Mundane Matters - 8 :: Translations

Dear All

I was delighted to receive an appreciation (comment posted already ) for the translation work which I did a fortnight back; I mean the previous post.

Well, the happiness is due to two reasons - one is the basic human craving for recognition on which I am not going to expound further. Every one must have felt it at various points of time in their lives, isn't it ?

Lemme only delve upon the second reason which is of course what this musing is all about.....

First thing first, this was my first translation work. Before this, around 8 years back - while working for a social project at Isha I had the privilege of translating a wonderful poem of Robert Frost (?) which later I realized is the part of school curriculum these days - yes, my daughter showed the same poem in her text book couple of years back. (this little poem is about the significance of a tree)

On the array of creative works in the domain of communication, I always feel writing poem is the closest one to human hearts and minds as it offers maximum limit of abstraction possible. It almost bridges the gap between language and minds (i mean minds with same wave length which is true as per law of Physics).

With this experience of translation of Jeffry Archer's short story, I get a feeling that translation is the farthest or the one offering minimum job satisfaction.

Wait.....I am not done with the above statement. There are so much of responsibilities in the shoulders of the translators. 

Firstly,  the original feeling has to be brought inside the work; 

Secondly, he must not do a word to word translation and kill the soul of the original work; 

Third in my list will be the time it takes - Gosh !! I am happy that I chose one of the shortest stories in this collected works as this 5 paged story has taken me close to 6 hours to translate. 

(you could have observe the spelling mistakes that is sprayed all over - its just because I was racing with time and never had the patience to proof read the whole story once again ! ). 

Yes, the fourth quality required is patience.

But then, the list ends with the subtlest point I wish to share with you. 

To decide upon a career as a translator is like "upasanaa" as described in our scriptures. 

The literal meaning of this word is "taking a side seat - allowing some one bigger than ourselves in our chair". YES, the translator - whether he is conscious about it or not - becomes a subtler human being ready to take a side seat and shed off his ego. 

He might have his own ideas how to take forward the written work but then, he has to restrict himself to the scope offered by the original work. 

The only choice he has is of course if some material is worthy enough to be translated or not ? Period......

So, some activity which really appears to be "mundane" , actually matters a lot only if you have the patience to read thru' (including this post, huh?)

Love // Suren