IN COVERSATION
Translation as absence
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Noted French translator Dominique Vitalyos is passionate about translating Indian, especially Malayalam, authors. K.K. GOPALAKRISHNAN talks to the translator who is in India now.
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DOMINIQUE VITALYOS, the well-known French translator from Marseilles, France, is back in Kerala, for her "winter migration". What makes her different from other translators is that she proposes interesting books to the publishers in France and translates from the original, "a pre-condition to any claim of loyalty to the authors' spirit".
Fayard released her recent translation of O.V. Vijayan's path-breaking Malayalam novel Khasakkinte Itihasam (The Legends of Khasak), titled Les Légendes de Khasak, in France a few months back. "I got immense pleasure in translating the work. Both Vijayan — at the time of writing — and his character Ravi find themselves in an ideological void, a state which enhances sensitivity to one's surroundings," says Dominique. "The book is slowly picking up among the French readers. Nobody could guess where Khasak — a fictional name anyway! — was, while the name Kerala rings a bell at least as a tourist centre, so it was presented (rightly so, I feel) as Le grand roman du Kerala which literally means `the big novel from Kerala', to give it a better chance", adds Dominique.
The influence of Kathakali
"Before Nalacharitam, I never knew I would work as a translator one day. I had been in Kerala for five years (since 1985), studying Malayalam and Kathakali. But the beauty of the text and story, the various ways through which Kathakali on stage induces understanding of the most subtle meanings, had a deep effect on me." Dominique's translated Unnayi Variyar's classic Kathakali repertoire Nalacharitam in 1993 and it was published in 1995 by Gallimard, with a substantial introduction and photographs by her, in their series on oriental materials (Connaissance de l'Orient), as Jours d'amour et d'épreuve, L'histoire de Nala. Her second work was different — Sudhir Kakar's English book Shamans, Mystics and Doctors, published by Seuil in 1997.
"In 1992, I had to go back to France but wanted to keep coming to Kerala. These two translations were the perfect work for the mobility I required. But I could never have made a living out of translating from Malayalam exclusively, and I felt the time had come to enlarge my vision and experience of India as a whole. The only Indian authors who had then made a name in France were those living abroad like Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Shashi Tharoor, Anita Desai,... with the exceptions of R.K. Narayan and (partly) Amitav Ghosh." Dominique started reading Indian authors, convinced that some of them deserved to be translated and read in France.
Her translation of Mukul Kesavan's Looking Through Glass was on its way towards publication by Philippe Picquier as Retour sur Image when Arundathi Roy, whose God of Small Things Dominique read in English and loved immensely from the start, shot to fame with the Booker prize. Arundathi's success gave an impetus to the publishing of Indian authors in France, and two succeeding national book fairs with India as their focus, in 2001 and 2002, enhanced the publishers' interest in Indian literatures, extending to Indian languages as well. Thanks to these factors, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam authors have been published outside the limited channels of oriental studies. But Kannada and the Northeastern languages still await translators.
Dominique hopes the interest in Indian texts will not waver as these favourable circumstances recede into the past. "Literature desperately needs to be moved around, talked about, introduced and made alive even before reading. Something has to be done to give the readers a festive approach to it. Meeting the authors (and their translators recycled as interpreters) made a huge difference for many potential readers during the book fairs. If only these fairs could multiply!"
She is currently translating The Trotter Nama, by I. Allan Sealy (whose Everest Hotel she also "discovered" and proposed), "a huge and challenging book in English on the Anglo-Indians, at the crossroads between history, epic, farce, nonsense... ", and selected works of Vaikkom Mohammed Basheer.
A double process
"An author's expression deserves to be interiorised until you hear the author speaking French in your head. For me, translating involves a double process of disappearance and creation. Ideally, there should not be any trace of my own `style' in my translations. If at all, I would love to be recognised through my absence", Dominique emphasises.
Her other translations from Malayalam include poems of G. Sankara Kurup (the first Jnanpith winner) and Ayyappa Panicker, Mantracharadu (Magical String) by Basheer, O.V. Vijayan's Vimanattavalam (Airport), Kamala Das' Driksakshi, (Eye Witness) and a short story of Paul Zacharia. Additionally, she translated other Indian authors writing in English, like Sudhir Kakar, Bulbul Sharma, Mukul Kesavan, Sanjay Nigam, I. Allan Sealy, Manil Suri, Radhika Jha and B. P. Singh. `The Discovery of India' by Jawaharlal Nehru, proposed by Dominique, was translated by her jointly with Catherine Richard and published by Philippe Picquier in 2002. "Even if some information given in it is outdated, Nehru's book is immensely important to understand the idea that lies at the basis of India as the state and democracy she has become with Independence", insists Dominique.
But all is not rosy in France for Indian literatures and translations in general, according to her. Publishing means business, and business is all about balancing investment and profit. Except for very few well-known authors, Indian titles are quite tough to market. The buying of copyrights and translation rights are significant investments, advertisements are very expensive, and overburdened reviewers in leading periodicals mostly limit their reading and reviews to renowned authors, she says.
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