The Observant Owl: Hootum’s Vignettes of Nineteenth-Century Calcutta By Kaliprasanna Sinha, Black Kite, Rs 295

Those with experience in such matters say that it is difficult, if not impossible, to find a woman who is both beautiful and faithful. The same could be said of the genre of translations. Translated books are mostly either so faithful to the original that they lose all their literary appeal, or they have so much literary appeal that the original is lost. The book under review, however, presents no such problems. It is neither faithful nor beautiful.

It could be argued with a fair degree of justification that the translator, Swarup Roy, who teaches English in a Calcutta college, is not to blame for this. The problem lies in the nature of the text he has chosen. Hootum Pyanchar Naksha (the earthy Bengali is actually untranslatable — “Sketches by Hootum” is the nearest one can get to it; The Observant Owl conveys nothing of the original title) is perhaps one of the most difficult Bengali texts to translate. The Bengali is earthy and colloquial; its register varies from satire to the tongue-in-cheek to the bawdy. It is impossible to capture its flavour in English, but that does not excuse the rendering of this text into a dry-as-dust narrative of social life in 19th-century Calcutta. The translation misses the humour and the sense of play that are distinctive features of Hootum’s sketches. Further, there are unnecessary deletions. The original begins with an epigraph, a quote from a tappa by Tunowar (whoever he might be). Roy drops the epigraph and does not even tell his readers that he has done so. This is an act of bad faith. He could have told his readers about the epigraph and pleaded his inability to translate it.

Part of Roy’s failure is located in the fact that translation is in its infancy in India. For one thing, most attempts at translation are from an Indian language to English. Very few translations are made from one Indian language to another. It is difficult to explain this phenomenon.

In the West, translations have become a major business and intellectual endeavour. And it has been so for a long time. The Russian classics — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and others — have all been translated into English, and more recently — in the case of War and Peace and Anna Karenina — have been retranslated. Similarly, Proust, whose great novel was first rendered into English by Scott Moncrieff, has been retranslated twice in the last 20 years, . Don Quixote is another text on which the same process is seen to be at work.

This fact of repeated translations (even though no one says that the first translation was bad or inadequate) raises a crucial question about the genre of translations. Apparently, the tension between faithfulness and literary appeal is not resolvable. If it were, why the need for retranslations? Translations are a lost cause without a city to call their own.

To return to the present volume. Professor Partha Chatterjee in his Foreword applauds Roy’s effort as an example of “post-colonial self-confidence”. What exactly does this mean? Post-colonial is a chronological index. What does it mean as an adjective to self-confidence? When Kaliprasanna Sinha translated the Mahabharata from Sanskrit to Bengali, was it an example of colonial confidence?