Enter an Indian bookstore and scan the covers. You might encounter Chowringhee by Sankar, The Murderer’s Mother by Mahasweta Devi, or The Magic Moonlight Flower by Satyajit Ray, to name only three from an ever-swelling list of more than 90 titles. Most are original Bengali works, crisscrossing eras, ranging across registers, many dauntingly literary, a few unabashedly pulp. Picked from a sea of Bangla writing to feature on English-reader bookshelves, their localized flavours have been retained and remade with a mysterious, magical alchemy by one of the nation’s master translators, Arunava Sinha. As he puts it with an oblique elegance that reveals and obscures the complexity of his craft, “You’re dressing the same subject in a new set of clothes.”

Sinha does not need an introduction in literary circles. The winner of many illustrious awards in India and abroad, his works have been published in the US, UK, Australia and in many other Asian and European countries through further translations. Primarily focusing on Bangla to English, he’s also done a few from English to Bangla and one each from Hindi to Bangla and from Hindi to English. He’s curated anthologies of Bengali short stories, published by Penguin and Aleph. Further, he’s the Co-director of the Ashoka Center for Translation and  Professor of Practice in Creative Writing at Ashoka University.

Tiny Hands, Big Books: Journeying Between Covers

In a conversation that spans his life journey, Sinha elaborates on how he had watched his mother and everyone else read. “Reading was pretty much the normal thing to do when you’re done with your chores.” His homemaker mother subscribed to literary magazines that published stories and serialized novels and novellas. Most Bangla literature had been published that way, especially in bumper Puja editions. Readers did not have to venture out to discover books. They landed on your doorstep in bite-sized chunks.

One evening, though they weren’t impoverished, they had run out of food. To distract her hungry 10-year-old, his mother read out a short story about an ox and its embittered owner. In that short spell, Sinha was magically transported to the center of the action. He realized how short stories could ferry you through a “breathless ride” into another place and time.

Encouraged by a poet uncle, Arunava took to books early. Combing through his parents’ bookshelves from the age of four, he started out on grown-up books. With a wicked twinkle, he admits to soaking up The Carpetbaggers by Harold Robbins—a sprawling novel with steamy scenes—when he was still too little. And coolly moving on to The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, a coming-of-age story that depicts gang violence and class conflict in Oklahoma. “It was an intriguing mixture of the profound and prurient. As a result of such reading, I never distinguished between high and low literature. All books were wonderful.” Ironically, it was Sinha who lugged kids’ books into the house after learning of their existence.

Despite being such a zesty bibliophile, he never saw himself as a writer. He recognized, too, that the world needed readers more than writers. There were enough good writers, and reading—as actively as he did—was shot with thrills. While early on, he had been reading in Bangla and English, during his school years he was mostly reading in English. As a teenager, he returned to his bilingual forays, reading in both languages.

Circuits to Sonnets: Switching Tracks at Jadavpur University

Joining Jadavpur University, he initially enlisted in an Engineering degree. At the same time, he signed up to play the comedic Trinculo in the English Department’s production of The Tempest. While he had studied Shakespeare’s works in school—Julius Caesar, Macbeth—the performance brought the text to life, uncovering layers and shades that he might have skipped over otherwise. By comparison, his engineering classes felt dull. Deliberately skirting his exams, he leveraged his English Department connections to switch tracks, enrolling for a degree in English Literature.

The university also had a famed Comparative Literature department, taught by writers like Navaneeta Dev Sen, a colorful, exuberant persona who accorded students glimpses into her personal life: “She was a terrific person with a tremendous sense of humor and a complete lack of barriers.” Sen seemed to embody the stereotype that writers are distinct people willing to break mainstream moulds.

Goaded by a professor who encouraged the Bangla-fluent to persist in their explorations of an alternate universe, Arunava consciously kept up with his Bangla reading. Reading in two languages enriched his insights into other literatures. Moreover, living at home (there weren’t any hostels at the time), after chitchats with friends, he didn’t have much else to do. Entire evenings and nights were spent reading.

Cracking Code Switches: Early Forays in Translation

In 1982, Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature. At the Calcutta Book Fair held in January, six Marquez books were displayed in “beautiful Picador editions.” Poring through One Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time, Sinha was struck by an insight. Till then, while reading translations, he had never dwelt much on the makings of a text in another language. “Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude made me realize that translation is a distinct act from writing the first version of the text.”

Curious about what this entailed, he decided to give it a go while still at college. Starting out with short stories, he sensed that he relished it. Wrestling with words, as all writers do, he was producing new works without fretting about what to write. Moreover, he could skip the “generate crap” stage that many writers pummel through. He was straightaway wrangling with texts that felt worthwhile.

Capers and Puns at the Calcutta Skyline

He translated regularly from thereon and joined a city magazine after college. He had always planned on an academic career till then. But the magazine work was more exhilarating than his academic slog, and he dropped out of his MA course. Called Calcutta Skyline, the new publication was run by a small team where everyone did everything: writing stories, editing, page layouts. Sinha admits that the magazine was fueled by a certain defensiveness of the city when many folks were deriding its decline. Stories ranged across politics, culture, sports profiles, interviews, and a series on city neighborhoods. Moreover, they were the first in the nation to kickstart listings of innovative shops and enterprises. Apart from reportage, the mag published one short story in every issue, translated by Sinha.

In an article in The Telegraph, Abhijit Gupta, currently an English Professor at Jadavpur University, recalls working on a story with Arunava that involved exposing a local godman. Posing as devotees, they attended evening seances to gather material. Another piece centered on a graffiti artist who insisted on a heliocentric view of the universe. As Gupta observes, “In its commitment to both the serious and the bizarre, the banal and the quirky, Calcutta Skyline came closer than many others in capturing the contrary selves of the city.”

From Inky Fingers to Dotcom Conquests

After three years, Sinha moved on to running the Sunday feature pages for The Economic Times. In that period, he also translated his first book, Chowringhee. The author, Sankar, who was being courted by a French publisher, had prodded Arunava to translate it.

In the meanwhile, Sinha joined Business Today in Delhi to mainly rework the pieces of other writers. The magazine wanted to foster an image similar to Fortune magazine, so articles needed to display flair and panache. After eight years, the internet rolled in. Arunava was attracted by its heady early days, joining Indya.com to produce buzzy content. When the portal folded like many others, he moved to the Times Group, working on their online editions.

Found in Translation, Just in Time

Around then, Penguin reached out to him. They heard from Sankar that “someone” had already translated Chowringhee—the author couldn’t recall the name—and he had sent them a printout with Arunava Sinha’s name. Was he that person, and if so, could they publish it? they asked. As it happened, Penguin’s offer slid into his life at the right time. If not, he says, he might have experienced a full-blown midlife crisis and bought a red Ferrari or done something more outrageous. The book even won the Vodafone Crossword Book Award for the best translation in 2007.

Thereafter, he was awash with book offers. Suddenly Indian publishers were hungry for translated works. The billowing literate population whetted reader appetites for material that evoked local terrains and complicated pasts. Sinha found his earlier side hustle could lead to a sustainable career. With an ocean of untranslated, worthwhile material to delve into, book followed book: “In some mysterious way, it became a furious passion. You do something that you really enjoy, and when you’re done with it, you’re thinking, what next? It’s very easy. Do another book.”

Some of his memorable projects include Asha Purna Devi’s quietly devastating stories, Khwabnama by Aktaruzzaman Elias—a work that encompasses history, memory, magic realism, and the subaltern experience—and When the Time is Right, a novel set in the 1940s that depicts the end of the feudal era and the arrival of a moneyed class. Sometimes Sinha picks the books, and sometimes publishers or authors approach him. Inevitably, as a translator, he has his literary tastes, and he occasionally turns down author requests with polite excuses.

Wisdom for Budding Translators

In general, he foresees a bright future for translators. Besides literary translations, they can also subtitle films and OTT content, translate shorter pieces like articles and essays, or tackle children’s literature. At this point, Sinha is not threatened by technology, despite the hype surrounding AI’s magical powers. While Google Translate or AI translations can work for more bromidic content—such as corporate manuals and legal documents—they flatten literary and creative works to a homogenous mediocrity. AI works better when there is a single interpretation of a text. In creative works, multiple readings are possible, and it takes human intuition and discernment to pick the most precise one. As Sinha puts it, “Even if it’s a bestseller or a thriller or romance, there’s stuff happening that you cannot capture if you’re only looking at the meaning.”

One of his dictums to new translators is to read great writers in translation. To be an effective translator, at the very least, you must read 100 books in each language.

Hands-on Learning: Transmitting the Craft

His own class on translation at Ashoka University is attended by a dozen eager students. After all, the endeavor takes them back to their roots, endorsing the validity of their mother tongues or regional languages. He also perceives a shift in younger generations, with many attuned to language losses and the riches of local literatures. Colonial hangovers associated with reading in English are fortunately eroding. Moreover, students are kicked to produce high-quality, publishable material at the young age of 19 or 20.

A forthcoming work edited by Sinha will feature student translations of Saadat Hasan Manto, the Urdu writer who chronicled the pangs of Partition and the plight of Bombay’s textile workers among other themes. For this book, students have picked their own stories, and the collection will be published by Westland. As Sinha puts it, “I want to know what talks to them as young people, which parts of Manto appeal to them.” Other students of Sinha’s class have produced four published works, translated entirely by them.

A Daily Grind with Details

Like in writing, translation also involves rewriting. Of course, there would rarely be structural changes in drafts. The reading is more than a close reading required of literature students. Arunava calls it “micro-reading.” Thereafter, you read the translated drafts to check if silences and pauses, idioms and dialects, implicit meanings and subtexts have been precisely transported into the new version. Some translators generate up to ten drafts, but Sinha usually produces two or three. He emphasizes that “translation is a problem of language, not of literature.”

At times, he says, he has read a text so minutely, he loses sight of the broader narrative. Soon after a translation, if someone asks him what the book was about, he might occasionally stumble with summarizing it. After all, he was so tangled up with transmuting word after word, sentence after sentence. A year down the line, he can zoom out and offer a big-picture essence.

Even as he reads translated books, somewhere at the back of his mind, he’s observing how others work with language, especially for moments of inventiveness.

Sometimes, he works on a single text. Often, he simultaneously tackles multiple texts. That helps with sustaining his energy if a particular text feels enervating for some reason. He also ensures that he translates every day so that his “translation muscles don’t atrophy.” It’s the riyaaz demanded of any creative discipline

Fanning New Voices in Indian Languages

He’s personally not enchanted with the quality of writing produced by contemporary Bangla writers. Since publishers are chasing numbers rather than quality, they’re promoting “books that appeal to certain questionable tastes.” But this only applies to mainstream commercial publishers. On the bright side, a lot of interesting writing is happening on the margins.

However, he points out that contemporary writers in Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, and Telugu are engendering high-quality and popular works. Languages and literatures are subjected, like all else, to cycles. To encourage new voices, it’s important to sustain reading and writing cultures and communities: “When recognition comes from your peers, and they’re aiming to write serious literature, you might try to write similar stuff.”

Sinha, himself, by being a critical conduit for Indian language stories, is fostering a global community of readers. His passion for translation is illustrated by a long-ago story. On the day of his graduation from college, he opted to skip the ceremony. Instead, he was knocking on Satyajit Ray’s door, having summoned the courage to translate three of the master filmmaker’s stories. Ray kindly spent a memorable “thirteen minutes” with the nervy graduate, “making three suggestions, offering his illustrations, and then showing me out?” Such meetings with exalted creators might have lit up Arunava, and he’s painstakingly torching other flames through his books and classes.

References

Arunava Sinha (selected and translated by), The Greatest Bengali Stories Ever Told, Aleph Book Company, 2016

https://www.telegraphindia.com/entertainment/local-colours/cid/591089#goog_rewarded