Everything you wanted to know about translations but were afraid to ask

Here’s why translators do the work they do.

1. There’s money in it: When Shanta Gokhale agreed to translate my novel Em and the Big Hoom into Marathi, I was delighted. I asked a publisher and they were delighted too. Then I asked her how much money she was being paid. She laughed. She was not being paid.

2. There’s fame in it: Tintin was not originally written in English, you do know that? Who translated Tintin? The Asterix and Obelix series were originally written in Italian. Who translates those magnificent puns? Come on, surely you know. Those guys gave you hours of pleasure.

3. The books sell so well: Arunava Sinha was on stage with some translators at the Samanway Literary Festival, India’s most precious literary space in my mind, for it is where languages meet on an equal footing and talk to each other. He began his question with how do we get them to buy the books we translate?

4. The original writers are so grateful: I was on stage with Amir Or, an Israeli poet, at the Tata Lit Live festival in Mumbai. He read some poems in Hebrew and then he read them in English. I asked him who had translated his poems. He said, “Many people.” He did not remember.

5. Other writers care too: A recent book of poems carries epigraphs from Rumi and Neruda. Both these are English poets, you see. Because the poet and his publishers did not think fit to put the translator’s name in.

6. The faith everyone has in you: I tell people I am working on translating a Marathi novel into English. The first question I am asked: “Do you know Marathi that well?”

Okay, enough of that.

I’ll tell you why I translate. It’s because you want a book to be known better. You remember the time when you thought the world had the good taste you did? So you would urge Stefan Zweig on a friend because you had just discovered the Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt translation? How that slowly waned because it lay on your friend’s desk for months before you retrieved it and he didn’t even notice? Those were the days you were a proselytiser for the books you read, the plays you loved, the films you enjoyed. You don’t do that now. You’ve outgrown it. You now know better than to go and tell the world how much you loved a book because the world then yawns and goes off to post on Facebook. Translators don’t outgrow that moment. They never outgrow the joy of bringing a book to new readers. They stay there, locked into a relationship with a book not theirs that may last months, years even—think Proust, think the Arabian Nights—only because they want it to get to a larger audience. My peeps need to read this, they think. My peeps would want to read this, they think.

I also translate because I am a writer. I am often terrified of the empty page that mocks my best efforts to invent a new world. There are days when the sedge is withered on the lake and no birds sing. That’s a good time to be translating because there is something to say. Someone else has said it. I’ve got to say it again. It’s so comforting to work with a text that has already been worked out. I don’t have to worry about what is going to happen to a character or whether I have put in enough about the scenery or located the action in a time zone. That stuff is someone else’s problem. Yes, you sometimes fix things. If someone has ordered coffee and drinks his tea without complaining to the waiter, you can change that. No, you don’t add a nicely worded complaint to the waiter. You just put in coffee where there was tea.

I also translate finally because every time I look at the five-hundred rupee note, I see how many scripts there are in India. And then there are languages that don’t have scripts and there are languages that share the same script. And if we’re going to hang together, we’ve got to do some bridge building. We’ve got to get those scripts talking to each other.

And finally, I translate because it feels great to find a line developing under my fingers, a line that is mine and Narayan Surve’s all at once. I translate because it feels right. And in that right feeling is the only joy I need though I wouldn’t mind a few more five-hundred rupee notes to stare at.