Bridges, gaps, and the thread that binds
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We can never fully understand another culture, another language. But translation may just be the beginning of a dialogue, concludes C.K. MEENA, at the end of the recent Indo-Swedish Translation Project.
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THE LABEL beneath the vessel of kosumbri said "vegetable salad" and the Kannadigas in the room sniffed disapprovingly. But if the dish had been called by its original name, the Swedes wouldn't have made sense of it. And yet, how could the festive and culture-specific "kosumbri" be changed into a word that, to the Indian, connoted a mundane assortment of onions, carrots, and cucumbers? To add a further twist, what exactly did "vegetable salad" mean to a resident of Sweden?
There it was — the quandaries of cross-cultural dialogue represented by a single item of food. Appropriately enough, the occasion was a conference held by the Indo-Swedish Translation Project (ISTP), a forum for writers, translators and publishers from both these countries, financially supported by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. What began as a month-long visit by 10 Swedish writers to India in 1996, arranged by the Sahitya Akademi and the Swedish Writers Union (SWU), blossomed into a bouquet of translations of literary works: four Indian books into Swedish, and six Swedish books into Indian languages. During last week's three-day conference at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), titled Sambandh: Relating Distant Worlds, 41 authors, poets, translators, scholars, critics and publishers explored the meanings, difficulties, and possibilities of translation and cultural exchange.
India and Sweden: can you find two, more different countries on this planet? The Sanskrit word sambandh spelt without the "h" in Swedish means "the thread that binds", but this common meaning cannot, on its own, be the basis for a firm and lasting connection. In fact, the differences between cultures as much as the similarities help strengthen mutual understanding. As English professor, translator, and conference co-ordinator Vanamala Vishwanatha observed during the inaugural: "All dialogues across cultures are marked by the fact that one's attempt to make sense of the other is always necessarily incomplete... It is that residual opacity — that something which we do not fully understand — that marks the beginning of a real dialogue."
We can never fully understand another culture, another language. Translation may be an excellent vehicle of intercultural communication, but that tantalising something which we cannot put our finger on — isn't that what every translator grapples with, day in and day out? Writer and educator Stewe Claeson came up with a wonderful simile describing languages "all dancing around the same point" like the gopikas dancing around Krishna. Just as the moment a gopika felt that Krishna was hers and hers alone, he would vanish, the elusive meaning of a word slides away the instant you think you've captured its essence.
"Knowing and not knowing, the wonderful gap in between, that for me is sambandh," said poet Arne Johnsson during a discussion on "Sambandh: Bridging Cultural Gaps". He said he liked the danger of the gap, liked being in a situation where he was not totally in control. "We need those differences. We need not know everything about each other."
Knowing something about the other's culture does help the process of translation, and the ISTP has made possible inter-country visits by Indian and Swedish writers. Of the 10 writers who came to India on that initial '96 trip, four took up translation. One wonders how many of the nine who came this January (and who were part of the 22-member Swedish delegation at the NIAS conference) would feel inspired to translate Indian works into Swedish. One is reasonably sure that they would either write about India, or that India would seep into their writing — two results of the previous visit. As the Swedish Ambassador to India Inga Erikkson-Fogh explained during the inaugural: "Many Swedes here have come to India many times and some have even lived and worked here." Hence they did not see India as "the exotic other".
So what's the connection between kosumbri and vegetable salad? Cross cultural dialogues began right from food at Sambandh: Relating Different Worlds. — Photos: Murali Kumar K.
India had influenced them indelibly, and with varying intensity. Lars Andersson spoke of how India had entered three of his latest novels. Newspaper editor Soren Sommelius had written a book on Kerala in the Eighties. Writer Tomas Lofstrom had configured his home computer so that the website of The Hindu came up first when he switched it on! In contrast with many of the old India hands was the youngest delegate, 24-year-old poet Asa Ericsdotter, sounding like the archetypal innocent abroad when she described her recent travels.
But however deep the connections be, translation poses inevitable difficulties. Poet Teji Grover referred to the challenges of translating Swedish poets into Hindi, some of whom were notoriously difficult, while some had a style that could be translated so easily that the poems read like Hindi originals. Writer S.R. Vijayaraghavan who had translated Gunnar Ekelof's poems into Kannada said he hadn't heard the sound of the Swedish language until the inaugural of the conference, and if he had heard it earlier, "I suspect the Kannada Ekelof would have sounded different". He also felt that "the music of Kannada fills what eluded the English translator".
Here came a vexatious issue: the inevitability of English as a via media. There were no direct translations between Swedish and Indian languages. "We need to use the English translation as a bridge over unknown troubled waters," as translator and SWU president Boel Unnerstad put it. Publisher Styrbjorn Gustafsson said that Sweden published around 1,000 translated books every year but over 80 per cent were from books written in English.
Novelist Agneta Pleijel gently hinted at the impossibility of translating the Swedish experience into the Anglo-Saxon when she referred to Joan Tate's translation of her novel into the English Dog Star. There was a "smoothening out" of the original, she said. When I later pressed her to explain, she said that Tate had "English-ified" the novel. She had done an "efficient" job, but rendered solid what Agneta had left deliberately opaque since her priority had been "clarity".
Getting translated into English is the aim of many writers in a globalised world. Given "the cannibalistic tendencies of market-driven global cultures", in Vanamala's words, there is a greater need for a sambandh between countries that get gobbled up. What, in the end, does the Indo-Swedish sambandh amount to? Are the links "between one interior and another interior", to quote U.R. Ananthamurthy? Is it a narcisstic desire to "look for my reflection in your pool" as translation scholar Harish Trivedi put it, or a "curiosity about the antipodes", in Agneta's phrase? Writer Zac O'Yeah pointed to the dangers of building bridges since they tended to become one-way and led to the "coca-colonising of native cultures" (a colourful expression earlier used by Sahitya Akademi secretary K. Satchidanandan). "Rather than building bridges," said Zac, "we should learn to swim."
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