Translator’s notebook: Uncompromising integrity is essential when translating texts from the margins

Translating regional language texts into English has become the “in” thing in the last two decades, with translators, especially in Kerala, eagerly soliciting writers to get a chance to translate their novels. With Geetanjali Shree and Banu Mushtaq winning the International Booker Prize, the fervour has definitely hit the roof. The eagerness to translate, however, wanes when it comes to texts that occupy a space beyond the boundaries of mainstream literature, texts that are sidelined, at times even erased by the source language literary community.

However, when such texts do get translated into English, the translation performs the unintended task of enabling them to gain visibility and traction within the linguistic terrain from which they evolved; it’s almost like forcing the hand of the mainstream literary community to acknowledge the existence of these texts and their authors. I refer to two of my translations to prove my point, Kocharethi by Narayan, India’s first tribal novelist, and Pulayathara by Paul Chirakkarode, both novels that have withstood the test of time.

A strategic act of defiance

Narayan belonged to the Mala Araya tribe, which at one time inhabited the hilly terrain of the Western Ghats in central Travancore. He was born in 1940, seven years before India gained independence. A first-generation literate, he passed the tenth standard examination and joined the postal service in Kochi. He began his literary career by penning short stories. Writing Kocharethi, his first novel, was a strategic act of defiance against a certain upper caste writer’s attempt to misrepresent the tribal community and reduce it to a trope. He completed the novel in 1988 and gave the manuscript to a friend for an objective evaluation. The friend took the manuscript but forgot all about it. Narayan wasted almost five years, too diffident to ask his friend what he thought about its literary worth. Finally urged by another friend, he retrieved the manuscript; then rewrote it as the ink had dulled by then.

The book was published in 1998, a decade later. It won the 1999 Kerala Sahitya Academy Award and two other awards. The ordinary Malayalee reader welcomed the novel wholeheartedly but the response of the literary elite was unsettling. While some openly challenged the text’s legitimacy, the diplomatic ones opted for a willed silence. The result, even as late as 2009, postgraduates in Malayalam, research scholars in Malayalam, who spoke volubly on black identity and negritude, had not heard of Narayan and Kocharethi, despite the fact that the text had been translated into Hindi, and a Tamil translation was in the offing. A few translators did approach Narayan, expressing interest in translating the text into English, but all they did was pocket the complimentary copy and disappear.

The English translation finally materialised only because the late Ayyappa Paniker demanded that Mini Krishnan of Oxford University Press commission it. That I, whose only credentials as a translator at that time were limited to half a dozen short stories of NS Madhavan, which I translated for The Little Magazine, was asked to translate a text like Kocharethi speaks for itself.

Translating the novel was difficult, requiring frequent and extensive interactions with the author. The weight of the realisation that I was not just translating a text, but bore the moral and ethical responsibility of translating an entire tribal community’s interaction with modernity, was daunting. Narayan helped me understand the cultural nuances of usage and expressions, as well as gain insight into the customs and rituals of the tribe. And of course, I had a brilliant editor in Mini Krishnan. Then came the 2011 Crossword Award, which inevitably extended the text and the author’s visibility beyond Kerala’s literary terrain, ensuring translations into three more regional languages plus French. Juri Dutta’s translation won the Assam Sahitya Academy award. But I want to focus on the shift in perception that occurred in the source language community.

Academia could no longer ignore a text that had travelled so far as to be included in the culture studies program of the University of Calgary. Malayalam and English language departments across the state included the text in their postgraduate syllabi, not in any core paper, mind you, but in optional papers like Dalit Studies, Translation Studies or Culture Studies; papers whose inclusion makes the syllabus look impressive but few colleges opt for. Narayan continued to be an outsider for the most part, dignified till the end. I recall an incident: When urged to undergo cardiac surgery, Narayan stumped the doctor with the words, “I walked half a kilometre to get here. Can you guarantee that I will walk out of this hospital?”

When Narayan died in 2022 due to Covid-related complications, the print and visual media mentioned his passing, and a brief statement of condolence was made in the state assembly; that was all. Way back in 2011, when a certain powerful academic and Adivasi welfare activist vehemently opposed Mini Krishnan’s claim that Narayan was India’s first tribal writer, Krishnan gracefully withdrew, and the translation introduced Narayan as South India’s first tribal writer. However, in a recent publication, the same writer calls Narayan India’s first tribal writer; an acknowledgement that has come too late for the one person who would have treasured it! However, Narayan has one great asset, the backing of his Mala Araya tribe, which is determined that his legacy remains.

A powerful depiction of oppression

The same cannot be said of Paul Chirakkarode, who died in 2008. He wrote Pulayathara in 1962. It’s a short novel, with a simple storyline but certain features make it remarkable; one, the seamless interweaving of social history and fiction, which transforms it into a powerful depiction of the oppression and persecution of the Pulaya community who worked in the paddy fields of Kuttanad in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Second, the way Chirakkarode moulds language to depict the various levels of oppression and angst experienced not just by Dalits who convert to Christianity but also those who adhere to their native beliefs and rituals; for instance, the monosyllabic acquiescent responses of the indigenous Dalit labourer which reveal the near total erasure of autonomy, the half- formed sentences of the converted Dalits who struggle to express their thoughts, the crisp, controlled utterances of the upper caste landlords; they are all linguistic markers of inequality, held together the omniscient narratorial voice which alternates between strident criticism and evocative sentences that achieve almost lyrical cadences.

Most importantly, Pulayathara exposes the hypocrisy of the Church, which even as it actively engages in converting Dalits, maintains a complicit silence regarding the inequality that exists within the church, making no attempt to erase the caste hierarchy that is maintained between the Syrian Christians who claim an ancient lineage and converted Dalits, a hierarchy which is manifested spatially with the converts sitting on straw mats on the floor while the Syrian Christians lounge on benches at the back of the church.

The church naturally does not take well to criticism. As no one would publish the novel, Chirakkarode paid for 500 copies to be printed, but the church, which is a major vote bank in Kerala politics, made sure that the book disappeared from the public domain. When Oxford University Press commissioned the Anthology of Malayalam Dalit literature in translation and the editors decided to include a few chapters from Pulayathara, they discovered that only two copies existed in all of Kerala, one of which was a tattered copy in Thiruvananthapuram public library, on the brink of being weeded.

Now comes the interesting part. The news of the anthology prompted Raven Books, a local publisher, to bring out a thousand copies of the source text. When the English translation appeared in 2019, Malayala Manorama, a leading publishing house, stepped in to reprint the source text. Translation into English did something unique; it made it impossible for the source language community to feign ignorance anymore; ensured the rebirth of the source text after five and a half decades of incognito existence. What saddens me, however, is that in spite of knowing all this history of exclusion and near erasure, prejudice made a certain well-known Malayalee Dalit writer incapable of an objective assessment of the text and Chirakkarode’s contribution to Malayalam literature.

I recall an incident that occurred a couple of years ago. I was asked to conduct a translation workshop in a local college. The texts selected for the two-day program included a poem by a well-known Malayalam Dalit writer. The powerful imagery prompted me to check if it had been translated. It had. However, a crucial line had been carelessly translated, thereby destroying not just a powerful image but the very structural and thematic cohesion of the poem. The poet is unaware of the error that has crept into the translation. More importantly, anyone who reads just the translation will dismiss the poem as trivial. Uncompromising integrity to the source text, therefore, needs to be the cornerstone of the translation process, particularly in the case of writers from marginalised communities, who are either deceased or lack the necessary competence to identify errors that can occur during the process of translation.

Catherine Thankamma’s latest book is A Kind of Meat and Other Stories.