What’s the good word?

Do not pop the cork yet. There is cheer in the world of translations, no doubt, but writers are not convinced that their time has come.

Over the past few years, translated literature — specifically, translations from Indian languages into English — has been experiencing a growing visibility and readership. More recently, the two biggest prizes for literature in India were awarded to translated works.

Translations in the spotlight: The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2018 was awarded to Jayant Kaikini (extreme left) and his translator Tejaswini Niranjana (second from left)

Benyamin’s Jasmine Days , translated from Malayalam by Shahnaz Habib, won the first JCB Prize for Literature in 2018, while the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2018 went to No Presents Please , translated into English by Tejaswini Niranjana from Jayant Kaikini’s Kannada work. It was the first time that the $25,000 prize had been awarded to a translated work. Notably, Perumal Murugan’s Poonachi , translated from Tamil by N Kalyan Raman, featured on both the JCB and DSC shortlists.

Publishers are also giving translations a fillip by experimenting with the form. Westland recently launched its language imprint Eka, which seeks to publish in nine Indian languages, translate books across the nine languages as well as into English, and translate literature in English into the nine languages.

However, observers of the market for literary translations claim that it is still too early to bring out the champagne. For translations are still literature’s step-sibling.

Teesta Guha Sarkar, senior commissioning editor at Pan Macmillan India, says, “Despite these happy developments, translations still form a minuscule percentage of English-language publishing lists in India.”

Multilingual history

A work of translation is expected to be faithful to the original and accurate — but it also has to be transparent. A translation does not cover the original or block its light, the German cultural critic and scholar Walter Benjamin wrote in the 1923 essay The Task of the Translator . It allows the language “to shine upon the original all the more fully”.

The mandate of translation is inherent in its Latin origins translat , which means to be carried across. The text must travel — through languages, time, communities, cultures, regions as well as renewed meanings.

In Indian literary history, translations occupy a critical location. Scholar and linguist GN Devy, the man behind the 2010 People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), says, “All modern Indian languages inaugurate their history with translations. In that sense, translation is the mother of literature.” The PLSI, which sought to capture the linguistic diversity in the country, identified over 780 languages — as opposed to the 22 languages officially recognised by the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. With such an extraordinarily diverse linguistic landscape, translation is an inescapable, almost mundane aspect of life in India, yielding what Devy refers to as a “translating consciousness”, a capacity to operate in multiple languages.

Poet and translator K Srilata, who teaches literature in translation at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, says, “Given that people think and live out of different languages simultaneously, the sanctity that is typically attached to the idea of an original work is not such a big deal here.” Unlike the case in monolingual cultures in the Western world where translation implied a sullying of the original, the impetus in Indian literary traditions was to take a story forward. This can be seen in each version of the Sanskrit epic Ramayan — Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi, Kamba Ramayanam in Tamil, Krittibasi Ramayan in Bengali, to name a few — where the original story, attributed to the sage Valmiki, adapts to a new literary idiom and context each time it is translated.

Srilata also points out the uneasy relationship between translation and the experience of colonisation, wherein many studies of Indian literature and languages were carried out — by the Asiatic Society, for instance — to suit the purposes of the British Empire.

“The spread of English has meant that in India, when we say ‘translation’, we typically mean translations from vernacular languages to English. This is a problem — this unidirectional flow of linguistic power and hierarchies. Translations should happen in many different directions,” she says. Her recent poem I Bury Them Under the Witnessing Yellow of the Chinar on Atta Mohammad, a caretaker of unmarked graves in Kashmir, was translated from English into Tamil, Hindi and Malayalam.

Yet, despite the long-standing tradition of moving across languages, translations have a more recent history as far as the publishing industry is concerned.

Publishing translations

Discussing the trajectory translated works have had in the publishing industry, translator and journalist Arunava Sinha says, “In the early 20th century, there was a robust tradition of translations between Indian languages. The works of Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee were translated, and people reading them in translation even thought them to be local writers.”

Translations into English began towards the latter half of the 20th century with academic texts, brought out by publishers such as Orient Longman — but these were few and far between. “It was only towards the late ’80s, with the arrival of the publishing house Penguin that English-language publishing took on a corporate shape. From the second half of the ’90s, Penguin began publishing literary translations from Indian languages into English. This was how momentum gathered around translations in the publishing industry,” says Sinha, who translates from Bengali into English.

Over the last decade, when literary fiction in English attracted attention, translations also slipped quite comfortably into that groove. However, in the last four or five years, owing to the declining retail space for books and oversaturated attention spans of readers, there has been a considerable drop in the sales of literary fiction, something that has also affected literary translations. “Publishers are now more circumspect about publishing translations,” says Sinha.

The focus has shifted to discovering new books for translation as opposed to looking at the literary canon. But though the canon in most languages has already been translated, many of the books have gone out of print. “So while these books technically exist, people don’t get to see them, and, for the most part, are not even aware of them,” he says.

Naming the problem

Publishers are looking out for new trends in regional languages. “In the last five years or so, one can see a marked change in which the market has become more receptive to translated literature,” says Ambar Sahil Chatterjee, senior commissioning editor at Penguin Random House India. According to him, the key challenge for an English-language publisher is to get a deeper sense of what is happening where. The first part of the problem lies in scouting for books coming out in Indian languages. For this, publishers have to rely on informal networks with language publishers, translators, journalists and so on.

The second half of the problem is in finding a good translator. “This is really crucial because, even if you have a good book for translation, without the right translator the whole enterprise sinks. For many of these books, they just have one shot to reach out to a wider audience, so publishers have to work really hard to find experienced or reliable translators who will do these books full justice,” says Chatterjee. “So, while there are positive developments such as the JCB and DSC prizes, I think we have some way to go before people buy translated literature in larger numbers,” he holds.

Pan Macmillan India’s Sarkar explains further, “The ecosystem in which translations have begun to thrive has benefited from the new literary awards that judge translated literature and original writing in English by the same yardstick,” she says. Additionally, the burgeoning of literature festivals around the country has also given writers from Indian languages a platform that was not available to them earlier.”

Changes in the industry

Though publishers cite a lack of reliable literary translators as a bottleneck in bringing out new translations, translators complain that they often get the short end of the stick in the industry. There is no specific body that supports their work and universities rarely teach translation — whether in theory or practice. Most translators tend to have day jobs since the sales of translated books are not enough to sustain a livelihood. They are largely motivated by a love for the text and a desire to see it become more accessible to reading communities.

But this has also been changing. Sinha says, “Unlike translators in the early days of publishing, translators today are not academics. The other thing is that translators have become as keen about market success as the writer, so they are negotiating with publishers for advances, marketing the book on social media, and ensuring their own visibility as the translator.” Translators in India are paid either a one-time fee or a share of the royalties from the sales of a book, but now they have a chance to publish their translations in global markets, which brings both recognition and better remuneration.

As for the challenge in finding new books to translate, one could look at how other countries operate in this respect. Sinha refers to the role that governments elsewhere play in projecting books. “In most European countries and a few Asian ones like Korea and Japan, there are government bodies to present their literatures in global book fairs so that foreign publishers would be interested,” Sinha says. “Now forget about India vis-à-vis other countries, do we see that even happening for each Indian language?”

Writers in regional languages, he points out, face various constraints. “They are often not represented by agents who can make a case for the book’s translation into English. Since awards are given out for literature in Indian languages, a catalogue could be easily put together based on that to pitch to publishers, saying — these are the most compelling works of fiction from this language this year, and they are worth translating,” he says.

The final word

At the end of the day, the challenge lies in the numbers — just how many copies will a book sell? Anish Chandy, founder of the literary agency Labyrinth, says, “Translations are a genre that publishers would like to promote because there’s a lot of great writing that remains undiscovered, but the fact is that there is very little money to be made from it. The average work of translation will sell about 1,000-1,500 copies, or even less. So publishers can’t be blamed for not wanting to take financial risks with translations.”

He continues, “There is no system or process that gets works in translations to sell at the retail level, we also don’t have a robust system of grants; so though translations tend to win prizes, it’s not a marker of a change in business priorities outside of the established authors in translation.”

Sinha, on the other hand, hopes that even if publishers are not moved to publish translations in greater numbers, the current spotlight would put translations on a par with original writers when it comes to publication. Piggybacking on the current wave of interest around translations would allow publishers to sustain reader interest and bring out new stories to diverse reading communities.

The text must travel, after all.

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