Asia Uncensored–The Myopic Translator: Why Translation isn’t Just About Discovery but the Potential to Expand the English Language

By Arunava Sinha

 Editor’s Note: There is a gap in English fiction today. This crevice is filled with thousands of stories, cultural microcosms, inventive structures, and “taboo” subjects. They are the stories told in other tongues that haven’t been translated. Even if they were, what would be the literary merit of translating stories into a language as limited as English? Is it time to expand our vocabulary, borrow from the ingenuous emotions and poetic skills that other languages possess? (Rhea Mukherjee)

The greatest value that translations of Indian literature into English can bring to the English-speaking world is not in the form of brilliant fiction yet to be discovered by the West. There’s no denying that aspect, but that’s not where the real enrichment comes from.

Instead, what those accustomed to reading English fiction will gain is the awareness of a whole new range of human experiences and emotions, which are not captured by literatures elsewhere in the world because they do not exist in those places. From socioeconomic realities to internal states of existence, every aspect of life will yield new richness through reading translated Indian fiction.

Take the word “mon” in Bangla, which appears in Hindi as “man”. In the ontology that English-reading people have acquired through their books, the heart and the mind are binary—neither word can be used to refer to the other. In Indian languages, however, this word represents neither the heart nor the mind exclusively. It takes a position, contextually to the rest of the text, on a continuum between the heart and the mind, between emotion and reason, between feeling and knowing.