.::Song Of The Little Road::.

In the one hour I had between the two writing workshops An Introduction To Freelance Writing and The Art Of Translation yesterday, I wandered the corridors of Elphinstone College and its narrow dark staircases that looked as if they belonged to a cold time-forgotten castle more than a college.

I even happened to venture unnoticed into their staff room which has six larger-than-life portraits hung across its walls. And guess what I found!!! One of the portraits was of William Wordsworth (eponymous grandson of the great poet William Wordsworth), who was a principal of the college at one time. Another portrait was that of Peter Peterson, who had been a Professor of Oriental Languages in the college. It might be history to those who know Elphinstone, but it is certainly news to me.

As for The Art Of Translation workshop that followed, it soon regressed into The Craft Of Translation workshop. It is very necessary to have an agenda or at least a purpose which implicitly sets some sort of tacit agenda, especially if the workshop session is going to be as long as three hours. The discussion was often punctuated with silences that hovered in the air of Elphinstone’s Seminar Hall which hosted the poorly attended workshop.

A lot of discussion took place on the problems of finding suitable publishers for translated work, why small publishing houses make a success of it while big publishing houses shy away from it, and the lack of qualified, experienced translators and an agency that unites them and protects their rights. Also the practical difficulties that a translator may encounter while translating from one language to the other (often the second language is English) were discussed in great detail. Attention was also paid to the problems of typesetting and transcreation.

In all, four people attended the workshop including me. One of them was Meera Desai who had translated some stories from Gujarati. Rimi had a look at the manuscript, liked the stories very much, and promised Desai to do something about them. There was a girl who had worked extensively with BNHS, right from the editing stages to the printing stages of its journals and magazines. Then there was a guy who does technical translation from French to English for an organization. I was the only one with little knowledge of translation, and perhaps that is why the workshop didn’t work wonders for me. In the end, the workshop grew intensely boring and meaningful, like a Proust novel with little pace.

The saving grace for me was that the talk was interspersed with discussions on translation of Bengali Literature. I’ve a weakness for Bengali, and for me it has always meant much more than a language. I took Bengali classes some years back, learnt the alphabet, even some poems, then abandoned it midway for no reason at all. But sometimes I still go back to the thin, translucent pages of my textbooks on the Bengali alphabet and Introductory Bengali Literature and sigh with quiet pleasure.

The workshop could have been productive except that it mostly became an analytical debate rather than a workshop. Ultimately art is more important than (and sometimes far removed from) the issues.

Perhaps Rimi Chatterji’s time could have been better used if she had taken a workshop on The Art Of Writing A Novel, especially since her second novel The City Of Love has been published recently.