Avenues of translations
Nepali translators have long pursued translation as a creative work, but now it is an important practical activity
The person who knows two or more languages used in the family and society is a richer person for being able to use multiple languages
Oct 2, 2016- Hamlet, when he found it very hard to make a choice, suddenly realised that he would not be able to make a return to normalcy. Then, to lighten the burden, he asked the very existential question—to be or not to be, which the later French existentialists would repeat like a mantra. A translator’s karma is one of existential choice, if not of angst. He or she is not sent in this world of letters to translate. Translation is by far the most voluntary choice. But when the great explicator of world literature David Damrosch said the soul of world literature is translation, he was striking the right chord. When the scholars of the young generation presenting papers at the two-day translation seminar at the Dilliraman Regmi Centre in Lazimpat from September 29-30 probed issues that are related to translation, I was happily struck by a few ideas that they floated.
I made some comments about some of their observations on the sphere of translation. They would include the code-switching of the bilinguals as translation. I felt like a teacher when I said code-switching is not translation.The person who knows two or more languages used in the family and society is a richer person for being able to use multiple languages. A bilingual person can show his or her ability to create, discuss and draw philosophical conclusions with ease in each code. As a monolingual, Nepali-only speaker insofar as the use of idioms is the question, I consider such bilinguals or trilinguals very lucky with an advantage that I do not possess. To say that people who switch code are translating will be tantamount to saying that one language is the target and others are subsidiaries. I hoped that the talented young linguists would think about this question.
An esoteric karma
There is basically one major book on translation written by a Nepali professor of English, Govinda Bhattarai. It is used by translators productively. In addition to that, a number of powerful foreign writers’ books are also available. But the young generation of scholars who made their presentations convinced me that translation in Nepal is being taken in earnest for more than one purpose.
Translation in the traditional sense—as the translation of only literature, because of which it is a pastime activity—is not accepted any more. It is taken in both academic and professional sense. They are seeing translation as a factor that has linked the South Asian region for ages. Translation as a practice has its raison d’être, and has proved its usefulness. Translation has cultural and civilizational impact. The plea that the organisers of this conference, who are linguists and hard workers like Bhim Regmi, Basanta Thapa, Balaram Adhikari, Shekhar Kharel and others, is that translation should be made a professional skill.
But as the Professors Govinda Bhattarai and Tejratna Kansakar, as well as writer Mohan Mainali said at the opening, translation has been a quietly pursued practice for some time. But translators, they revealed, meet the challenges personally.
In that sense, translation is also being practised as an esoteric karma, which of course is a human faculty that has produced immortal literature in the world. Nepali translators have long pursued translation as a creative work, albeit not a karma of practical significance. But today it is being taken as an important practical activity.
Hillary in poems
One person at the seminar drew my attention to a work of translation with a little strange title, Hillary Clinton in Poems (2000), which was published in Kathmandu. That was a very curious context. Hillary Clinton had visited Nepal in 1995 as the First Lady and was received by king Birendra and queen Aishwarya. This prominent woman, curiously fired the imagination of the Nepali poets, including the late great modernist poet Mohan Koirala to write poems about her and publish it five years later. I went back to my library and found both the original Nepali collection entitled Euti Nari Kavitama or ‘a woman in poems’. I also found more than half a dozen press cuttings with the collections. These commentators include Manjushree Thapa, Orun Gupto, Samrat Upadhyaya, Govinda Giri Prerana and some others. I am struck by what comes out in the translations.
The majority of the poems are mere eulogies that make you feel some sense of shame. But then one can write poems on any subject, or about any person for that matter. However, I must say, except for some good translators who have done their best to polish them, the translators have made the poems even more odd by producing quaint texts. I do not intend to revive the discussions about the collection published 16 years ago. But what is certainly worth noting is that these translations are a reminder of how lightly the translation of literature is sometimes taken by the practitioners here.
A point of coincidence should also be mentioned here. To read the original and translated poems written about Hillary Clinton by Nepali poets after having recently watched the presidential debate between her and Donald Trump is certainly a unique experience as the contexts and times since Hillary came here are different now. Since the Nepali poets wrote these poems
and later sent the translated text—whatever that maybe like—to Hilary Clinton, who I was told, had received it, two American presidents have visited India. Her husband Bill Clinton made the visit in 2000 and Barack Obama in 2015. The foreign policy architected by Henry Kissinger says that only the bigger country of a region should matter; the smaller ones should remain invisible. I have not read any political analyses on the degree of Nepal’s visibility to the White House. It will be interesting to know how the Nepali poets’ translation will break the Kissinger doctrine if Hillary gets elected as the President of America.
This episode just shows Nepali literary translation spree. The seminar has opened up many creative and pragmatic avenues of Nepali translation activities, literary and otherwise. Times are changing.
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