Abstract
There have been many studies on locating the developments and challenges encountered in the translation of Dalit literature and the numerous impacts introduced by translators, editors and publishers. But hardly any attempt has been made to understand how Dalit writers themselves understand the process of translation. This is important because they often work very closely with these agents, and yet their opinions seem to get lost in the nitty-gritties of translation studies. It is perhaps for this reason alone that Limbale’s response to his translator evinces out this need when he says ‘You are worrying about my books and I am worrying about my movement’. It seems that Dalit writers have a distinct understanding of the role and process of translation which needs a necessary extrapolation. This essay then makes an attempt to suggest a theoretical framework which Dalit writers seem to have in mind when they advocate a need for a ‘socially committed translator’. The expression ‘Socially or politically committed translator’ itself needs to be explained as Dalit writers and their translators continue to use this expression, but the expression itself remains relatively untouched. This article will therefore address these two important issues to contribute some insights into this field.
Translating Intent: Translation from the Eyes of Dalit Writers
‘Don’t worry about these little blemishes. The book is still effective.’ 1
—Omprakash Valmiki
Introduction
In a conference in 2015 in the University of East Anglia, Sharan Kumar Limbale remarked that ‘The translators of Dalit literature are not always professional translators but they are socially committed. They give back to society with their work of translation… he should be socially committed’ (Dalit Voice and Vision, 2016). When asked about his opinion on the technical problems of translation and the many impacts introduced by numerous reconfigurations through translation, he says on a conclusive note that ‘You are worrying about my books and I am worrying about my movement’ (Dalit Voice and Vision, 2016). In Limbale’s statement, one finds an attempt to leap out of the apparent limitations involved in the process of translation towards the achievement of something he and Omprakash Valmiki seem to identify as far more important than mere technical issues related to language. Limbale and also the sense explicit in Valmiki’s quote here depict a very atypical condition for translators which implicitly seem to suggest that we need not worry about the details of translation as long as the translator himself is ‘socially committed’. Now this attitude to a scholar of translation studies may very well seem to be the biggest sacrilege they have ever heard.
However, it is interesting that Limbale does not quite ignore the need for a professional translator; he rather makes a distinction between the two kinds ‘Being loyal to text is one thing and being loyal to the social cause is another’ (Dalit Voice and Vision, 2016). Here, it seems that Limbale is trying to stretch the understanding of a professional translator with regard to Dalit literature. The typical idea of the translator ‘faithful to the integrity of the text’ here presupposes that this professional translator must also assume a sociopolitical function and the integrity of his task can only be maintained if and only if he remains politically committed. Hence, a translator in this context is qualified not so much on the basis of his professional acumen as much as on his political commitment. In other words, a translator may be technically very sound but due to the lack of his sociopolitical understanding and the subtleties of the political vision of Dalit literature, they may very well distort the efficacy of many aesthetic elements in this literature. But, on the other hand, a socially committed translator may not be technically very sound and may end up committing unpardonable mistakes.
It could very well be a case that a translator is socially committed but because of the lack of technical knowledge, enough proficiency, or a translator’s own idiosyncratic treatment the text may produce results of which it becomes perplexing to make sense of. One such instance is the translation of a short story ‘Phulwa’ written by a Dalit writer Ratan Kumar Sambharia’s in which the beginning of the Hindi and the English text does not only differ but also creatively re-imagined by the translator by adding scenes of her own. 2 Adding, excising and omitting words and sometimes sentences to even full pages are not very uncommon, and one merely has to look at the critical literature available in this regard to understand the prevalence of this practice. A similarly important reflection on this is provided by Arun Prabha Mukherjee in her essay titled ‘Dalit literature in translation: A symptomatic reading of Sharankumar Limbale’s Akkarmashi in English translation’ (2020). Mukherjee highlights how the English version of Akkarmashi published by Oxford ended up ‘truncating the writer’s four-page long ‘manogat’ (which can be translated as ‘speaking from the heart’) to less than a page in the English translation, subtitled as ‘Author’s Note’ and subsumed under ‘Acknowledgements’’ (Mukherjee, 2020, p. 154). Therefore, it becomes necessary to explore the idea of ‘socially committed’ translator in its full import despite its glaring shortcomings.
A View at the Recent Developments
I will come back to these issues in a moment, but I wish to begin with a few borrowed remarks in general over how important and persuasive the issue of translation stands before us with regard to Dalit literature. The following remark by the known Tamil critic, K. Satchidanandan is helpful to begin with:
There has been a surge in publishing Dalit writing in English translation. Mainstream publishers in India and abroad are seeking out Dalit literature. Namdeo Dhasal, Bama, Narendra Jadhav, Sharankumar Limbale and Omprakash Valmiki are in the news. Narendra Jhadav’s memoir Outcaste (Aamcha Baap aan Amhi) has been picked up for publishing in the United States by Simon and Schuster, the world’s second largest publisher, for a record amount and is fast becoming essential reading for sociological studies in American universities. (Satchidanandan, 2010)
With this increasing critical attention, translators abroad are also taking interests in this body of literature and one of the most widely known contemporary Dalit writers Ajay Navaria’s acclaimed book Unclaimed Terrain (2013) is translated by Laura Brueck, a translator and scholar of Modern Hindi literature at the Northwestern University. The several successful Dalit literature anthologies published by Oxford University Press also indicate this increasing global attention to understand marginality.
‘The Global interest in the local cultures and marginalised literatures which encourages the translation revolution of the 1990s compelled us to introduce the singularity of Tamil Dalit writing translated into English. Indeed, Known to us, and at the time of the printing of this book, no such volume focusing exclusively on Tamil Dalit writing exists even in Tamil.’ (Azhagarasan, 2012, p. Xi)
With a growing global interest in this literature, the need to look at the role played by foreign translators in translating this literature is crucial to understand the dynamic of the global narrative of marginality. A more acute consideration of this involvement of foreigners acting as mediators by assisting translations is considered by Christi Merrill when she highlights:
Today the work of the Dalit movement is recognized not only within India but transnationally, as activists have made headlines advocating for themselves at the UN Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 and as translations of these accounts enjoy ever-increasing publishing success abroad. In this essay I ask how we as foreign (and in this case American) readers are to arbitrate the political value of claims made in a literary genre whose rules of interpretation are in many cases foreign to us. (Merrill, 2010, p. 127)
With the involvement of foreign translators and critics studying these dynamics, one can understand how prominent the issue has already become. In the picture above portrayed, it is clear that Dalit literature has attracted both national and global attention, and consequently the issue of Dalit literary translation is becoming important in the global literary tradition and as such forms a part of a wider scholarship on translation and representation.
However, there have been attempts to critically engage with this issue as early as 2002 in a study titled Translating Caste edited by Tapan Basu, but apart from locating the issue in its social and cultural relevance they have largely failed to generate helpful theoretical insights. Scholars like Maya Pandit have also contributed significant insights on locating the ‘translation of Dalit literature in the dominant tradition of translation in India and in the discipline of translation studies’ (Pandit, 2020, p. 166).
It is undoubtedly with scholars like Arun Prabha Mukherjee (2016) and Alok Mukherjee (2020) who have written impressively on the role of editors, publishers and translators explaining in details the many ways these agents have distorted and damaged the actual intentions of the text. They have also brought a theoretical rigour to the discussions which the field has mostly lacked. Even though there is a fair amount of literature available now on the difficulties and challenges of translating this literature, but hardly any attempt is made to understand how Dalit writers themselves come to consider the issue of translation with regard to their work and at a larger level of cultural politics.
This essay is then an attempt to understand how Dalit writers look at the process of translation and what underpins such outlook. This is important because writers always work closely with translators, editors and publishers, and yet hardly any notice has been given to how they react or make sense of the many errors these agents make. In this essay, I will try to argue that the major developments in this field can be classed into two broad categories called, technical and practical functions of translation based on the understanding of Dalit writers. Through the discussion of these two types, I will suggest a framework that these writers seem to have in mind whenever they invoke a socially committed translator.
Technical and Practical Functions of Translation
As indicated above, the view of the problem as it stands before us can be understood in two broad categories. On the one hand, there are technical issues while on the other there are practical ones. Technical issues are related to the internal linguistic dynamics of language while the practical issues are related to external sociocultural and politico-literary matters of the text. I have subdivided technical issues further up into what is commonly understood as the logic of equivalence in translation studies and the logic of reversal in addition to the logic of political intent. The logic of reversal and political intent are two rules that I wish to add specifically for considering this body of literature. One should also bear in mind that these two categories, technical and practical, issue from each other, for instance if a translator adheres appropriately enough to the technical rules of translation, he/she may successfully fulfil what may be called the practical aspects of translation. Hence, technical rules may imply practical functions and this essay will try to explicitly explain what these practical functions as such are as per the vision and aesthetics of this body of literature are concerned.
Technical Functions
The three important technical aspects are the ‘logic of equivalence, ‘logic of reversal’ and the ‘logic of political intent’. For a simple understanding the issue of equivalence means the problem of untranslatables, and the issue of reversal deals with specific uses of words and sentence in order to reverse the accepted cultural connotation of that word, or idiom in the given rhetorical design and imagination of the text and the context in which it participates. The logic of equivalence includes problems like the flattened effect which may just take away a specific texture of the text if the translator is not proficient enough to get the texture of the text right. The logic of reversal is guided by the ‘logic of political intent’ pregnant in this body of literature the operation of which determines the efficacy of the text as such. In fact, the logic of political intent is the hinge upon which the logic of equivalence and logic of reversal at many occasions may depend.
The logic of political intent is nothing but the resurrection of the old intentionalist debate in literature which assumes that a writer has certain intentions installed in the text, which then must be appropriately translated by the translator. One major intent of Dalit literature as a whole is thus to rewrite and revise Indian imagination of caste and this intention provides Dalit literature to a very large extent a ‘revisionist character’ (Gajrawala, 2013). Hence, in order to successfully translate these intentions, a translator must see if the translated work is capable of performing those revisions or not. Thus, logic of reversal and political intent are tied together and must be considered as technical aspects because without these the aesthetic effects of this literature are rendered blunted.
The points made above will be explained by referring to an incident that I have discussed in my other chapter on Limbale’s autobiography. In this episode, the translator chooses to gloss over just a single word, and this technical error completely nullifies what I am calling the ‘logic of reversal’ and ‘the logic of political intent’, which are integral to the functioning of this literature. The inability to understand or preserve these two technical elements would amount to disturbing the practical aspects of the text, that is, its role in revising Indian imagination and history as Dalit writers like to claim. The episode is as follows:
In an episode when Limbale fails to obtain permission for going to loo, a flood of piss flowed out of his shorts to which he refers as Godavari. Calling his piss Godavari changes the sacred status the river has carried for the upper-caste Hindus and highlights a method adopted by Dalit writers to re-inscribe and renew the traditional outlook produced out of a Brahmanical mindset. It is interesting; however, that this incident is easily lost in the translation as the English translation omits the word ‘Godavari’ for ‘flood’. One, therefore, needs to pay strict regard to how translation can also affect and erase the intentionality of a Dalit text. (Gurjar, 2020, pp. 37–38)
In the above example, a technical error, namely that of ‘equivalence’ (inability to find an equivalent of Godavari, even though it is a proper noun and should not have ideally caused the translator to omit it for ‘flood’), is motivated by translator’s lack of sociopolitical background and intent of Dalit literature and their history. Not all socially committed translators, lacking the importance and training in translation studies, can gauge the importance of omitting even a single word. Nor can it be expected even from the proficient translators that they translate a text with such greater understanding word by word. In this example, we can see the problem of equivalence that translators often struggle with words and sometimes expressions that are untranslatable; there can never be a good approximation. But it is not the problem of equivalence alone that is at stake here; rather it is the logic of reversal and logic of intent which the translator seems to have nullified. Piss as ‘flood’ reverses nothing and communicates no significant intent but piss as ‘Godavari’ (a version of Ganga in Indian mythology) performs a ‘reversal’ and communicates a ‘political intent’, both of which are integral to this body of literature. Sara Beth offers a similar critical insight through her impressive reading of Hindi Dalit autobiographies ‘the pig is re-interpreted in Dalit autobiographical narratives from an object of filth and uncultured practices to a symbol of prosperity, celebration and most importantly, a separate and unique cultural tradition of the Dalit community’ (Beth, 2007, p. 547). They have an intention to rewrite attitudes, histories, perceptions etc. Hence, these three logics are very technical and connected to the way they serve practical purposes.
Alok Mukherjee while working with Limbale on a translation project remarks precisely this, ‘As it turned out, we needed to work through the text line by line. We needed to make sure that the book offended those that it needed to offend!’ (Arun Prabha Mukherjee, 2016, p. 11). This is what I meant when I said that a technically sound translation adhering to the logic of reversal and political intent will render the most successful fulfilment of practical functions. Now, there are two things I would like to say here, first, that all the technical efforts of the translators should be tied to his ability to master a certain preservation and communication of the political intent of the text to make sure the text preserves at least on many occasions this logic of reversal.
Second, the idea of a political intent is not as clear-cut as a Dalit writer simply trying to insult a Brahmin or an upper-caste member. This is not to say that the political intent is purely an act of slurring and mud-slinging, rather it seems to be a political act devoid of any particularly directed politics as such. This is again very clear in case of the publication of Limbale’s autobiography Akkarmashi. His text was received as insulting by his own kin more than others who castigated him for slandering and insulting his own community, as he wrote the autobiography when he was merely 25 years old (Limbale, 2009). 3 So, the idea of a political intent, or the logic of intent, has to be thought of as a technical strategy in the sense that it merely targets what Limbale would call a particularly Brahmanical attitude, this political intent can then be understood as creating an aesthetic impression imagined to be a part of a progressive politics against a regressive ideology of inequality. So what I am calling a political intent is a technical feature without which the text does not function as it was supposed to work. Hence, a translator must preserve this in order to render his services faithfully to the text, to make sure that the text means in the first place what it was supposed to mean.
Now we can see that the major technical challenge is to appropriate these logics of reversal and intent in order to come close to a successful rendition to strike the logic of equivalence. Since both the logic of reversal and the political intent work towards the achievement of equivalence, I have put them under the category of technical functions. Hence, we can see what should concern a translator of this body when he is faced with the difficulty of untranslatables. He should be able to preserve the logic of reversal and intent which the text in trying to perform by situating the untranslatable in its appropriate sociopolitical set-up. The example of this can be given from an excerpt from Arun Prabha Mukherjee’s translation of Jhootan:
During weddings, when the guests and the baratis, those who had accompanied the bridegroom as members of his party, were eating their meals, the Chuhras would sit outside with huge baskets. After the bridegroom’s party had eaten, the dirty pattals, or leaf plates, were put in the Chuhra’s baskets, which they took home to save the joothan that was sticking to them. The little remnants of pooris, puffed bread; bits of sweetmeats; and a little bit of vegetable were enough to make them happy. They ate the joothan with a lot of relish… (Arun Prabha Mukherjee, 2016, pp. 4–5; italics are mine)
Here, we see a very careful and impressive strategy in which the intent is well preserved and communicated. Mukherjee refers to what I am calling the preservation of the political intent as the task of ‘cultural explanation’ (Arun Prabha Mukherjee, 2016). But cultural explanation is like speaking for the other whereas the logic of intent is a technical feature and a neutral one. It is operative for both readers, upper–lower castes.
The Practical Aspects
Dalit writers provide a particular emphasis on the practical aspects which are made possible by the very act of translation without fixating upon the problems and solutions that can be generated within the technical domain. These practical aspects are seen as serving extra-textual purposes that are also the cornerstones of Dalit movement as such. Hence, instead of seeing the inadequacy of technical matters as a serious problem, they are subsumed under a broad political vision as a step from ignorance to knowledge and power. This insight is remarkably present in a reflection that Aniket Jaware makes in the introduction to his book Practising Caste when he says:
Like most other things, this (translation) is both good and bad at the same time; good that this literature is getting into English, and bad that is getting into English and other dominant languages of the world. Many of these translations will not be patiently done, since publishers must sell this literature while its popularity lasts: The translations will be quickly done and in an English that it is internationally readable (and therefore rather bland, a very small and thin and narrow ribbon in the available bandwidth called the English Language). Many of these impatient translation will not have the time to reflect on translation itself; neither will they have the time to pay attention to linguistic details of either of the two languages. There will be sins of commission and omission. (Jaware, 2019)
Jaware thus locates the faults committed by translators and publishers in a much broader matrix of cultural and material practices. Dalit authors also, like Jaware, locate these faults in a perpetual unfolding of the dynamics of cultural politics against which this body of literature continues to counteract. Therefore, they insist on judging a book not by how effectively it is linguistically managed but by how effectively it raises the concerns Dalit movement is identified for, some of which I will try to illustrate here.
We have already seen how translation is responsible for the dissemination of Dalit subjectivity at national and international levels. Hence, I wish to classify the aspect of nationalization and internationalization of Dalit subjectivity, the logic of dissemination, as one of the practical functions of the translation. The simple fact that any perfect or imperfect translation assists the logic of dissemination is considered a practical success of the translated work. Now, the text may have serious technical errors, in the way I indicated, but it can still help to nationalize, or internationalize Dalit consciousness. It is the logic of dissemination that speaks through Limbale and Valmiki’s insistence that Dalit movement is a priority and blemishes can be tolerated. Once the popularity and awareness increases, these blemishes will be taken care of by a more serious and meticulous engagement with this literature. A poor translation is still useful for exposing the many ways in which the language of upper castes continues to silence and erase Dalit subjectivity. Thus, it also disseminates the subtle forms of linguistic silences and erasures which now can be recorded and brought into critical discussions.
This brings us to our second practical function related to the logic of representation in which translation is seen as impregnating English or any other regional language with an experience that is rooted specifically in local Dalit subjectivity. This will then help in creating a cultural repertoire of memories and issues. This is important in the sense that such a repertoire once available in English or a national language can become available for literary criticism at a global level and play a vital role in generating literary discussions and ethical concerns. We can then say that translation participates in a certain politics of representation to make possible what K. Satyanarana and Susie Tharu (2013) would have called an ‘epistemic break’. This aspect can then be classified as the logic of representation. This is evident in the following sources:
Translating Caste is, first and foremost, intended to fulfil a pedagogical function. It proposes to bring the issue of caste and its textual representation in contemporary Indian literature into the classrooms of universities in India and abroad. The textual representation of caste in contemporary Indian Literature is, of course, to be made available and accessible to university students through their translations into English. (Basu, 2002, p. IX) It brings together most of the key figures and founding texts and includes contributions from different regions and castes…. This Dossier documents the complex questions that have been opened up in the context of the new Dalit movements. In fact, we find in this dossier a charting out of the field of contemporary Dalit political, social, cultural and spiritual initiatives. (Tharu, 2013, pp. 1–51)
There is yet another practical aspect which issues from the concerns raised in the aesthetic evaluations of this literature which can be called the logic of transformation. Only this much can be said of the logic of transformation here, that the overall aim of Dalit literature is to participate as an agent in the process of social change by inspiring and awakening people to the inherent inequalities of the world. And a successful translation is ultimately thought of as one which is able to bring that change in the world or in the people and the inspiration and intent it instil in people to rise against unjust social orders. Hence, the question of intention is a central one, what is my intention after seeing and knowing the unjust reality in which I may find myself complicit? I may wish to advocate justice or I may very well accept the world as it is, therefore, the question of intent is fundamentally political; hence, the translator in translating intent is operating under the ‘logic of political intent’. And this comes out beautifully in Arun’s remark ‘If a Dalit writer is an activist, I would say that the translator is also an activist. My journey to the point of becoming a translator of Joothan is the journey of coming into consciousness about the unjust social order and my place in it’ (Arun Prabha Mukherjee, 2016, p. 6).
Conclusion
But I must caution readers here that this is a politics not in the usual sense of the word politics, but it is a kind of an apolitical politics in which I need not come out on streets and rage battle against a regime or social setup, but a political activity which is implicit and compatible with the work of my everyday life. Life as inherently both political and yet apolitical in all its micro–macro manifestations, let me give a sense of this apolitical by reading out another sensitive translator, Suryanarayan Ransumbhe, who translated Limbale’s Akkarmashi in Hindi:
I am not a professional translator. I am committed to the distress of the oppressed, marginalised and untouchable sections of the society. That is why I consider Dalit literature not just a literature but a tool for transformation. I deem it necessary to take this literature at the national level so that people living a dehumanised existence in the far-flung areas of the country be made aware of their pains and the reasons for such existence. At the same time, I also consider it necessary to connect the privileged, savarna and sensitive people with the pains of the marginalised’ (Limbale, 2009, p. 27) (Translation my own).
4
Ransumbhe appears to be the perfect specimen of a socially committed translator for his heart is kindled by the same Dalit consciousness which this literature attempts to generate. The socially committed translator is, therefore, a person who is not only linguistically abled but also socially and politically committed to participate in the waves of social change with a progressive outlook. While a translator always thinks to be faithful to the text, Dalit writers insist that faithful service to the text can only be done when the translator himself understands the importance of extra-textual matters at hand. He must come out of the text and locate the text in a broader sociopolitical and cultural milieu, and it is from this location that he must address the text. Because textual matters are not governed by internal textual dynamics as much as they are by external sociopolitical and cultural factors. A socially committed translator remains faithful to the text as long as he fits into the framework we have discussed above. They may not perform their task to perfection but they may still contribute to the many visions Dalit texts and movement are about. A politically or socially committed translator understands that adoption of a political intent is first and foremost a necessary ingredient to his faithful service to the text’s integrity.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.