PAPERWALLAH. Word view

Sometime in January I made a literary resolution.

This year, I told myself, I would read only books in translation. At the time, I wasn’t entirely sure why I needed to do this. Perhaps a jadedness with what I’d mostly always been reading. Anglo-Saxon writers from the UK or the US, even “Indian” diasporic fiction, produced elsewhere, chiselled to Anglo perfection. I think I was bored of English English. Of the way it sounded, the themes it was addressing (urbanity, suburbanness, grief), their reinforcement (though mostly non-deliberate) of a Western/Euro/big city-centric view of the world. And so this was it, I decided. Apart from books I’d been sent to review, everything else I read would be books originally not written in English.

I began with a blunder.

With Nabokov’s Lolita . Thinking it was originally in Russian, until someone informed me, when I was halfway through, that it wasn’t. But how to stop? This most perfect novel with its heart-wrenching, disquieting, loathsome protagonist. After this, I had a better reading-in-translation run, oddly with a slew of novellas, beginning with Albert Sánchez Piñol’s Cold Skin . An anthropologist by scholarly profession, this Catalan author writes with the same sharp unnerving eye, relating a surreal, devastating account of an unnamed narrator who arrives at a desolate Antarctic island for a year-long post as a weather official. He finds the man he’s meant to replace driven to madness and distraction because — and we find this out very early in the book — he’s trying to keep a swarm of humanoid creatures, who attack nightly, at bay. This brilliant little book is a scathing indictment on colonialism, man’s inhumanity to each other, war, the cyclical nature of history, while losing none of its edge-of the-seat grippingness. I also read Vivek Shanbhag’s disquieting Ghachar Ghochar (translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur) — the story of a near-destitute family raised suddenly to new wealth, and the consequences of this “elevation”. Then the small, sensuous Silk by Italian writer Alessandro Baricco, a tale of delicate, humorous love and longing set in the 1860s where young merchant Herve Joncour, travels across the world to Japan to find eggs for a fresh breeding of silkworms. Long on my reading list, Peruvian Nobel-prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa’s In Praise of the Stepmother , an erotic novella detailing, through a series of paintings (reproduced in colour), the relationship between 40-year-old Lucrecia, wife of Don Rigoberto, and her stepson, Alfonsito, a beautiful, prepubescent, enfant terrible.

While I haven’t yet started on Elena Ferrante’s Napoli series, her earliest books captured my heart (and mostly wrung it inside out). I read the devastating trio — Days of Abandonment , The Lost Daughter , Troubling Love — speedily, one after the next, finding each piercing, unforgettably poignant. Ages and cultural contexts apart notwithstanding, I found similar resonance in Hindi writer Nirmal Verma. His Days of Longing , set in wintry Prague, following the doomed affair between a young student and a beautiful tourist, places sharp psychological insight in similar quiet, understated ways. Swallowing Mercury , the book with the most beautiful cover, by British-domicile Polish poet Wioletta Greg (translated by Eliza Marciniak), works as a fictional yet autobiographically-inspired Bildungsroman set in the 1970s and ’80s under one of the milder communist regimes. What stayed was Greg’s wonderful childlike blend of the magical and the mundane. The missing cat, the giant bees, a girl who went mad because she had to “finish dreaming”. On the far end of the spectrum is Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman (translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan), intricately, “realistically” detailed in its setting in rural Tamil Nadu. The novel centres around a small tragedy — even after many years of marriage, Kali and Ponna’s efforts to conceive have been in vain. Relationships splinter around this, creating rifts between family, neighbours, friends, bringing it all to climactic heat at the annual chariot festival, where the couple’s humiliation might end, but also test their marriage. In the list, Yukio Mishima’s The Sound of Waves , delicate as a Japanese painting, might be the only book in which two lovers, poor fisherman Shinji and Hatsue, the daughter of a wealthy shipowner, finally find togetherness.

At the end of the year, I am still left with a pile of books I’ve started and am yet to finish — Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red , Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude , Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke , Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramor — yet I’ve already seen what I can only call an expansion. What has a year of reading conscientiously, purposely mostly in translation taught me? It has made me realise how many “Englishes” exist in the world. In fact, the odd book that I did pick up written originally in the language suddenly, oddly, felt flat. Like there was something missing. Translations can carry the music of the original languages. It lends English a different cadence and lilt, new sentence structures. This makes the “bearing across” from one language to the other an exercise in linguistic multiplicity. Of allowing the text to exist in many forms. The translations, like languages themselves, also carry with them new, alternative ways of seeing the world.

Janice Pariat is the author of The Nine-Chambered Heart, which will be out in November 2017; @janicepariat

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