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Literary Review
Translation
Two takes on destiny
RAJI NARASIMHAN
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I, Ramaseshan succeeds in being true to the spirit of the original while Krishna Krishna reinforces the grandeur of the Mahabharata.
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Krishna Krishna, written and translated by Indira Paarthasarathy, Indian Writing, 2007, price not stated.
When the protagonist’s voice in a translation merges as smoothly with the spirit and phonetics of the target language as in I, Ramaseshan, it is an achievement. Padma Narayanan’s translation of Aadhavan’s Tamil no
vel En Peyar Ramaseshan, is this kind of achievement. Aadhavan’s hero is a recognisable pre-adult male of recognisable Tamil Brahmin stock. The diatribes produced by his attempts to cut loose from the various stagnations of his h
ome have a distinct linguistic-cultural vocal timbre that breaks through the canopy of English.
“Why are you blinking as if you don’t know what we are talking about?” storms Ramaseshan’s mother when she comes to know of his goings on with a girl. The word “blinking” stands out conspicuously in that translated sentence. The rest sinks under the weight of that word. But this very imbalance alerts you to the non-English idiom of the sentence. And on the wings of this awakening, the sentence speaks itself out in the phonetics of everyday Tamil. The whole situation portrayed in the sentence stands clear before us in a certain “native” distribution of emotion and the linguistic-cultural shaping of it.
Now, in this re-formulated sentence too, the emphasis falls on the Tamil word denoting “blinking”. But the rest of the sentence doesn’t buckle under the weight. It swings with the word, the word gives ballast to the whole sentence.
Repeatedly in Narayanan’s translation we hear this ground level articulation of the original language ring out above the English sound designs. Such quick interplay of both the constituent languages, one feels, is a hallmark of a good translation.
Comfortably located
I, Ramaseshan, Aadhavan, translated from the Tamil by Padma Narayanan, Indian Writing, 2007, price not stated.
Narayanan achieves this symbiosis mainly through a close, involved reading of Aadhavan’s work. One device that comes to her from this close range is transliterating words. It is not unprecedented, far from it. But to make the transliteration chime with the translating language in body and spirit is not exactly precedented. How Narayanan manages this is not easy to explain. Terms like thayir vadai, mami, paatti, which she imports liberally
into her rendering, do not seem discordant in the English acoustics. A glossary is given at the end. But the precise meanings that glossaries give are not really needed in this translation. The contexts emerge clearly enough to provide the broad clues necessary to get on with the reading.
Stationed in this cosy terrain between two languages, lapped by the waters of both, we rock with the aches and angers of R’s growth to maturity. It is a thoroughly enjoyable cross-lingual experience that we get from I, Ramaseshan.
The grand scheme of things
Cross-lingual pleasures taper off to beyond-language sensations of transcendentalist awakenings in Indira Paarthasarathy’s novel Krishna Krishna. Translated from the Tamil into English by Paarthasarathy himself, the work draws
attention more to the grandeur of the Mahabharata, on which it is based, than to any telling linguistic usage. Take the high water marks of the work, where the well-known events of the Mahabharata are re-interpreted
by the writer-narrator, figuring as Narada. Thus, Duryodhan, an archer as good as Arjun, loses the contest set for winning Draupadi because Krishna sows confusion in his mind over a distant but related issue on the occasion of the contest and makes him lose concentration. If Duryodhan had won, the Mahabharata wouldn’t have happened. And the Mahabharata had to happen because it had to. Krishna is only a limb of destiny. That is the rationale of the author. It
is fascinating. But it takes us back to the epic, makes us forget the writer or the language. No writer, no language, can steal the thunder from the Mahabharata!
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