Translating the world
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UMA MAHADEVAN-DASGUPTA listens as Homi Bhabha and Amitav Ghosh talk about translation and language at a reading of Ghosh's latest work.
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K.GOPINATHAN
Of language and realationships ... Amitav Ghosh.
IT was the evening with the most rain this month, but the Cha Bar at Bombay's Oxford Bookstore was packed beyond its capacity for the Amitav Ghosh book reading. Rahul Bose was also up there on the dais, but the Bombay literati get to see Bose often enough on the rugby field at the Bombay Gymkhana; and there was Ghosh himself, a slender silvery-haired figure in blue kurta. But at least half the crowd had braved the rains to hear the other person on the dais: Homi Bhabha, international grey eminence of literary and cultural studies and, as he was introduced, to his amusement, the "academic superstar of today".
Optical illusions
Ghosh began the reading from his latest novel, The Hungry Tide with a passage in which the American-educated cetologist Piya is being initiated into the mysteries of the Sunderbans by Fokir, her boatman guide:
"At the end of the run, Fokir surprised her by turning the boat's bow in the direction of the shore. This was the closest she had been to the forest and she felt as though she were facing it for the first time: before, it had been either half-submerged, or a distant silhouette, looking down on the water from the heights of the shore. Looking into it now, she was struck by the way the greenery worked to confound the eye. It was not just that it was a barrier, like a screen or a wall: it seemed to trick the human gaze, in the manner of a cleverly drawn optical illusion."
Bhabha picked up this image to remark upon the optical illusions of Ghosh's narrative itself as it shifts continually from the vast mapping of the territory and its various metaphors, the world and its cultures, seen from the stance of the outsider, to the continual moving into the detail and the local, recalling the gamchha that is not only towel and garment, but also the skin of Fokir as it were — and which actually saves Piya's life at the end. Modernity, technology and the local are profoundly "messed up" in Ghosh's fiction, remarked Bhabha. Ghosh agreed: his attempt, he explained, had been, as always, to establish the connections between `the resolutely panoptical and the irreducibly local'.
Also recalling that, at the end of the novel, Piya will retrieve her information from the GPS, Bhabha remarked upon language itself being another GPS, and on how Ghosh talks about this, making the translator, and the act of translation, so important in the novel. "You only get lost in translation if you don't deal with the underlying problems of translation," Bhabha observed.
"Translation goes to the heart of it all," said Ghosh. "I see myself as a translator; Rahul (Bose) is a translator. I ask myself, what exactly do I do in this role?"
"In some ways," said Ghosh, "this book also grew into a response to 9/11. I started reading Rilke then, and began to learn what he meant when he spoke of praising the world, its splendour and glory, despite the despair."
P.V.SIVAKUMAR
Homi Bhabha
There is much of Rilke in The Hungry Tide. "Rilke, perhaps more than any other European poet, had an influence on Bengali poetry," said Ghosh, recalling the two important translations of Rilke into Bengali. The lines from Rilke quoted in the first chapter of the book are at once joyful and elegiac: "we, who have always thought of joy as rising... feel the emotion that almost amazes us when a happy thing falls."
Rahul Bose read a passage from the novel, about words, their persistence and their absence: "But she persisted, making signs and gestures until finally he understood. `Gamchha,' he said laconically, and of course, that was it; she had known it all along: Gamchha, gamchha."
Discovering language
How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a cupboard, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered? "There was a time once when the Bengali language was an angry flood trying to break down her door. She would crawl into a wardrobe and lock herself in, stuffing her ears to shut out those sounds. But the doors were no defence against her parents' voices: it was in that language that they fought, and the sounds of their quarrels would always find ways of trickling in, under the door and through the cracks, the level rising until she thought she would drown in the flood."
"We have a very complicated relationship with language in India," said Ghosh. "There is the language we are born into, the language we've learned, which is at once very compelling, but also something that we want to get away from. English then becomes the neutral territory."
"The novel today can draw everything into it," said Ghosh. "It is the most intense activity. In The Hungry Tide, I have tried to depict the technological, social, ethical complexities of living in the world today. I started work on the novel in 2000, spending weeks at a time, several times, in the Sunderbans. The living conditions there are extraordinarily difficult. The deprivation and difficulty are unbelievable, and it's shocking that so little is known about it. There are four million people living in the Indian Sunderbans, and it's not the tigers but the poverty that is killing them steadily. It's a continuing catastrophe."
"The Sunderbans are a deeply disturbing landscape. Very beautiful, but it takes a long, long time to see their beauty: the mud, mudskippers, crabs frothing in the mud," said Ghosh. "Interestingly, the Sunderbans seem to be a part of the country that almost hasn't been sung into myth at all. They are an area of darkness, not just to Mumbai or Delhi but also to those in Kolkata. It's strange how absent they are."
"And yet,' remarked Bhabha, `Hamilton wanted to set up his utopian community there. And this novel shows the value of living there; of living. It is not about celebration, but about what it takes to survive with forbearance in the world."
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