Translations and Paulo Coelho

The world would be so much poorer, in terms of knowledge, scientific progress and human values, had there been no translations. How would we experience the beauty of Homer’s Iliad, Sudraka’s Mricchakatikam, Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, Tagore’s Gitanjali, or Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, if these great works were to remain forever in their original languages? It would be the same as getting hold of a valuable manuscript from some civilization in another planet and not knowing what to do with it, being unable to decipher it.

Translations have opened up mankind to understand and accept the realities of different countries, cultures, regions, religions and eras through each other’s written works. It has helped transcend linguistic barriers and therefore political and geographic boundaries too. Most of all, it has come as a boon to readers, enabling them to enjoy literary flavours from across the world. As a young schoolboy, I remember, I and my classmates laughing our hearts out at the misadventures of Don Quixote by Cervantes. Little did we know then that the classic was a translation from the Spanish; nonetheless each of us enjoyed narrating to others our version of the knight’s eccentricity.

One of my favourite authors, since childhood, has been Jules Verne, the father of sci-fi. (This genre has caught up once again with the present young generation, though now in the form of movies and not as books.) Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Around the World in Eighty Days – I enjoyed reading these books as if they were not fiction but reality and as if I was part of those adventurous journeys. Once again, I was ignorant of the fact that I was reading translated versions from the French.

What makes such seamless transition from one language to another, so that the reader finds no discord in the language? All credit must go the translator here. He needs have mastery of both languages to tackle the nuances, the syntax, the colloquialism and idioms that are peculiar to each language. An author adorns his work with figurative usage of phrases that may be unique to his tongue. The translator who uses the paraphrase technique preserves the overall sense implied by the author. Thus the translation flows naturally, but in the process some purity is lost. As opposed to paraphrase, in the meta-phrase technique, one does a word to word translation. Here the translator is faithful to every word of the author but could end up with a farcical work if he were to translate every phrase into their exact dictionary equivalents.

It is truly tricky to translate idioms and proverbs. The Hindi proverb, “Naach na jaane, aangan tedha”, could turn out hilarious if translated exactly into any European language. It would be best to translate it as “Make no silly excuses”. One needs to strike a fine balance between meaning and usage of both languages. To quote Yevgeny Yevtushenko: “Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.”

If translations are a boon to readers, it is more so to writers. What more may an author want than his writings be read by people across countries and continents! It is godsend for the author if someone picks up his book to publish it in another language. The author gets recognition far and wide, and his work travels to distant lands. Translations serve as a measure of an author’s success (though not necessarily literary success) – the more the translations the better the author. The most widely translated author happens to be Agatha Christie, followed by Jules Verne, with Shakespeare coming up as third.

Very few authors have translated their own works. Rabindra Nath Tagore stands out among them. He wrote Gitanjali in Bengali, and later, translated his collection of poems into English. Only after that did it come to the notice of the western world, and only then did it get shortlisted for the Nobel Prize. But for the English translation, Tagore may never have become a laureate. The story for the Russian authors Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, goes somewhat differently. Their translated novels got them the Nobel alright, but with it came more trouble than fame.

Another form of translation is termed interpretation, where the interpreter renders speech from one language into another orally, and almost instantaneously. This linguistic art calls for more talent and greater presence of mind than for translations.

Retelling a story in a different version is sometimes mistakenly referred to as translation. It is especially the case with religious texts, and the best example is Valmiki’s Ramayan and Tulsi Das’ Ramcharit Manas. One is in Sanskrit and the other in Awadhi, but the later work is not a translation, but rather a different and simpler version of the same mythological story. There are several differences in the episodes of each version, while the plot and the theme remain the same. Valmiki lived in the same time as Ram and chronicled a contemporary account of the great king, while Tulsi Das wrote his version in the 16th century portraying Ram as God. It is advisable that present day writers do not attempt such retelling, or else they might get sued under the copyright act, how much ever different and original their version might be. If, on the other hand, the original work has passed into public domain, one may play around with it and rewrite it in a newer light.

Well, who is the most translated living author? The honour goes to Paulo Coelho, the man who created history with Alchemist. It has been translated into 67 languages. Coelho, a Brazilian, writes in Portuguese. He has written 27 books and most of them have been translated into several languages. His works could easily be termed as a new phenomenon in the world of translations – no sooner his books get published in the original language than they get translated into English and many other languages. And the greatest phenomenon in translations is just about happen. This November, Coelho’s latest novel, The Spy will get released worldwide in 28 languages almost simultaneously. (It includes the Malayalam version.) Translations have indeed scaled a new peak.