On Why I Translate

According to a quote credited to the Roman Emperor Charlemagne "to have a second language is to have a second soul". Many Indians are multilingual from early childhood but going by my own experience I don’t think it gives us many souls, just that one soul fragmented into many pieces. As a child I heard Punjabi from my grandmother, Urdu from my father, Hindi from my mother, the UP Dehati (is Awadhi the correct term for it?) from the servants in the house and their children who were my friends and English from the nuns and teachers in my convent school. As an adult I picked up basic reading and speaking skills in Gujarati and the ability to listen in a few other Indian languages if I immerse myself in them for a spell. So what does that make me?

Multilingual? Yes, perhaps, sort of. But also confused and compartmentalized. Punjabi to me is the language of nostalgia, of a lost past, since my folks were refugees who when they moved from West Punjab after Partition to Lucknow also found it convenient to more or less drop the mother tongue and to pick up the threads of their young lives in the language of their adopted town. Urdu to me is the language of poetry and news (since my father loved poetry and heard the AIR’s Urdu news bulletin), Hindi of literature (since my mother read a great deal), awadhi of fun and games and being looked after and English the language I work in and make my way around the world in. And Gujarati is the language I talk to myself in inside my head when I need to distance myself from a situation and look at it objectively.

Over the years English has become by far my most dominant language. I read, write, speak and listen in English more and more. While my spoken Hindi is good, the reading and writing skills have fallen into disuse rapidly after the school years. And when I am in the presence of fluent Urdu or Punjabi speakers feelings of great embarrassment and regret overcome me – that I should know these languages better but don’t. Only my fractured Gujarati and smatterings of Bangla and Tamil (the languages I know least well) give me some happiness because these are not inheritances I whittled away but treasures I discovered on my own.

So to go back to the original question – why do I translate? To put it fancifully – I do it to construct a bridge back to myself - for however proficient I might be in English, culturally and emotionally I am still an Indian (part Lakhnawi, part refugee Punjabi, part adopted Gujju-behn, part all the places I’ve lived and worked in, in this vast and beloved country). A phulka to me does not feel as halka, in any other language as it does in my own. And while I like and admire the poetry of many English and American poets it simply doesn’t touch and move me in ways that the poetry of Faiz, Ghalib, Kabir, Shiv Batalvi, Nirala or Gulzar and so many other Indian poets does.

“Even one’s own tradition is not one’s birthright,” AK Ramanujan wrote in his introduction to his translation of the classic Tamil poets, “it has to be earned, repossessed. ...One chooses and translates a part of one’s past to make it present to oneself and maybe to others.” And that really is why I translate – to reclaim bits of myself. Call it a dialogue of my mind with my heart – my mind thinks and comprehends in English, my heart feels and relates in the parent tongues and when I engage in the process of translation I bring the two together for myself. A poem feels more my own after I have trans-created it than before.

I do not know if these trans-creations I post here will work similarly for you.....but I post them on the off-chance that they just might.....