Translator Translated_ A Novella - Anita Desai [15]
And together with this 'enhancement', as I named it, of the text, I could see that reduction and deletion were called for too. I had to be a teacher and a critic, underline words she had used again and again: how often could I let her use the same adjective for one character? There was no need to repeat 'gentle' and 'kind-hearted' every time the grandmother was mentioned: her words and acts alone could convey that. And it was not necessary to keep calling the daughter-in-law 'greedy' and 'bad-tempered' if there were incidents that showed her greed and insolence.
As with adjectives, I found verbs and adverbs, too, could go. The death of the grandfather, for instance, described by one character in chapter two, surely did not need to be repeated in chapter three by another character with the same 'wailing' and signs of 'grief'. It could be dramatised just once, not oftener: the effect would be to make the text tighter, stronger.
I admit that now and then, in tired moments when I sat back and became aware of how my neck ached and how the heat was solidifying and pressing on me, I did wonder if what I was doing was my brief—to render a faithful translation of Suvarna Devi's work. But then I would get up, fetch myself a glass of water from the big clay jar that rested on the ledge of the kitchen window and kept the water marginally cooler than what emerged from the tap, return to my table and take a sip. Then ideas would come to me like drops of moisture falling on the arid manuscript, reviving my interest.
Picking up my pen, I would remind myself that the best translations are the most inspired, when the translator becomes fully a co-author of the work so that it is a coming together of two creative spirits in a single venture. If the translator cannot rise to that, then the translation will be a failure.
It made me laugh, almost, to see how improved the text was with the changes I had made, and the paring away of repetition. Oh, I should have been an editor—Tara should have employed me in her publishing house—and Suvarna Devi ought to have had an editor before she had a translator. Now she had both. How could she be anything but pleased? My translation was an uncovering, a revealing of what had been buried, concealed in her work. In a way, you could say I was the writer, only I would not be given the recognition. Not by Tara who had not read the original, and not by Suvarna Devi who was unlikely to read the translation. She had said, in the speech she gave at the conference, that although she could read English, she could not write in it because its vocabulary did not 'cover'—that was her word— her experience of life. I had thought that a strange remark but now I found reassurance in it. It had been my role to prove that it could. Perhaps one day we would meet again and I would explain to her the different way of translation I had discovered: a transcreation? or even a collaboration?
All this was clear to me in the day, while I worked, but I have to confess that darkness, sleeplessness and anxiety made the nights a different matter. Lying on my back, trying to ignore the heat, the sounds and lights of passing traffic, I found that the thoughts and worries I could hold at bay in daylight approached me like ghosts, like monsters come to threaten me. They exerted a weight on my chest and sometimes I could hardly breathe. I would have to get up to try and escape them. I would go to the kitchen and pour myself a glass of water. I would drink it standing by the window and looking out on the deserted street. The street lights would be shining. Sometimes a dog appeared to scavenge in a pile of garbage