Celebrated translator Arunava Sinha on Sunday talked about his 100th published translation and the evolving craft of carrying Bengali literature to a global readership. In conversation with theatre director and cultural commentator Sujoy Prasad Chatterjee at the Kolkata Literary Meet, Sinha said much of his career began “almost by accident”.
Sinha traced the unlikely beginnings of his journey to Chowringhee. “I translated Chowringhee in 1992 — 30 years after the novel came out in Bangla,” he said. “And then it lay in cold storage for 14 years.” The manuscript resurfaced only when a Penguin editor asked the author Shankar for it. “He had forgotten who’d done it,” Sinha recalled. “Fortunately, I’d put my name on it. And that was how it all began”.
Asked about translating living authors, Sinha said the process rarely changes. “I translate any author the same way,” he said, whether they are alive or not. What differs, he said, is the occasional luxury of clarification — being able to call an author to ask what a word or phrase truly intends. That said, he added, such moments are rare.
The discussion turned to the difference between translating prose and poetry. “With poetry, it’s elliptical,” he said. “It’s probably a failed endeavour to try and arrive at a singular meaning.” A translator, he explained, must pay attention to “sound, rhythm, music, imagery,” often choosing to foreground only one or two elements. “That’s why two translators will never converge in poetry the way they sometimes do in prose.”
Asked why he chose translation over writing original fiction, Sinha said it wasn’t a conscious choice. “It’s not even a career that earns me a living,” he said, “It was just something I tried. I enjoyed it. Other people enjoyed it too.”
Timing, he added, mattered. “English-language publishing in India was just starting out. They were desperately looking for books — and not all of them could be written in English.”
Sinha acknowledged that a translator’s personal politics can clash with the worldview embedded in a text. Referring to a historical novel that portrays outsiders as enemies, he said, “My politics is opposed to the latent politics of the text.”
Still, he chose to translate it. “I didn’t want to take the easy option of not translating,” he said. Instead, he added a note: “Don’t shoot the messenger. The translator is only telling you what the text says in another language.”