‘Boats Nudged into the Sea’: Ambai on text, translation and authors who refuse to die
The essay that appeared recently on Scroll, “Literary translation and its discontents”, by Jayasree Kalathil, brought back memories of my earlier talks and essays written on the subject as an author. One of them “To pierce a mustard seed and let in seven oceans” which is part of the book Translating Women: Indian Interventions (Zubaan, 2009) edited by Kamala Narasimhan has appeared on Scroll earlier. However, it will be very relevant to give a summary of my talk entitled “Ways of Seeing: Text, Translation and Authors Who Refuse to Die” at the Habitat Centre, New Delhi for the Leela Foundation Lecture series on November 21, 2013, in response to Jayasree Kalathil’s essay. It was a lecture given in 2013, but contains the essence of what can be seen as an author-translator conflict. I am giving below an updated version of the talk bringing it up to the present-day scenario.
Translation is not just an act of rendering a text from one language to another. Translation is a way of seeing and relating which one is doing all the time. One has to expand the meaning of translation to include ways in which texts are seen, contextualised, categorised, reduced and expanded and presented.
Coming from a middle-class Tamil family I was exposed...
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