That is not to say that that kind of writing is a purely static object. In my case, I do not know if it is a simple task – translating, I have been told it is not a simple task – maybe because of what is going on in my writing has more to do with what is happening on the level of style and language. If you cannot handle that person’s language and style as you are translating, then I would say: “don’t do it”. I do not think that simplifying somebody’s language or making it different is a good idea. Having translated his chapter of that book for the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, and having confronted those long, kind of serpentine, sentences, in which a huge amount of stuff is going on, I know that it is possible to try and do that in another language, without simplifying and breaking up.
Is a faithful translation of such an approach to writing possible?Īmit: I do not know, but having translated myself a writer, who wrote, for the want of a better word, poetically, although he wrote great novels, Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee in Bengali, who wrote Pather Panchali, which was just made into film by Satyajit Ray. Your work thrives on close observation, social nuance, and above all the energies of poetry. That is a good thing to do to give a fresh lease of life in translation to self that might be well known, but might have become a bit too canonical.
#Abstruction book by satyajit ray update
There is the other kind of translation, which is a re-working, and where you might actually take something that is canonical and very well known, and update it in a different kind of language, which might be periodic. I would try to approximate that uniqueness, if possible, in the target language. I would then try my best to be as faithful to what it is that made that writer unique and deserving of attention without necessarily putting anything of my own interpretation of what is important into the translation. that is what I would like to do when I am trying to translate a writer, who, I think, deserves attention outside of their own linguistic constituency. I have translated myself, and I suppose there are two kinds of translation – the translation that gives us a text from a foreign language in a target language, which might be English, capturing something of the style and the hallmarks of language that have made the writer well known in that language that they write in. What does a writer want of a translator?Īmit: You know, it has never been something that I thought about. He has been described as being “upsettingly multi-talented”.Īmit, your work, both your non-fiction and your fiction, has been translated widely into a multitude of languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and also an acclaimed musician and singer having released two albums – “This Is Not Fusion” and “Found Music”, as well as being an acclaimed singer in the Hindustani classical tradition. He lives in Calcutta with his wife and daughter, but spends some of the year in the UK where he is professor of the Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.
He is the winner of the Betty Trask Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, the Encore Award for Best Second Novel and the LA Times Book Prize for Fiction. He has published five novels and a collection of short stories, and his work has appeared in various publications, including the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Granta, and the New Yorker. He is a graduate of University College London, and was at Balliol College, and later, as Creative Arts Fellow, at Wolfson College at Oxford. Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962, but brought up in Bombay. I am Roger James Elsgood, and I am with writer and critic, Amit Chaudhuri. Roger: Welcome to the Today Translations’ interview.
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