Lost in Translation?!

It was with great anticipation that I picked up Tagore’s Chokher Bali for perusal.
It was with great disappointment that I put it down.

I sat back and reflected.

How could it be that Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s celebrated creation had left me cold! Had I gone out of my mind?
I could grasp nothing concrete from that vague ‘something missing feeling’ that had haunted me throughout the read.

The realization struck me in the most unexpected of places – while watching Sanjeev Kapoor’s Cookery session on the idiot box. He kept repeating the word ‘flavour’ and at its tenth mention, I sat up straight.

This was it!

Flavour!

The flavour of Tagore’s creation – of the Bangla tradition in that pre-independence era – were conspicuously missing from the English translation of his work!

Chokher Bali had been lost somewhere in translation.

I decided to give it another go. I read the English version of Sardindu Bindopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi collection – though not at par with Chokher Bali, it was at least set in the same Bangla world! This time the feeling of unreality was markedly less. It did not feel as though Byomkesh and Ajit were puppets lip-syncing on stage, as I had felt with Binodini and Behari.

What was the difference? Why was this the case?

At first, I reasoned that Byomkesh was more of crime and investigation and less of culture and language and emotion as Chokher Bali had been. But I dismissed the notion soon as a fitter idea took its place.

The translator of Saradindu Bindopadhyay (Shrijeeta Guha) had used several Hindi and Bangla words in place of their English counterparts whereas that of Chokher Bali (Radha Chakravarty) had not.

This had somehow managed to provide a certain authenticity, a stamp of Bengal so to say, on the translated version.

Eureka!

If you leave books aside and regard the celluloid world, the tale is abjectly pitiable. Even less attention to maintaining the flavour is spared in this area – all those of you who have seen the Hindi versions of Harry Potter and Titanic will have to agree to this – the movies were so much caricature and so little movies! I was reading the Hindi sub-titles of The Mask and you wouldn’t believe it how they translated ‘Spicy Babe’. Forgive me, but I leave it to your knowledge of Hindi and your imagination powers to help decipher what its literal translation would be! You can’t? How about ‘Chhamiya Masaledaar’? Er – Gosh – Egads – Yikes – But there it is! True enough!
(Oh, and my barother wants me to believe that Spiderman is available with Bhojpuri sub-titles - anyone game for it? :-D)

The Tele-Shopping network or the Discovery Channel & NGC are still worse – they make you want to laugh and do nothing else! Especially the TSN is nothing but an elaborate joke and very little less, methinks at times. And as for Discovery…Frankly, the way they speak on Discovery…I once wondered if I was watching an Ekta Kapoor creation and not a treatise on African snakes.


You see language itself can be a source of constraint for any Translator. Language can be such a complexity. It is such an efficient mirror of culture and popular views – which are dynamic, diverse and developing every minute!
There are dozens of words that can be found in one and are missing from others – e.g. – a tailor is called ‘darzi’ in Urdu but I could find no suitable synonym for it in Hindi.

Herein, a translator has no option but to use the only word available.

Then there are the idioms and axioms and special phrases and similar sounding words that are so unique to one language. I feel especially sad when an intelligent pun has been made using words of one language and a translator can never achieve to transmit it faithfully in the other-language version.

On other occasions, some words simply refuse to be translated with the same feel to them. Example in quote – the word ‘mishti’ has such sweetness in it that the word ‘sweetmeats’ can not replace it!

The nature of the text is important of course. A philosophical treatise will not give as many hassles as the song ‘Beedi’ from Omkara… No jokes people – take it as an exercise! You can translate Coelho’s Alchemist more easily (If you know Brazilian, that is) than Gulzar's 'Beedi'…try it, try it!


Jokes apart, I hope you would perhaps now agree with me that a Translator is doing no mean task – and that he seldom gets the credit due to him when all we mention is the author’s name and forget his! In fact, do we even bother to know the name of those unheard of people who prepare sub-titles for movies?