Photo credit: Justin Eli Kahn
Interview by Alex Valente
Alex Valente: Somrita, thank you for agreeing to do this! Literary translation is one of those fields where everyone eventually really does know everyone else, and your name keeps cropping up, be it recommendations or your own work. In one of your early pieces from 2016, you say that you’re not an expert––you’re an enthusiast. What brought you to be passionate about literary translation in particular?
Somrita Urni Ganguly: The literary translation circle, Alex, is rather small. The people I’ve met in this community have been generous with their time, contacts, and resources. Our conversation today bears testimony to that idea of camaraderie. Thank you for talking to me.
Growing up multilingual in India meant that I was translating all the time, without realizing it. Big cities like Calcutta are melting-pots of languages, charmed crucibles of various cultures, and I found myself in the heart of it, an English-speaking Bengali-girl curious about Hindi music and Urdu literature. I’ve had a fraught relationship with Bangla. I was born in an “Anglo-Indian” locality of Calcutta. Even after relocating to an old North Kolkata neighbourhood of narrow lanes and bylanes, red-brick walls, and hand-drawn rickshaws, I continued to be friends with people who chose Jim Reeves and Cliff Richard over Rabindra-sangeet or Nazrul-geeti. English became the language of my intellectual and emotional make-up: my first language at home and in my Methodist school run by always-English-speaking-occasionally-Bible-reading teachers. My engagement with Bangla literature is perhaps a decade old––and that is surprising because Bangla is supposed to be my mother-tongue (I am slightly wary of the politics of assigning a language as a person’s mother-tongue; I don’t think the relationship is always as natural as it seems; it hasn’t been so organic for me). I used to read Bangla literature in translation, and was often discreetly laughed at by the custodians of Bangla culture for my “too-Anglicized” upbringing. I taught myself the language eventually, and now I translate from Bangla into English. You could say I arrived at my mother-tongue belatedly, instead of being born into it!
I feel art is a little like love, a little like languages––it cannot be contained. The character of good literature is that of the sun: it is, and should be, for everyone. Translation is my way of carrying some of the warmth of that sun to corners where the rays can’t reach easily. In the last three years as a literary translator I have realized that translation can be a form of social activism, and can also gently unbuild cultures of linguistic chauvinism. And so I translate: for people who do not have access to Bangla and Hindi, but might want to read some Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay or Harivansh Rai Bachchan.
AV: I remember you mentioning this tension of having a “mother tongue”––English––which is also a colonial language (if not the colonial language), and how unnatural it is to you, but also more in general in the literary world. How do you personally “unbuild cultures of linguistic chauvinism” in your translatorial practice?
SUG: We speak different Englishes in the world; indeed, we speak different Englishes in India. I am currently translating Pragyasundari Devi, and I want to take her to an English reader without turning her, a twentieth century Bengali woman, into an “English” writer. There is a tendency to homogenize translated literature to such an extent that the works sometimes end up sounding rather “white,” sanitized, and hygienic. My attempt has been to not sacrifice the kinks of my English at the altar of this monolithic idea of “white English.”
How often do you see quesadilla or enchilada italicized in an Anglophone world? But nimki and roshogolla seem to warrant italics! I brought up this example because translating food names, I have found, is a tricky area to navigate, especially when you are translating from a minority culture/language. I do not use italics, footnotes, or glossaries when translating literary fiction. I find them clumsy, bulky, impeding the reading experience. I massage into the text the little additional information that is necessary to contextualize an idea and help the readers, and then, I trust them to find out more for themselves. I respect them enough to not dumb-down or oversimplify every cultural quirk. So, I am likely to prefix a bowl of roshogollas with descriptors such as syrupy/sweet, and a plate of nimkis with a savoury snack, for instance.
As a general rule, I make room in my translations for the hyphens that I need to accommodate suffixes of respect frequently used in the culture I translate from (Alex-babu, Urni-ji, for example).
As translators we make many such choices, and I’ve shared two with you. How much of the local flavour do I leave in the text to underscore that the work is a translation from Bangla into English, and not originally written in English? I don’t think there’s a formula.
AV: How do you navigate that? How do you balance your instinct to “underscore” the translation versus create a new text in another language?
SUG: I arrive at a balance by talking to my editor/publisher. One of the most important things I learnt at the BCLT Summer School 2020 is the importance of a good editor. I understand that my English register is marginally different from what is spoken in New York City, or London, or Singapore. An editor from the UK might find this register slightly odd, but I would much rather have that conversation with her than smoothen out all the Bengali-ness from my translation in an anticipatory, self-censoring manner. I see my auto-formatted US-English Word document faithfully highlighting in bright red a word I’ve used in the previous sentence: “smoothen.” Earlier, these trembling red lines under some of my too-Indian-to-be-English words made me anxious. There is a deeper sense of understanding and acceptance now, I believe. Translation is a practice in acceptance, after all. We learn to accept over time that the translated work will not be equal to the original––only equivalent.
So, who is this mythical white reader that we try to unconditionally translate for? Who are the gatekeepers of the industry who won’t allow for difference? As literary translators, as writers, I think we can quietly question some of these reified notions of permissibility and acceptance through our practice.
AV: Indeed. I like how you mention the importance of editors, too––a figure forgotten even more often than the translator, especially when a text is badly received (usually by a monolingual reader). Have you had any particularly edifying experiences with editors, as a writer or translator?
SUG: I’ve primarily published in India in the last three years, and worked on commissioned projects elsewhere. So, my editors and I have largely been on the same page and have had the space to discuss our choices. I now look forward to exploring other markets and working with editors from the UK, or the US, or Canada perhaps.
I recently edited an anthology of food poems, Quesadilla and Other Adventures. The contributors were from eight different countries, with very different and distinct voices. In the last couple of years, I’ve had the chance to work closely with Arunava Sinha, and I had the opportunity to learn from Daniel Hahn at the Summer School this year. They’ve really instilled in me the value of killing my darlings when necessary, even if it breaks my wee heart! I would expect no different from any editor I trust and respect!
AV: I’m excited to see more of your work soon––darlings notwithstanding! In closing, two rapid-fire questions: what’s a text (book, comic, article, poem) everyone should read in your opinion, in any language? And what is a text you would love to translate at some point in your life?
SUG: Book(s) I’d recommend: The Bluest Eye, Life is Elsewhere, The Mahabharata, The English Patient, The Young Bride.
What I’d like to translate in the foreseeable future: Rituparno Ghosh (all, or at least three of his film-scripts: Unishey April, Bariwali, and Utsab).
Somrita Urni Ganguly is a professor, and an award-winning poet and literary translator. She was a Fulbright Doctoral Research Fellow at Brown University, Rhode Island, and a fellow at the International Literary Translation and Creative Writing Summer School at the British Centre for Literary Translation, University of East Anglia. Somrita translates from Bengali and Hindi to English, and was selected by the National Centre for Writing, UK, as an emerging translator in 2016. She was a translator-in-residence at Cove Park, Scotland, and her work has been showcased at the London Book Fair.
Alex Valente (he/him) is a half-Tuscan, half-Yorkshire white European currently living on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and sel̓íl̓witulh land. He is an award-winning literary translator from Italian into English, though he also dabbles with French, and regularly struggles with Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Dutch. His work has recently been published in NYT Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, The Short Story Project. His latest book is now out with Penguin Random House US, and he has two novels due in 2021.