CREATIVITY AND TRANSLATION             

In its etymological sense, poetry means ‘the art of making’ and in that basic sense all creativity has poetry behind it. My point in today’s conversation is about a particular kind of creativity which is ‘translation’. And I would like to begin with the premise that all creativity itself can be likened to the process of ‘translation’. When we create art, in its broadest sense, we actually ‘translate’ an idea, an emotion or an experience into a concrete form in a particular genre of art – a poem, a story, a play or various other forms of art – music, painting, sculpture or whatever. When we create in art, the creative process itself is a process of translation of something into some form of art in a particular genre. Translation basically means change – but it implies both the process and the product, both the process of change, and the end-product. It is a process with a purpose, a process that we call creativity with some concrete end-product as its resultant. Thus all creativity is in essence translation or ‘transcreation’ to give it a more precise signification. Even as we write a poem we are going through a process of ‘translation’ – or changing one thing into another, more tangible to experience.

But then the term ‘translation’ has another aspect in terms of the medium, i.e. language which is the medium for poetry or any of the other genres of literature. In a specific sense, therefore, we shall talk of ‘translation’, in its simple definition, as a language activity that takes place when the written content in one language is changed into another language with as much close proximity as possible within the bounds of communication. At the highest level, it can be translation of the finest kind of poetry, while at the lowest, it can be the most pedestrian kind of prose used, for instance, in the newspapers. Translation of other literary forms like short story, novels, non-fiction, etc – depending upon the literary level of the original language or text– come staggered in between these two levels.

At the moment, I intend to focus on bilingual (Hindi-English) translation as an extended creative activity.For a bilingual translator, equal command over both languages is a near impossibility. In most cases, it shall be a near equal command over the two languages that makes a good bilingual translator.  If his – and I use the masculine as a gender-free pronoun in this conversation – so, if his L1 is English, he will generally translate better from Hindi to English with the reverse also being equally true. For English L1 translators, I can name two good translators – 1. Rupert Snell and 2. David Rubin who have translated from L2 (Hindi) to L1 (English) – Snell has translated  Bachchan’s autobiography as ‘In the Afternoon of time’ and Rubin,  Shrilal Shukla’s novel (‘Pahla Padav’) as ‘Opening Moves’. David Rubin has also translated poems of Nirala, Prasad, Pant and Mahadevi in his ‘The Return of Saraswati’(OUP,1993).  There is also Gillian Wright, the translator of Shrilal Shukla’s ‘Raag Darbari’ in this L2 to L1(Hindi>English) category. Then there are also some very good Indian translators in this category : Ruth Vanita who has translated two of Ugra’s books – ‘About Me’(‘Apani Khabar’, his autobiography) and ‘Chocolate’ (Hindi short stories of with the same title), and Satti Khanna, the translator of Nirala’s ‘Kulli Bhat’ (as ‘A Life Misspent’). There are many other Indians, too, like Rakshanda Jalil, and late Jairatan, who won the Sahitya Academy Award for excellence in L1-L2 (Hindi>English) translation work.

But one thing is clear that none of them – all very good translators – are bilingual translators, i.e.translating both ways between Hindi and English. That is to say, for all these translators – it is always a one-way street: they would only translate from Hindi into English (both having English as L1 and as L2): Snell, Rubin, Vanita, or even Jalil and Jairatan), but not in the reverse direction, i.e. from English to Hindi. Also, there is another important aspect to be noted. Translations into English have better publication/sale prospects, and reverse translations (English to Hindi) have a smaller market and most translators in this (E>H) category are again one-way translators, which includes a large number of acknowledged Hindi writers beginning from Premchand and Agyeya to many like Dharmveer Bharati, Mohan Rakesh, Nirmal Varma, Rajendra Yadav, et al.

This is a general and universal phenomenon in literary translation. We have bilingual translators who are, in almost every case, one-way translators, either from L1 to L2(native to foreign) or from L2 to L1(foreign to native). And that I think is an important and useful point to note in considering bilingual translations. Why does a translator, who knows two languages of translation almost equally well, does better in translating only from L2 to L1 (foreign>native)  and not the reverse, native to foreign (L1 > L2)? In other words, why in almost all cases, translation from (foreign>native) L2 to L1 is always better than from native (L1) to foreign (L2)? This also points to a possibility that equally good two-way translations manifest the highest translation capability in a bilingual translator. This latter – i.e. two-way good translators - being rather exceptional, one obvious reason is the wider spread of English in the published world than Hindi. This bilingual translation interface is true almost to the same extent in English vrs the other European languages like French, Russian and Spanish, that is they are always better in the case of native English translators also when the process is from foreign to native (L2>L1).

There has been a huge amount of research in this field of bilingual translation which is an important area of comparative linguistics. This also points to an ideal situation in which the highest kind of translation can be done – in either direction – only in an equally competent  two-way situation. Late Prof Sujit Mukherji – my teacher, (and I am also lucky to have another Sujit Mukherji here, my student, with an eminence in his own firld of creativity,) but I mean – the Prof Sujit Mukherji has done some pioneering work in this field of bilingual translation, and I will refer here to his two landmark books Translation as Discovery and Translation as Recovery, the latter published posthumously.

I have been doing two-way translations – both L2 to L1(English>Hindi) and L1 to L2(Hindi>English). And I believe, my competence as a bilingual translator can be measured on this count. I have translated standard literary texts in either direction (though on a rather limited scale) and have arrived at the realization that at a certain level of excellence, the art and craft of the creative exercise transcends the bounds of language and enters into an undefined realm of communication where language has to be subjugated to a higher kind of literary sensibility. A bilingually competent two-way kind of translator has to devise strategies of language of the finest kind – very minute and specific tools of a complex and highly effectual kind.

One very important and sensitive area in translation is editing or modification of the text – extending from a particular word/phrase or part of a sentence upto larger chunks like whole paragraphs or sections in the original Text. Among the Hindi to English translators – particularly of the English L1 category, named above, almost all have spoken about this unavoidable aspect of translation, namely the tool of redaction. I shall quote at some length from only Rupert Snell, the translator of Bachchan’s 4-volume Hindi autobiography into a single volume book ‘In the Afternoon of Time’, which explains this core aspect of translating an original Text that is of a voluminous nature. And I quote Rupert Snell from his Preface to that book:

“In translating the autobiography, its great length and prolific detail had to be substantially reduced to appeal to an English readership; the task involved reducing four books of Hindi – some 1200 pages – into a single volume of English….”

“The first difficulty in the actual process of translation was to find an appropriate English style to suggest the qualities of Bachchan’s Hindi. His language draws freely on numerous complementary registers.”

Language registers are always the biggest challenges for the translators which we notice in all kinds of translations – specially in the case of poetry, right from translations of epics like Ramcharit Manas of Tulsidas (written in Awadhi) to the longer or shorter Hindi poems of Nirala and Prasad. And the same holds true for novels like Raag Darbari. Prof Harish Trivedi also has written about this problem in translation. He tried translating E M Forster’s A Passage to India but had to abandon it in the face of this problem of language registers. I myself started translating it once and stopped half-way for the same reason of language register, as I also abandoned translating my father’s famous novel Dehati Duniya after doing part of the first chapter. This problem becomes all the more complex in the case of poetry translation, as Rabindranath Tagore himself found when he was translating his own Bengali poems into English.

Rupert Snell in his observations on translating Bachchan’s Autobiography spoke of the problem of inventing a suitable matching voice in translation and  had said : “What kind of voice should be adopted for the book ?....What was needed was to create an idiomatic English voice, while not straying into stylistic territory which Bachchan himself would find unfamiliar; thus one had to forge a reproduction which would remain faithful to the flavour and spirit of the Hindi, while also being sufficiently readable to sustain the interest of an English readership.

Rupert Snell’s extensive essay on translating Bachchan’s Autobiography gives us many fascinating clues about good translation of a voluminous literary prose text where two important aspects of such translation are highlighted: (1) extensive and creative editing and redaction of the text for the sake of enhanching its ‘reader-friendliness’. And (2) the invention of an ‘appropriate voice’ – most important from the point of view of creative translation of even a literary prose text – a kind of ‘tight-rope walking’ - where a very delicate, tenuous and complexly cultural transmutation has to be achieved over the entire length of the translation process.

As for the problem of suitable ‘voice’, particularly in the translation of longer prose texts in an Autobiography like Bachchan’s, or like Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’s Apani Khabar, I would like to quote from a letter of Rupert Snell in reply to my suggestion to him for translating Ugra’s Autobiography Apani Kahabar where he wrote : “Your suggestion about translating "Apni Khabar" is uncanny, because I did once consider doing just that; what stopped me was that I could not find an appropriate English "voice" for Ugra.  This is a major problem in translating: I have abandoned many projects simply because of the unability to feel my way fully into the persona of the author. ”

Translation as a creative activity – or as, let’s say, transcreation – is psychologically a fascinating process, which is at its most intense in the case of  translating poetry, where the challenge is much more complex than translating prose fiction or non-fiction, because it starts at a higher level of creativity where the bounds of language are generally transcended in the first place. There it is creativity many times compounded; there it is creativity, perhaps, at the highest level, much above the bounds of language, involving a world of complex elements of signification.

My purpose in today’s conversation, to summarise my points, was first to suggest that translation is like a ‘double down’ creativity, particularly in the case of good poetry, with far more complex challenges than in good literary prose; and that the linguistic challenges that I have briefly referred to, are far more complicated in the translation of poetry than in the case of prose; besides the other challenges of structure and cultural identity, and so on.

In the end, I would like to emphasize that translation is as much creativity as writing poetry in the original, or any other genre in art, and it has a human and universal significance, unique to itself, for all literature and art. The subject is of such expansive significance that it would need many more of such conversations. 

(C) Dr BSM Murty

This paper was presented in a meeting of WORDCONNECT, a literary forum newly established in Patna held on 10th July, 2025. For the benefit of the members who attended, this paper is published here in full. Two of Dr BSM Mmurty's newly published books THA ART OF MULKRAJ ANAND, a festschrift volume in commemoration of the great Indian English novelist & writer, and another  a

collection of Hindi short stories SARIKA, edited by Acharya Shivpoojan Sahay and newly re-edited by Dr Mangal Murty were both released in the meeting by Shri Vijoy Prakash,IAS, Chairman of Bihar Vidyapith, Patna & Actg Chairman of Acharya Shivpoojan Sahay Smarak Nyas, Patna. Dr Murty also spoke briefly about the significancde of these two new publications.