How hard should we try? – Questions of detail in literary translation
Ketaki Kushari Dyson
ABSTRACT
We have all been sent a sheet outlining the questions that
you would like us to address, and I would like to take off from the first two
sets of questions posed there. To me, ‘What is the purpose of translation?’ is
the crucial question. What we decide to call ‘a good translation’ depends on
the answer we give to that first question. Whenever I undertake any task of
translation, I ask myself: what is the purpose of this particular task that I
am taking on? There could indeed be a plurality of purposes in any single task,
so the idea of what is a good translation needs to be broad and accommodating
rather than narrow and rigid. I certainly think that the quality of literary
vitality can be conveyed in translation, and I believe that our attitude to
form needs to be flexible. The question
of mistakes is an intriguing one. Some mistakes may be of the straightforward
kind (say, a word or phrase inadvertently missed out, or a word misunderstood)
regarding which we can reach an immediate agreement; with other mistakes, it
may be necessary to have quite a long discussion before any such consensus can
be reached; and sometimes slightly different interpretations are entirely
possible, so that translators (and scholars) will have to agree to differ. A
few mistakes do not invalidate the whole work, and shifts of meaning are
inevitable when a text moves from the terrain of one language to the terrain of
another. In that case, how hard should we try? I think we have to try our best
without getting wound up about it. I would like to illustrate this with
examples, using some English translations of the Bengali poet Vijaya
Mukhopadhyay which have been published as a booklet. I hope to focus on
concrete examples in the spirit of a workshop. Through such focusing we can
raise our awareness of the practical issues involved in the craft of literary
translation and improve our skills.
[What follows is a slightly revised version of a talk I gave
with the help of an overhead projector at a translation workshop held at the
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, on 19 September
2002. Although called a workshop, the gathering was really in the nature of a
mini-conference. It was a two-day event, over 19-20 September 2002, called
‘Workshop Three: The Art of Translation’, within a series entitled
‘Translations and Translation Theories East and West’, organized jointly by Dr
William Radice of the School of Oriental and African Studies and Prof Theo
Hermans of University College London, with the assistance of Dr Ross Forman of
the SOAS. I am delighted that they have agreed that this workshop paper can be
published in Parabaas. Interestingly,
prior to this publication some fruitful discussion took place between the
editor of Parabaas and myself which
was itself in the nature of a workshop, and I have made some amendments in the
text accordingly. My sincere thanks to the editor of Parabaas.]
Since time is limited, I shall not recap the basic points
which underlie my approach: they are already in the Abstract, and you can look
them up. At the end of the day, literary translation is a creative and
imaginative art and a practical craft in its own right, requiring very special
writing and problem-solving skills. I think most practising translators would
agree that nowadays there is far too much preoccupation with theory in academic
circles and not enough understanding of the nitty-grity of the actual task. I
would like my contribution to be as in a real workshop, a hard-nosed dive into
details. It will be in the nature of notes.
I shall take all my examples from a booklet of translations
from the poetry of the contemporary Bengali poet Vijaya Mukhopadhyay (b. 1937),
entitled No symbol, No Prayer, published
by Cambridge India (Educational Publishers), Calcutta, in 2001. The translators
are Carolyne Wright in conjunction with Paramita Banerjee and Sunil B. Ray, and
in collaboration with the author. I have chosen this booklet as the basis of my
presentation as it is a serious and on the whole reasonably competent effort,
and yet certain ‘problematic’ areas remain in it, even after - or is it partly
because of? - such a collaborative effort, and despite the close consultation with
the poet which is supposed to have taken place. Vijaya is an articulate woman
and I would have thought quite capable of discussing fine points with her
translators; nevertheless, the residual ‘problems’ indicate how easy it is for
gaps to develop when, as in this case, two or more parties with different
cultural backgrounds and professional trainings, and varying levels of ability
in the two relevant languages, are trying to communicate.
Certainly, what I am referring to as ‘problems’ do not
invalidate the whole work, but if the main purpose of issuing a book like this
is to generate interest in the work of a particular poet amongst those who
cannot read his/her original texts, to capture a new readership for that poet,
then is an even finer attention to detail required to do justice to the poetry
and to capture the attention of new readers in an age when fewer and fewer
people are reading poetry in the first place? Twentieth-century poetry is
frequently dense and concentrated, with a special reliance on images and
oblique innuendoes, and more often than not there is no story-line to carry the
reader through. Modern poetry in translation is therefore particularly
vulnerable to flagging reader-attention: if the translated texts lack vitality
and vibrancy, if they lack the accent of poetry and sound prosaic, readers soon
go to sleep. There is no one way, or perfect way, to translate a poem, but I
believe that we can sometimes see better ways to do this or that, and that
translation skills, like any other craft skills, can be polished and improved.
Vijaya, a qualified Sanskritist, is a poet who uses words
extremely carefully. Her poetry is lean and taut, characterized by precision,
economy, irony, and acerbity. A rigorous and masterly approach to language is needed
to capture the distinctive flavour of her poetry.
Of necessity I shall focus on some selected small-sized
examples, since looking before and after is quite impossible unless all of you
are furnished with the original and translated poems in front of your eyes.
This may suggest that I am just interested in an exercise of spotting the
problems for its own sake. Not at all. My goal is to improve our understanding
of the nature of the task, to see how we may tackle problems on the ground and
refine our techniques. We can never hope to improve our techniques unless we
learn to focus on details. And it is the overall competence of the translators
that makes such a focus all the more rewarding and educative. My queries and
suggestions are offered with humility, and with due respect to all the
translators. Looking at smallish samples is dictated by the format of this
workshop and the time-limit. So let me plunge into the job in medias res. My first bundle of notes is called:
Some simple examples

on your forehead put a dot of “bindi” powder
made
from burnt postal cards,
put a sprig of jasmine in your hair (‘That’s not for Puti’)
I am not sure that ‘sandhyamalati’ is jasmine. I suspect it
is a local name for a completely different flower. As far as I know, it is a
small bush with purplish flowers. If Vijaya Mukhopadhyay had really meant
jasmine, would she not have written ‘jui’? The editor of Parabaas and myself have had a lot of discussion about the identity
of the ‘sandhyamalati’.
 |
Mirabilis jalapa, sent to us as sandhyamalati by the photographer, Arunangshu Sinha |
What some of us know as ‘sandhyamalati’ is called
‘sandhyamoni’ or ‘krishnakali’ (the Mirabilis
jalapa) by some others. This flower does blossom in the evening
(‘sandhya’). There is also considerable diversity in the interpretation of the
name ‘malati’. If it is interpreted as ‘jasmine’, as it sometimes is, then
‘sandhyamalati’ could indeed be interpreted as ‘evening-flowering jasmine’, a
sprig of which would be appropriate on a woman’s hair. However, I remember
doing a great deal of research into plant-names when compiling the glossary for
my translations of Tagore, looking up books compiled by botanists and
horticulturists, pestering students of botany in the Santiniketan campus,
getting them to consult their teachers and prepare lists for me, getting people
to show me the actual plants, and as a result of those investigations, the
‘juthika’ or ‘jui’ was identified as the Jasminum
auriculatum, the ‘bel’ as the Jasminum
sambac, the ‘chameli’ as the Jasminum
grandiflorum, all of the Oleaceae family, whereas the ‘malati’ was identified
as the Aganosma dichotoma (or the Aganosma caryophyllata of earlier
classifications) of the Apocynaceae family. I was shown the ‘malati’ plant, a
climbing shrub with fragrant white flowers. Does all this matter? That will
depend on the translator’s overall approach to local details. Personally, I
like to carry over as much detail as can be accommodated in the target language
without upsetting the poetical balance, and in this case I would have gone for
the simple option of retaining the original name and adding a note. I am
intrigued why this was not an option for these translators when they took much
greater trouble in the immediately preceding line, resulting in a somewhat
heavy-footed line, where six words have become fourteen, and the poetry has
been compromised by a cumbersome explanation. The Hindi word ‘bindi’ itself
requires an explanation, as does the process of ‘tip’-making referred to,
neither of which is provided. To attract new readers, the translation of poetry
needs to be ‘sharp’ and rhythmic, not bland or tired or stale. One could have
written:
put a dot of burnt-paper powder on your forehead,
stick a sprig of sandhyamalati in your coiled hair ....
and added appropriate notes.
What about the following example? -

I have removed all my trinkets,
have lifted off my veil, my gold tiara
and
hair ornaments. (‘To Be Worthy’)
I feel there is a question of interpretation here: the
philosophical force of ‘bahulya’ is not conveyed by the word ‘trinkets’. What
the poetic persona is saying is closer to: Look,
I am divesting myself of all superfluities. As in the original text, a period would be appropriate after the
first line, which is making a general statement, after which come some specific
details of ongoing action in the second line. And ‘sinthimour’ is one detail
the precision of which needed to be respected. It is the sola crown worn by
bride and groom. The phrase ‘hair ornaments’, in the plural, is too vague and
fudges the issue. After all, ‘tiara’ is also a hair ornament. The difference
between the two needs to be indicated - for the sake of the poetry, because
some of the poetry resides in the collocation of such details. We need to keep
the end always in view - which, in this type of edition, is to recreate the
poetry and recruit new readers for the poet.
A similar example is this one:

Sometimes it’s better
mentally to let go.
(‘Better let go’)
I am puzzled by this rendering; ‘nijeke arpon kora’ is
‘offering oneself’, not just ‘letting go’. Shouldn’t one at least write:
‘Sometimes it’s better/ mentally to let go of yourself’?
Here are examples of some off-the-mark renderings of single
words, of the kind that do matter in intensely terse and reticent poetry such
as Vijaya’s.

Mere words, empty words, meaningless. (‘Words’)
Here the interesting adjective ‘parinamheen’, meaning
‘leading nowhere, without a future’, has been translated by the more bland
adjective ‘meaningless’. If Vijaya wanted to say ‘meaningless’, she would have
surely written ‘arthaheen’.
‘Duallir moth’ in ‘Kolkatar Karakamale’ is rendered as ‘the
monument at Dualli’ (‘Homage to Calcutta’): but ‘moth’ is a monastery or
similar meeting-place of sannyasis; ‘monument’ has architectural associations,
but no necessary religious associations.
‘E bishal yajnashala’(‘Kon Flore’) is rendered as ‘this
colossal edifice’ (‘Which Floor’): however, ‘yajnashala’ implies the hectic
activity or busy-ness of a religious ritual, whereas ‘edifice’ merely refers to
a big building. In the same poem the phrase ‘koi, kon flore’ is rendered as
‘where,/ which floor’. I feel that ‘which floor’ should be ‘on which floor’;
omitting the locative causes the question to limp.
‘Boithaki moutat’ (‘Punarlikhito Kabita’) is rendered as
‘opium-smoke haze of the drawing-room’ (‘Rewritten Poem’): this narrows the
meaning unnecessarily; ‘moutat’ could be the haze of any kind of intoxication,
most likely, from the context of the poem, from tobacco or alcohol. Opium is
unlikely.
‘Pradipe kotu tel chhilo’ (‘Deepavriksha o Holud’) is
rendered as ‘There was mustard oil in the earthen lamp’ (‘The Lampstand and its
Yellow Flame’): I haven’t understood why the lamp is earthen when a few lines
down a brass artefact is referred to. Is it a brass lampstand with an earthen
lamp at the top? If so, didn’t it need to be explained in a note?
In the phrase ‘the heels’ pale rhythm’ (‘Henna’), ‘pale’ is
not the right translation of the word ‘mlaan’: amongst the various nuances of
this adjective are ‘tired, exhausted, languid’; hence in the context of human gait
‘flagging’ or ‘halting’would have been more appropriate. Vijaya has used this
adjective here in that special sense.
Let us now look at some
more complex cases, where, in my opinion, ‘trying harder’ might have
yielded better results.

The cat jumps up on the corrugated iron roof (‘Film’)
As far as conveying accurate information goes, the
translation is absolutely correct. I have checked this with people
knowledgeable in materials: what is called corrugated tin in common parlance is
actually corrugated iron, but in this line is there perhaps an oblique
reference to the film Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof (based on a Tennessee
Williams play)? After all, the poem is
entitled ‘Film’. Wasn’t some annotation necessary? This book provides no notes
at all.
The following example, the last lines of the poem in
question, deserves our close attention:

In the half-darkness
the upright lampstand and its yellow flame -
no symbol, no prayer.
(‘The Lampstand and Its Yellow Flame’)
The way the lines have been translated, with the addition of
a dash where Vijaya herself does not punctuate at all, suggests that the last
line has been taken to mean: ‘Here there is no symbol, no prayer’. This is OK
as far as it goes. But with a little effort the translation could have been
given a tilt towards what I reckon is the poet’s intended syntax: ‘The upright
lampstand with its yellow flame is neither a symbol nor a prayer (though one is
tempted to take it as such).’ The present indicative of the verb ‘to be’ is
implicit, not explicit in Bengali, and its hidden presence can be sensed
between lines 2 and 3 of the Bengali excerpt. I also think that the last line
needed to be repeated, as in the original poem. The original poem is a strong
philosophical statement, which is reinforced by the repetition of the last
line. Since the English volume gets its name from the last line of this poem,
the repetition would have been helpful. The English lines could be rewritten
thus:
In the half-darkness
the upright lampstand with its yellow flame
is neither a symbol nor a prayer.
Neither a symbol nor a prayer.
The other point worth
considering is the fact that the word ‘holud’ (‘yellow’) has been used in a
rather uncommon, ambiguous, starkly modernist way in the original poem.
Strictly speaking, in the four original lines given above and in the title of
the poem the word ‘holud’ is not an adjective, but a noun, the quality of
yellow-ness, the name of a colour. The title should really be translated as
‘The Lampstand and its Yellow’. The word for ‘flame’, ‘shikha’, does occur in
the original poem twice, and its yellow colour is explicitly acknowledged, but
interestingly the word is not used either at this point or in the title. The
word ‘flame’ has been kind of interpolated by the translators at this point and
in the title, presumably for the sake of fluency. So while they are not wrong
to have translated as they have done, the meaning has been somewhat narrowed
and the modernist use of language has been toned down. In the semi-darkness the
brass lampstand itself has a yellow sheen, to which is added the yellow tint of
the flame: there are two yellows, so to speak, one big, the other small, and
together they make up a special image, a tall, dominant splash of yellow. In
view of this, the second line of the extract given above could have been ‘the
upright lampstand and its yellow’ or ‘the upright lampstand with its yellow’,
and that would have been stronger and sharper, and nearer to the original
effect.
The following is an interesting example:

I came back home and found my
home wasn’t there. (‘No Home There’)
We have been given a somewhat matter-of-fact statement; the
play of words which is the heart of the original line isn’t quite there. There
the word for ‘home’ is repeated three times, and the poetry is in the paradox
of the statement. To me the line implies: ‘The house is still standing, but
there is no home for me in it. It has ceased to be my home.’ To bring this over
a creative gesture is called for. What about this? - just a suggestion! - ‘I
come back home, and find my home’s not at home.’ Further down in the translation of the same poem we encounter the
phrase ‘Like a stranger on a wooden chair’: in the original poem, it is not a
stranger but a tenant who is sitting on the chair. The transformation of the
tenant into a stranger is mysterious. I would have said that the original line
suggests a different transformation: the owner of the house has now become a
tenant, waiting nervously on a hard chair for the real owner to turn up. This meaning
could have been carried over with no effort at all. Why it wasn’t I don’t know.
Were the translators seduced by a Camus-like idea of ‘the stranger’? True, it
all boils down to an image of alienation, but personally I would have tried to
retain the image of the uncomfortable tenant, as it touches a Bengali social
reality - the ambiguous attitude of tenant to landlord.
And here is another one:

O fire
you know, this is my lonely ritual of Sati. (‘Are You Not Fire’)
The point is that the woman is burning on her own, whereas
in the ritual of sati a woman usually burns with the dead body of her husband,
or some emblem to stand for him. The point to grasp is that the poem is not
really about sati, but about death itself, its inevitable loneliness. The poet
visualizes her own death and the cremation of her body, which is earlier
described as ‘nirbandhab’, ‘friendless’ (as translated by these translators),
but more radically, following Sanskrit, ‘without kinsmen’. The function of the
image of sati is to sharpen the essential loneliness of death. This poet knows
that she will not even have the dubious comfort of company in death. And the
word for ‘fire’ used in the original is ‘paavak’, the root-meaning of which is
‘purifer’ and which I am quite sure has been used here deliberately by the
Sanskritist poet. The title, echoing one of the lines in the poem, is not quite
saying, simplistically, ‘Are you not fire?’, as in this translation, but
something much more like: ‘Are you not meant to be a purifier?’ So, incorporating
the root-meaning of the word ‘paavak’, and redistributing the words between the
lines a little bit for the sake of rhythm, one could rewrite the lines as:
O Fire, Purifier, you know
this is my act of sati, where I burn alone.

Disdainful city
do you fly like dust over my head,
cling to my feet like mud, ... (‘Rock of Resolve’)
I would say the word ‘like’ needs to be replaced with ‘as’.
The city is dust, is mud. These are parts of its being.

You can have only five abortions,
the advertisement says so. (‘Advertisement’)
The context of the poem indicates that the first line needs
to be translated as: ‘So you can have up to five abortions’.

First you put your hands on the
system, then on the strings.
(‘Sandhiprakash Raga’)
I wonder why ‘ganit’ has been translated as ‘system’ and not
as ‘mathematics’, the clear meaning. Isn’t ‘system’ too broad? Isn’t the poet
referring to the maths of music?

The heart-rending cries of
beggars
keep
exploding in your ears -
who can say if this beggary is a commercial racket
or
real indigence? (‘Climb up the
Rope’)
The last two lines have moved away a little from the
original. What the poet is saying may be paraphrased thus: ‘Looking at all
these beggars and listening to their cries, who can say the begging of which
one amongst them is simply a ploy to make money, and whose is real
helplessness?’ In other words, some of it is genuine and some fake. The
translation could have easily indicated this.
Annotation
The lack of annotation in this book needs to be mentioned
separately as an issue. I cannot see how in translating across cultural
boundaries we can opt out of annotation altogether, as has been done in this
volume.

What do you understand of the ULF? (‘That’s not for Puti’)
Well, none of us can understand, unless the acronym is
explained! Is it the United Leftist Front? Can we blame people if they think it
is the United Liberation Force?
The publisher’s blurb says: ‘The anthology is worth
international acclaim.’ But I don’t see how an international readership can be
expected to understand the meanings/associations of terms and phrases such as -
and I cull examples from various poems - ‘the Devisukta’, ‘Sunilmadhab’s
confusion of colours’, ‘Sandhiprakash Raga’, ‘Nirmal Hriday’, or ‘nine doors in
your virile body’ without the assistance of notes. I want you to look at the
extract which has the first two phrases:

starting with the mastication of a few lines
from
the Devisukta or King Lear
and ending with Sunilmadhab’s confusion of colors
or the universal scope of Esperanto. (‘Climb up the Rope’)
I have been puzzled by the phrase ‘confusion of colours’ for
‘varnavibhram’. ‘Varna’ can mean both ‘colour’ and ‘a letter of the alphabet’.
The other items in the context - the Devisukta, King Lear, Esperanto - all have
a connection with language and literature, so at first I wondered if
Sunilmadhab’s confusion was some kind of alphabetical or script-related chaos!
I wished I knew who this guy Sunilmadhab was! - some linguist, philologist, or
grammarian? BUT the editor of Parabaas
tells me that there is indeed a painter called Sunilmadhab Sen, so a reference
to the way he uses colours is entirely possible. Such a reference does,
however, need elucidation. I am not even sure which verses of which text the
Devisukta refers to. So even with my reasonable knowledge of Indian material I
need notes, and none are provided! How will the ‘overseas’ reader fare?
The poem ‘Graase, snaanajale’, translated as ‘In Devourings,
in Bathwater’, surely has a link with the image of ‘graas’ as eclipse? But
there is nothing in the translation to indicate it and no note to elucidate it.
What is one to make of this one - is this a cock-up or a
considered decision?

the solemn, myopic boy walks by,
the unyielding principle of tradition,
cold naiveté
glued to his back like a stone. (‘What You Gradually Realize’)
But ‘Mugdhabodh’ is the name of a famous grammatical text,
by Vopa-deva, the root meaning of the term being ‘that by means of which even
the dumbest students can be taught, made to understand’, i.e. ‘Sanskrit grammar
made easy’! Should the name of such a famous text have been translated as
‘naiveté’, without any note? Shouldn’t it at least be ‘grammar-made-easy’ or
some such formula? This example makes me think that the translators did not
have their entire work vetted by the poet, but consulted her only when they
thought it necessary, and this little problem slipped through the net because
none of the translators realized that it was
a problem!
Missing phrase or line/ wrong connections
Missing something out is a hazard of translation, most often
due to the sheer fatigue of maintaining the focus of the eyes on two separate
texts, the original one and the one that is in the process of being built. We
can ask a friend to check things for us, but if the work is substantial, he or
she will face the same problem, noting some problems maybe, but missing others.
Translation is a labour-intensive process carrying very little remuneration for
the time and labour spent on it.

in the exclusive shops of which cities are these terylene
shirts collected for droughts seen hanging, and is that robust girl’s name
Love, ...... (‘The Magic Mirror’)
The phrase in the original saying ‘and why I still don’t
know how to knit wool’ has been missed out. Of course, this could be a case of
printing error rather than a translator’s slip. But what about this one? -

The debate is over.
At any moment an earthquake could occur
just as a friend might drop in at another friend’s house,
from darkness an even thicker darkness flicks off.
An uncomplaining silence sits with lowered head
close to the fringes of flyaway hair.
Sleep, inebriation, memories float away, fragments
in the undertow.
The no’s - scattered like a sackful of nails on the floor,
a sackful of witchlike pitch-black no’s. (‘Twelve Fifty A.M.’)
You can see here how not paying attention to the original
layout is accompanied by a string of errors. The phrase ‘bhese jaay prajnaa o
prithivi’ has been swept off; the gap between the stanzas has been closed; and
the last line of the first stanza has been wrongly joined up with the first
line of the second stanza. Interestingly, there are two further errors:
‘bhrangsha’ is not really ‘fragments’ but ‘slippage’; and ‘ekguchchha’ can
never be ‘a sackful’- it is not more than ‘a handful’.
I would therefore say that punctuation and layout
are also details to which we have to pay as much attention as we can. In this
volume, space between stanzas is observed in an erratic fashion. It is
sometimes there, sometimes not. Sometimes gaps have been sacrificed just in
order to fit the poem on the page. I don’t think that is acceptable. We have to
try harder. A smaller font might have done the trick.

I never know who gets into my blood,
my veins, nerves, and brain go numb. (‘Let It Come Down the Highway’)
Even though there is no punctuation after the first line,
the Bengali lines are quite clear, because of the word-order. But reading the
English on its own, I read ‘my veins, nerves, and brain’ as a continuation of a
list beginning with ‘my blood’, until I hit the verb-phrase ‘go numb’, which
indicated otherwise. Then I looked up the original to check what was going on.
This kind of thing is what often puts readers off modern poetry in the first
place, and is a further irritant when reading poetry in translation. A
semi-colon rather than a comma would have been better after the first line.
Here is an interesting example of a wrong connection, the
kind I think we could eliminate by just a little more attention to syntax:

Thus sufficiently wearied
even when you make a spectacle
of
turning your back
we shall hail your “glorious retreat!” (‘Man’)
Let us for the moment ignore the question of whether the
irony-charged image of ‘darshaniyo pith’ could have been rendered better.
Indeed, the present rendering is quite imaginative. However, I think the syntax
should have been: ‘Thus, even when, sufficiently wearied,/ you make a spectacle
of turning your back’; otherwise the reader will link the phrase ‘sufficiently
wearied’ with the last line’s ‘we’, which is what I did until I checked the
lines against the original. I think the translator needs to make it quite clear
who is wearied - the viewers or the viewed. Note also that the title of the
poem (‘Purush’) has not been adequately translated. ‘Man’, so often used
generically for all humanity, is too general in the context of the poem, which
requires a clear statement of gender such as ‘The Male’.
These are just a few selected examples of ‘problems’. More
can be gathered from the book, but I have no time for more examples. I end
these notes with reiterating my basic position: I have attempted this exercise
in the spirit of a workshop not with the intention of showing others’ errors -
all of us, but all of us, make some mistakes in every task we perform - but
with the hope of showing how as professional translators we could be more
conscientious and try harder, for without excluding the elements of play and
pleasure, anything that is worth doing is surely worth doing well, with a clear
understanding of our objectives, and with an attention to the craft skills
appropriate to the task. I hope some translator somewhere can learn something
from this exercise. When a poem is transferred from one language to another,
some slippage of ‘meaning’ is unavoidable at times; and sometimes, inevitably,
new meanings are generated, which is all-right too, and can be fun, I think.
When reading translated poetry, we are not in search of pale replicas of
inaccessible texts: we want the joy of reading good poetry while savouring a
slight taste of ‘otherness’. But skills in any discipline can be improved by
training. If we as translators are prepared to go the extra mile, our
re-creations can have that oomph which can kindle flames in new readers.
Published July 25, 2003
Ketaki Kushari Dyson [ketakI
kushaarI Daaisan*] was born in Calcutta in 1940 and educated at Calcutta and Oxford. She has been based in England since ... (more)
Photograph of Mirabilis jalapa taken by Arunangshu Sinha who is a Department Head and Professor at Panshkura Banamali College in West Bengal.
Click here to send your feedback
|