Are translators co-creators of a novel? Jasmine Days’ author and its translator weigh in | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Are translators co-creators of a novel? Jasmine Days’ author and its translator weigh in | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Written by Ishita Sengupta |New Delhi |Updated: December 24, 2018 12:05:27 pm

Are translators co-creators of a novel? Jasmine Days’ author and its translator weigh in

The year 2018 has largely been about translated works. It began with Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk winning the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, on May 22

Benyamin’s Jasmine Days bagged the JCB Prize for Literature this year. (Source: File Photo)

Translation is a slippery act. A new voice tip-toes into the private literary universe created by an author, tells the same story in a language different from what it was written in, overcomes cultural and language barriers, or at least attempts to, and then exits without making a noise. In translation, the new ink evaporates the moment it is written with, the words chosen from a foreign lexicon resemble the existing words so closely that it seems they were always written in this language.

“Translation is a deeply creative act, like writing. And yet there is one huge difference—translators never have to face that mute expanse of the blank page. The map is drawn…I feel like the words are mine but the rhythms are hers,” translator Jessica Moore, who was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2016 for her translation of Maylis de Kerangal’s Mend the Living, writes in art magazine Canadian Art on the act of translation.

The year 2018 has largely been about these new words strung together by an already composed rhythm. It began with Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk winning the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, on May 22. Jayant Kaikini’s No Presents Please, translated from Kannada to English by Tejaswini Niranjana, has been shortlisted for the DSC Prize, and Benyamin’s novel Jasmine Days — a political fable narrating the life of a young woman in a city whose life changes as the hopeful promise of a revolution turn sour— translated from Malayalam to English by Shahnaz Habib, bagged the JCB Prize for Literature.

In an e-mail conversation with indianexpress.com, both Benyamin and Habib, from their perspectives, shed light on the process of translation, on the slippage that occurs while doing it and answered if translators can be considered as co-creators of a novel.