antiquated or too contemporary. To mirror its simple, crystalline vocabulary. To find other devices to replace or replicate the effects of the extensive rhyming in the original. To preserve its ambiguities and circularities.”

Repetition, you’ll notice, takes the place of rhyme in a lot of places here – a device that works in Magadh, because the original, too, has a circular, repeating quality, but it may not be for another work. With Magadh, I was also able to retain the shape of the poems by and large. But in my translations of Mirabai, to take another example, I found that the compressed quality of the work wasn’t coming through at all if I replicated the line breaks of the “original”– the English lines became longer, looser, and lost impact, so I opted to turn each line into a compact stanza with very short lines instead.

Translation – whether prose or verse – comes with constraints. The constraint is the original text and everything that it brings with it. I find such constraints quite liberating and exciting to work with – we have examples of extraordinarily original and creative works emerging, for instance, from the Oulipo group, where writers imposed severe constraints on themselves (like writing a whole novel without using the letter “e” at all) before embarking upon a project. I think there’s some kinship there with the task of a translator.

You redid Magadh almost a decade after you first translated it. You must have revisited your old translation while working with Hindi text. What were some of the things that you were keen on highlighting in the new translations? And did you discover anything new in Shrikant Verma’s poetry that you might have missed out on earlier?
I think one of the things that stood out the most for me was how the poems began to speak so much more to our time now than when I first encountered them back in 2007. I remember being struck most of all by the language then, which is still one of the most arresting things about the collection – the almost-paradox of its pared-down vocabulary and repetitions, the slippery circularity and riddle-like ambiguities of its locations.

I remember also being very, very taken with the intense, often unbearably overwhelming, even indiscriminate, sense of loss – for times, for places, for people – that haunted its pages. Those are the things that I was reaching for in my own writing as well, and it was to learn how to do that in English that I began to translate Magadh.

There were moments though, where I simply misread some things or failed to understand the true import of them, which only became clearer as time went on and things around us changed as well. For instance, there are these lines from “The Style of Kosal” – a poem that, frankly, baffled me when I first read it, but has now become, for me, one of the key poems in the collection and a favourite:

इतना अवश्य कहूंगा
जो सोचता है
बकता है
उसका बकना
शैली बन जाता है

दुख है
कोसल की अब तक
अब तक
शैली नहीं बन पायी

Which, in the first edition, I had translated as – which is all right and makes some sense, but what is it really saying? My own bafflement about the poem makes its way into the translation.

But this much I will say
Those who think
jabber on
and their gibberish
becomes a style

The sad thing is
that Kosal still
does not have
a style of its own    

Revisiting it now, I was astonished that it could have ever been opaque to me. How blindingly obvious is it that when, as the previous poem in the volume says, “Kosal can’t last much longer, there is a lack of thought in Kosal,” what this poem, and Verma, are actually saying is –

But this much I will say

Those who think
speak out
and their speaking out
becomes the style 

The sad thing is
that Kosal still
still doesn’t
have a style of its own

I wouldn’t say I wanted to highlight anything different in the new edition or with the corrections /changes I made – they were made to bring the translation closer to the original, and to rectify mistakes whether from misreading or misunderstanding.

Can you also shed some light on the interesting structure of poems like “Pataliputra” or “The Third Way”? And if it is a personal choice, how did you decide which poems would follow the pattern?
For the poems in Magadh, I was actually able to retain the original shape of the poems – this isn’t something that’s necessarily the case in other translations (such as the Mirabai verses I mentioned earlier).

It’s also something that I worked towards, actually – the first edition was a bilingual one, with the original and translation side by side, so it made sense to try and work harder to have the facing pages mirror each other – and it worked out quite well. Verma – like ee cummings in a way, perhaps – does work with verse forms, but plays with them, breaks them, and deconstructs them. I have to thank my first editors at Almost Island, Vivek Narayanan and Sharmistha Mohanty, for helping me see that – to learn to trust the original more and to try and understand the thinking behind the line breaks and indents of the Hindi poems.

My earlier drafts (some of which can be seen online in the Monsoon 2009 edition of Almost Island) often reconstructed those hidden forms – which helped me, I believe, get the rhythms and music right – so it was an essential part of the process – but also ended up in some ways perhaps undoing what Verma had done.

While reading Magadh, I was reminded of PB Shelley’s “Ozymandias”. Of course, the length might not be comparable, but the metaphors certainly are. Did you read any additional/companion texts while translating Magadh?
As a writer everything you read, experience etcetera comes to bear on what you write, of course. I don’t think I read anything specifically to figure out how to translate Magadh because actually, I wasn’t thinking of translating it at all – as I mentioned earlier, what I wanted to do was learn from it. Learn how to achieve certain effects in English which I hadn’t encountered before or was unable to achieve before.

I did and do see resonances between Magadh and the poetry of Cavafy and Borges, with Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and yes, with “Ozymandias” too. It was recently pointed out to me that there was something Beckettian about it – something that hadn’t struck me earlier, but which seems to make perfect sense now that it has been pointed out. In the time between the earlier edition and this new one, I also read, finally, the Kathasaritsagara (in Arshia Sattar’s fabulous translation), and that gave me more insight into some of the references and allusions, some of the names and places mentioned in the collection. I’m sure there are many other works and contexts that fed into my understanding of Magadh.

Poems like “Corpses in Kashi”, “Hastinapur”, and “Fiction” point to the futility of man’s vanity – especially of futile projects of accumulating wealth and fame or the desire to hold on to the physical manifestations of youth. Then there are poems like “The Republic of Kosal” and “Lack of Thought in Kosal” that critique the megalomania of rulers and the slothful attitude of citizens. I am interested in knowing what you make of Verma’s clinical eye which is unsparing of both our personal and public failures.
And equally unsparing of himself, I think, and of the very act of writing or creating – of art – in the midst of the ultimate futility of everything. “What I wrote, useless / What I did not, / meaningless”. There’s certainly warning here, and resignation, clearly guilt, and a need for penitence and absolution (the collection is dedicated, not coincidentally, to the great Hindi writer Nirmal Verma, a friend of Shrikant Verma’s, who was also among the very few people in the artistic/literary community to be very vocal and severely critical of the Emergency).

Apoorvanand notes in his foreword to the new edition that the collection “was received with bafflement by critics when it first appeared, and their response was largely ambivalent. It could have been mainly to do with the personality of the poet himself …The readers found it difficult to reconcile the fact of the poet being an integral part of the power apparatus with a poem which seemed to talk about the futility of the claims of power”.

Ashok Vajpeyi in his preface to the first edition used the extraordinary phrase “poetics of witness and complicity” (stress mine) – it is the second part of the phrase that is key; we hear about “poetics of witness” often enough, but a poetics of complicity? To recognise that complicity, and to turn that into the great, unique strength of the collection – to recognise the universality of that complicity – that I think is one of the key achievements of Magadh, apart from its masterful craftsmanship, and what gives the collection its incredible power, at once accusatory and empathetic, and its emotional heft.

Is there room for hope anywhere in this worldview? The tantalising poem “The Third Way” hints that there might be –

Friends, 

there’s also 

                   a third way –

but

      it doesn’t go 

      through

                   Magadh, 

                                 Avanti

                                            Kosal

                             or 

                                 Vidarbha.

– but in the characteristic, ambiguous way of the collection, there are no answers here – where does this road go through after all? – leaving us to wonder whether there is any possibility here or just delusion.

You translated Geetanjali Shree some ten years ago when she was still largely unknown to the English-language audience. A new edition has just been published and Shree is among the top-selling Indian-language authors right now. As a translator, what makes you gravitate towards an author? And is fame/felicitation an important factor?
I’ve been led to various works and authors by friends, fellow writers, translators, and editors. And I’ve translated various things for various reasons. I don’t think fame and felicitation play a role at all, nor do publication prospects – does the work speak to me, or is there something I can learn, craft-wise, from translating it, those are really the only concerns. Some, like Magadh, were works that resonated very deeply with me and/or were works that I thought I could learn much from. A lot of translation during the time I co-edited Pratilipi was simply for reasons of expeditiousness – we needed an English translation of something, and I was the most readily available resource for it.

There have been works that were commissioned – for instance, Geetanjali Shree’s The Roof Beneath Their Feet. It’s a work that’s very different, almost at the other extreme in some ways perhaps, from Magadh – maximalist prose versus minimalist verse. That came about over the course of a conversation with the author, and then Minakshi Thakur, who worked with HarperCollins at that point, signed it up.

It required a completely different approach from Magadh, and I remember struggling for months over the first paragraph, to hit the right note, get the right voice – but once that happened, the rest of the novel came much easier, and the first draft happened rather quickly. There were many subsequent revisions, of course, as I refined and edited that first draft. (Incidentally, that translation too has been reissued this year, and is one that, once again, I relished the opportunity to revisit and, I think, improve.)

Likewise, Ashok Vajpeyi’s selected poems (published as A Name for Every Leaf) – was also a commissioned project. But in both cases, it was important that I was familiar with their work already, that I admired and respected what they were trying to do and knew that it would be work that would provide creative satisfaction and opportunities to pick up more skills for my translator’s/writer’s toolkit.

Then there was Pankaj Kapur’s novella, Dopehri, which came about because I’d acquired the publishing rights to the work – in the original Hindustani and in the English language – for HarperCollins, and now had to find a translator. We asked for a few sample translations which the author felt didn’t work, and because we were running out of options and I felt I had a very good sense of what the work needed to sound like and what the author was looking for, I decided to take it on myself.

This, too, was an immensely satisfying process – and illuminating. All good writers are very closely attuned to the sound of words, phrases, and the cadences of sentences…but an accomplished actor takes that to another level entirely, and I learnt a lot, sitting with him, reading through the English translation of a work that had actually begun its life as a stage play, a one-actor performance, an act of story-telling, and absorbing his insights and inputs on the oral/aural qualities of the text.

You translate from Hindi but as an editor, you probably simultaneously work on manuscripts of several translations from different Indian languages. As a long-time editor of translations, how have translations evolved over the years?
There are some important changes that have come about in the past few years – I’d venture that perhaps Arunava Sinha’s translation of Sankar’s Chowringhee and then Srinath Perur’s translation of Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar were key turning points – translation has moved beyond the realm of the worthy, you-ought-to-read-this literary classic and the focus has shifted equally to more modern and contemporary literary works, and to a larger variety of works – including non-fiction, and commercial and genre fiction. Some major literary prizes now recognise and award translations; there is more awareness in the media and more conversations around translation. I also think that, among the newer generation of translators, there is a slightly different view of the English language – more of a sense of ownership – that allows works to be rendered in a more natural, flexible idiom and perhaps makes them more approachable.

You have translated two books of poetry. As a publisher, you’d know that poetry, even in the English language, has a very niche audience. This must be especially true for poetry in translation. Do you think this market will expand and do you see enough translators eager to take on poetry translation projects?
Literature, in India, in the English language, has always had a very niche audience. This is for a host of economic and socio-cultural reasons, I think, that will need a whole another conversation. The average sales of a work of “literary fiction” in the English language in India, whether it has been written originally in English or is a translation, are not very different. Poetry fares a little worse, but again, I’m sure the numbers for English originals and translations are not all that different here either.

The point is, I don’t think most readers of literature discriminate between whether a work is a translation or not. It is a small market, one that I don’t think has expanded much in the past many years and won’t rapidly expand in the near future – again, to be clear, I’m talking about the market for literary works published in English in India. (Publishing as a whole is huge in the country, and growing – but India is a curious case, an anomaly really, in that 96% of this is education-related.) Given that background, I don’t think we’ll be seeing authors or translators, whether of prose or poetry, taking on projects for commercial reasons, or because there is a market for it. If they do, it will be because they enjoy doing it, feel it’s important, and so on.

While translations are gaining more visibility and media coverage and steadily becoming visible in the shortlists of literary awards, publishers say they are selling fewer copies and literary translators point to how they continue to be unsatisfactorily paid. As a publisher and a translator, why do you think this is?
It’s very simple really, and it’s in the answer to the previous question: because very few people read literary work in English in India – whether it is English originals or translations. The Indian publishing scene (in English) is actually very equitable for translators – authors and translators here split, equally, royalties and advances, they both get cover credit (there are some notable exceptions, like the Penguin classics lists), they retain copyright respectively over the original and translation – many of these things still do not happen with publishers in the UK or US. But the readership there is far greater, and so the payments can be better. This is, of course, a simplified version of things, and there are nuances and exceptions, but by and large that is the situation here.

It’s been a year since Geetanjali Shree won the International Booker Prize. This resulted in a keen interest in her books, but has her win resulted in better sales for translations in general and translations from Hindi in particular? Or do you think the Indian market is too unpredictable for international awards to make an impression?
I don’t really have the numbers to answer this properly, but my impression is no. Prizes tend to not result in better sales for whole market categories – major international prizes like the Booker or the Nobel do change the fortunes of the winning title, sometimes (but not always) the author’s entire oeuvre, but I don’t think they result in any drastic changes in sales numbers for anything else in the Indian market, nor do they change much in terms of international publishers’ and readers’ interest in work from a particular region.

As a publisher, what makes you place your bet on an Indian-language author, even though they might be relatively unknown outside their language?
As a literary publisher, I am in the happy position of not having to worry too much about commercial considerations – thanks to my employers who recognise the importance of and make the room for literary works. So I can focus on the basics – great writing, great story, great voice. Is the work pushing the envelope in any way, with language, with form, with structure? Is it work of lasting value? I don’t think these criteria change or should change whether the work is in English or any other language.

Disclosure: Arunava Sinha edits the Books and Idea section of Scroll.