Translator Translated_ A Novella - Anita Desai [6]
And by the time the Fanta had been drunk (bringing on an embarrassing sequence of barely suppressed burps) and Prema, the academic and critic, was on her way out, it had been decided she would write a synopsis of the book, a brief biography and bibliography of Suvarna Devi's work, and a few pages—oh, five or ten—of her translation as a sample. Once she had sent that in, she would hear from Tara. Yes, definitely, within a month—or two at the most.
Then the secretary rang to announce the next visitor and Tara flew out of her chair to receive the young man who had come in with his arms flung wide, no longer merely polite but positively exuberant. Of course, he was young and attractive, Prema could see that before she left.
What actually saddened me when I left was not the sight of masculine youth and its attraction for Tara but the thought, now settling on me as I sat on the bus—it was a Ladies' Special which was why I had a seat—that Tara had not asked me a single question about my involvement with this language. I had been given no opportunity to explain how I came about it, what it meant to me and why, while teaching the usual, accepted course of English literature in a women's college, I had maintained my commitment to it. I could have told her so much, so much—but was given no chance and so I had to keep the information withheld, a secret. No one knew what a weight that exerted, one I longed to relieve.
But, getting off the bus and climbing the stairs to my room at the top, I found I could, in a quite miraculous way, unload myself of that weight. As soon as I took out the little paperback—its pages were coming loose from the binding, I noticed—and pulled a piece of paper to me and began to translate the first line, it was as if I had been given a magic key that would open the rest.
'It started to rain. It was getting dark'.
But no—immediately I could see how blunt that looked, how lacking in spirit. Where was the music, the lilt of the original?
'Rain began to fall. The village was in darkness.'
Yes, and yes. How easy to see that these words worked, the others did not. I hurried on, hurried while that sense lasted of what was right, what was wrong, an instinct sometimes elusive which had to be courted and kept alert. Selecting, recognising, acknowledging. I was only the conduit, the medium between that language and this—but I was the one doing the selecting, the discriminating, and I was the only one who could; the writer herself could not. I was interpreting the text for her because I had the power—too strong a word perhaps, but the ability, yes. I was also the one who knew what she meant, what worlds her words evoked. They were not mine but they were my mother's. I barely remembered her or those earliest years spent in her lap; I only imagined I did. I was not sure if I had ever seen the shefali tree's night-blooming flowers in the morning, or the pond where blue lotuses bloomed and intoxicated bumblebees buzzed, or heard the sound of cattle lowing as they made their way homewards at twilight, but at some subconscious level, I found I knew them just as she did. Translating Suvarna Devi's words and text into English was not so different, I thought, from what she herself must have felt when writing them in her own language, which was, after all, a kind of translation too—from seeing and hearing and feeling into syntax. And I, who had inherited the language, understood it and understood her in a way no one else could have done, by instinct and empathy. The act of translation brought us together as if we were sisters—or even as if we were one, two compatible halves of one writer.
Of course there were instances—small stumbles—when I could not find the exact word or phrase. In Suvarna Devi's language, each word conjured a whole world; the English