Khalid Jaffer, a journalist, writer, and more importantly, a bookworm from Malaysia, recently asked me to suggest a few authors from Kerala whose works represent Malayalam literature and are available in English translations. Khalid wanted to procure those books for the library of a research centre he was setting up in Kuala Lumpur. I started preparing a list of authors and their books which I thought to be milestones in Malayalam literature and culture. Names were endless. But, when it came to books, I got stuck because most of my favourite writers didn’t have reliable translations.
I had deliberately omitted classical writers like Thunchat Ramanujan Ezhuthachan, the 16th century poet and, for us, the father of our language; Poonthanam and Kunjan Nambiar who gave different faces of reflective deepness and satirical profundity respectively to our poetry. Also, I had skipped Unnayi Warrier, the Kalidasa of Malayalam in critics’ parlance and his Nalacharitham, the Nala-Damayanthi story he rendered into the format of the Kathakali text with poetical and theatrical dexterity. Those exclusions were mainly because, aside from Vijay Nambison’s Two Measures of Bhakti, an elegant translation of Poonthanam’s Jnana Pana (The Song of Wisdom) and Melpathur Narayana Bhatathiri’s Narayaneeyam (The Tale of the Lord Narayana), the last great work in Classical Sanskrit, I was sceptical about the authenticity of English translations of Malayalam classical literature.
Also, I was very careful this time to select writers and the translations of their books because I had a disappointing experience earlier. Two years ago when Lana Derkac, a writer from Croatia visited Kerala, she asked me about Malayalam literature and I said proudly that we had many writers of international standard and, as samples, gave her copies of Vaikkom Muhammad Basheer’s and O V Vijayan’s novels translated into English. But Lana found them uninteresting.
The failing is neither the authors’ nor hers. It is a problem of translation. Translatability, as Walter Benjamin says, is an ‘‘essential quality of certain works’’. This doesn’t mean that all such works must be translated. But that ‘‘a specific significance inherent in the original manifests in its translatability.’’ This is also tantamount to admitting that ‘‘no translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original.’’
At the same time, if this can be accepted as a theory, then how come that we are able to enjoy Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino, Mario Vargas Llosa, Pablo Neruda, Roberto Bolano, Georges Perec et al? Is it purely because of the ‘translatable quality’ of their works? Does this mean that Malayali authors’ works lack this quality?
We have seen the reach of Indian literature through A K Ramanujan’s translation of Tamil classical poetry, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s translations of Mahasweta Devi, Girish Karnad’s translation of Kannada literature and Lakshmi Holmstrom’s translation of contemporary Tamil writings. But Malayalam doesn’t have any such master translators. If there are any, they are interested only in popular names. That is the reason why major works like Uroob’s Sundarikalum Sundaranmarum (The Beautiful and the Handsome) or Parappurath’s Aranazhikaneram (Just a Moment) — both epic novels in content and treatment — still remain consigned to oblivion.
A translator is an amphibian being. The basic challenge is that the translation is meant for readers who do not understand the original. The essential quality of a work of art is not the imparting of information. But to go beyond the information and statements. Hence, an adequate translator is expected to convey the
experiential part which is possible only through his ability to correlate disparate
orders of languages and world views. Maybe our translators lack this felicity. Maybe that is what made me happy when novelist Anita Nair told me that she is now translating Nalacharitham into English and plans to do more works from Malayalam.