An Act of Creation
On losing my mother tongue
In the produce aisle at Walmart, a woman asks me if I, too, am Indian. She isn’t much older than me. Her gait is awkward, her eyes hopeful and hungry for a connection. I’m reminded of my mother’s stories from her first year in Canada, how she circled grocery stores aimlessly because she couldn’t figure out which panel of glass was supposed to be the front door and wrote long letters to her family back in Kolkata because she had nobody to speak to here.
I give the woman my practised answer: “My parents are from West Bengal, but I was born here.” Diplomatic. No promises of a country I don’t know.
The woman lights up regardless. “You’re Bengali!” She exclaims, and to my unassuming look, adds, “Bengalis are the artists of India. The poets.”
I know this, but I fail to feel it. The famous poems by Tagore are written in elegant, complex Bengali, making them almost entirely incomprehensible to me. I pour over various English translations of one poem in particular, “Come As You Are,” and find that each translation changes the poem’s meaning entirely. Only when I finally listen to a recording, spoken in its original Bengali, am I able to understand its first line as, “Come as you are, you need not dress up for me.” This line was originally translated into English as, “Come as you are, tarry not over your toilet.”
Understanding one line in its original language changed my perception of this poem completely. What I thought might be a text about bowel issues (?) was actually about the intimate comfort of being accepted entirely as you are. If one line can make that much of a difference, I have to imagine that fluency would change everything.
There is an Italian saying: “Traduttore, traditore." The line implies that the translator is a traitor, that the act of translation itself is a deceptive one. Translation being synonymous with betrayal is an idea commonly expressed by linguists. Untranslatable words are not rare—in fact, there are entire banks of them—and they will never be understood by non-native speakers with the same ease as somebody raised with them. To attempt to translate these words in a way that remains accurate but also flows like any other sentence is difficult, to say the least.
I’m currently reading Babel by R.F Kuang, a novel that delves into this idea thoroughly. In it, we follow Robin Swift from his childhood in China to his education as a translator at Oxford in an alternate version of our world that uses the act of translation for magic. In the novel, a character says, “Translation means doing violence upon the original, it means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So, where does that leave us?”
Kuang suggests that translation is an inherently violent and destructive thing. In fact, the entire title of her book is Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators'. Can violence ever be necessary? If translation is truly so destructive, why do we go to such lengths to keep doing it? After all, some of the most influential works of all time are translations. The Odyssey, The Alchemist, and even The Bible are all texts widely consumed in a language other than their original. This would lead anyone to question what sentence slipped between the gaps, which misconstrued turn of phrase affected an entire cultural philosophy. So why not just leave words as they are meant to be, in their original form?
The answer is simpler than the question itself: connection. The basic human desire to bond with one another, even across different cultures, defies any logic that we may try to assign it. To say, Look, I treasure these words. They mean something to me. Now you can have them, too. That’s what it all comes down to.
The spreading of ideas, information, and knowledge around the world relies on accessibility and, however beneficial it might be, the average person isn’t going to learn Bengali in order to read a Tagore poem. Translation is the only way to share that work of art. Even if it means losing something as it gets passed on, isn’t that better than nothing?
To be entirely honest, I’m still uncertain. Tagore called the translation of his poems “an act of creation” and maybe, in some sense, it was. But as I flounder over words that my ancestors would have read a million times over, I’m not sure if I’m witnessing a rebirth or a slow, withering away.
Hi Trina, as someone who speaks multiple languages and who loves reading fiction and poetry in translation, I really appreciated your reflections on the act and art of translation! I found the English translation of Tagore's poem that you mentioned pretty shocking in its complete divergence from the essence of the original poem. I feel like what I value most about translations are those that become a bridge for connecting two worlds, as you mention, and also in a way that retains the emotional truth and essence of the original, even if the words and facts may differ.
Reading your piece made me think about Jhumpa Lahiri's thoughts on translation, as a Bengali-British-American writer who writes in her non-native Italian and has also translated her own writing from Italian to English - she describes translation as "an act of radical change, an act of reshaping and reforming a text, and in some sense it becomes unrecognizable from what it was once, though its essence remains the same". Thank you for this piece, and all the room for further reflection it's opened up!
p.s. also I had to sign up for your substack, seeing the dedication to tangerine lovers and those who cry in the shower (I literally just wrote about this in my latest piece!) - looking forward to reading your other writing! 😊
I'm currently drafting an article on translation too! You have some really good insights here, though, and I agree with your point about loss. I don't think a translation can ever convey meaning in the same way as the original, not least because vocabulary and phrasing are fundamentally different between languages.
But there's a cultural element here too. If you're reading an ancient poem, fluency in the original language certainly helps, but an understanding of the society in which that poem was produced is irrecoverable.
What I'm trying to say is, there's always a degree of separation between the poet & their intended meaning, and the poem & its reader. This can be dangerous, sure (eg the way in which Christians understand the Bible is pretty far removed from its "reality"), but I don't think translation is a harmful tool in and of itself. It they can help spread ideas and beautiful language throughout time and space, and finding some common ground in our shared human experiences is what life is all about.