Vibrant Vernacular

A pumpkin is rotting under your feet, why are you counting someone else’s mustard seeds?--- would be my father’s putdown in response to neighbors or relatives minding our business. Too polite to say it to their face, of course. Yet, the imagery it brought forth never failed to amuse us. Maybe it is one of the fairly easily-translatable ones from Konkani, my mother-tongue, or maybe it is that everybody is minding everyone else’s business these days, that this is an oft-repeated one in my household from the treasury of dad’s idioms. Although my approximate translation does not capture its full color, I think I’m somewhat able to retain the spirit of the vernacular.

A few thousand years ago, text for translations were not easy to come by; and, for that matter, text was not easily translatable. I was recently reminded of the fact that, in ancient India, scholars travelled several thousand miles for several years, from neighboring regions to Nalanda, to come across Buddhist teachers and teachings. Collecting teachings also meant bringing back scriptures to translate from Sanskrit, Pali, or Prakrit into the regional languages. William Darlymple, in his The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, explains how China and a large portion of East Asia was heavily influenced by ideas migrating from the Indosphere through these translations.

Interestingly enough, in my student days in New Brunswick, NJ, I found some amazing gems eight thousand miles away from my home in Mumbai. Thanks to recommendations from a friend and interlibrary borrowing privileges at the University library, Kirn Nagarkar, AK Ramanujan,

Ismat Chughtai and Kamala Das, and several others translated from Marathi, Urdu, Malayalam and other languages, lit up my eager mind with their unconventionality and made me feel right at home. It was amazing how a skilled translator would play with formal, ‘posh’ Queen’s English or standardized English to recount folklore of the subcontinent and stories told in easygoing, earthy, localized dialects and mother-tongues.

In 2017, when Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar made a big splash in Anglosphere, it seemed like a turning point for translated books had arrived. For a while it was exciting and I stepped out to exploring translated books from all over world. That is, until this year.

When Deepa Bhasthi’s translation of Banu Mustaq’s Heart Lamp won the prestigious International Booker prize, it garnered a lot of attention for not only the first Indian translator having received the coveted prize, but also for a translation hailed as ‘radical’. A veritable ode to the vibrancy of the vernacular and to tradition of orality, a translation from Kannada-Urdu-Dakhni-Arabic to a more elastic English! How can anyone possibly beat that? A major recognition for the translator and for the process of translation. And, lo and behold - and with much fanfare - I am back again in the world of Indian language books translated into English! So much so that I have borrowed the above-mentioned books from MCLS and I am re-reading them. The prize-winning authors are easily found by doing an Author/Title search in the MCLS catalog. Several others, who are not as well-known in the United States, can be found within anthologies. And the ones that are not at MCLS are an easy Interlibrary Loan away!

~Shilpa Shanbhag, Reference Librarian @ Hickory Corner