A clash of ideas on translation took place not too long ago between Tamil writer Ambai and translator N Kalyan Raman. Ambai had written ab...
A clash of ideas on translation took place not too long ago between Tamil writer Ambai and translator N Kalyan Raman. Ambai had written about her perception of certain inadequacies in literary translation from an Indian language like Tamil into English. Her protests were a writer’s, and, despite some generalisations that I couldn’t entirely get behind, I could sympathise with her writer’s need to be well-represented, her apprehensions about certain perceptions of a hierarchy between English and Tamil – consequently, between the translator and the writer – and the demands of the market.
N Kalyan Raman’s response, from a translator’s perspective, was to clarify the practices in contemporary translation. That is, translation is not finding an exact equivalence of the source text in the other language – it is not in the “service” of the source text – but rather, it is an act of creating a negotiated text that does justice to the source text while creating a literary piece in the target language. This is important, for we have so few literary translators around us, and hardly any discussions of their craft, either in print or in literary festivals or otherwise. This ties to what I perceive as a general lack of...
