Between Two Poles: Tabish Khair on Translation

Tabish Khair

Tabish Khair, acclaimed novelist and frequent contributor to PN Review, shares his thoughts on the practice of translation.

Emily Apter's The Translation Zone begins with 20 'theses on translation'. The first one is, 'Nothing is translatable.' The last one is, 'Everything is translatable.'

Of course, as we know, any translation falls between these two poles. But we also know that it does not fall equally between these poles. The nature of the work(s), language(s) and translator(s) play a role in determining how far a particular translation stands from the first thesis or the last thesis. Genre too, I would argue. It is patently easier to translate a novel than a poem with so-called 'fidelity', though again Dan Brown's thrillers are obviously easier to translate 'fully' than James Joyce's Ulysses!

One can posit this difference along the oppositional axis of 'communication' and 'expression'. One can argue that the more communication-oriented a text is, the easier it is to translate it into another language – and hence the special difficulty of translating poetry.

PN Review 185, in which Tabish 

Khair contributed six poems

But here too one has to be careful: a text might set out to communicate a 'fact' (the date of a battle), an 'objective' experience (the account of a battle), or a 'subjective' experience (Wilfred Owen's experience of a battle) – even the most 'expressive' poem does set out to communicate something in this last sense – and each purpose will impact differently on both the 'original' and the translation.

The matter is even more complex in the realm of poetry. In the four languages that I can translate between with some degree of competence – Urdu, Hindi, Danish and English – it is easier to translate closer to the second pole (of fidelity) when one transfers from two languages that are linguistically and socio-culturally closer to each other. That is, from Urdu to Hindi and from Danish to English.

But even this is not unproblematic. For instance, even though Urdu and Hindi share the same cultural matrix of Hindustani dialects, the purist-Urdu 'dil' has a different poetic tradition from the purist-Hindi 'hriday'. Both mean 'heart' but, apart from the sound difference, Urdu poetry uses 'heart' frequently and with great complexity, while Hindi poetry is highly taciturn and economical in its use of 'heart'. 

Not surprisingly, when we look at Bombay film songs – which moved from Urdu-dominated Hindustani dialects to Hindi-dominated Hindustani dialects in the 1970s – we come across dozens of 'hit' songs with 'dil' in them and only one with 'hriday' in it!

PN Review 177, in which Kahir contributed 

an article entitled 'Echoes of Hieroglyphs: 

Language in Indian Poetry in English'

It is in this context that we have to look at such works as Rabindranath Tagore's Nobel-winning self-translation of Gitanjali (orig. 1910; trans. 1913) and Edward FitzGerald's influential translation of the 11th century Persian writer, Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat (1859). Both, as has been pointed out by scholars, take vast liberties with the original texts. Does that make them bad translations?

I would argue that it does not. It does not because both texts are aware of the fact that translation involves a transfer across languages and cultures: the translator has to maintain a balance between the ‘original’ text and language and the possibilities of the translated text in the new language and the new cultural context. At least in translating poetry, fidelity to just one text and its contexts is not enough.


Born and educated mostly in Bihar, India, Tabish Khair has won the All India Poetry Prize and his current novel, The Thing About Thugs, has been shortlisted for the two main Asian fiction prizes, the Man Asian Literary Award and the DSC Prize. The Thing About Thugs will be published in USA and available in UK in 2012.




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