Choosing an English for Hindi

JASON GRUNEBAUM

Americans translating into English from, say, French or Spanish don’t have to think about all the English speakers, and potential readers, of their English translations in France or Spain—or consider that the English spoken by those people has its own long history, and is different in meaningful ways from North American and UK English idioms. Translators translating from South Asian languages into English do have to consider the 254 million English speakers and potential readers in the countries that are the source of the original work.¹ More importantly, the translator’s process of bringing cultural differences and nuances from the source language into English, weighing one strategy against another, might conclude with one choice if the English reader is from North America and quite another if the reader is from South Asia. Translators translating from South Asian languages into English must ask themselves, “Which English?” in a way that raises very interesting questions about the process of translation and the intended audience.

“Can’t you imagine the pleasure of serving your friends back home at a tea with well prepared samosas, pakoras, honey filled rolled chaptis, and Indian sweets?” wrote Faye Sollid in her introduction to the bilingual English-Hindi American-Hindi Cook Book, published in 1956 by the American Women’s Club of New Delhi, after learning new recipes during an overseas stay. Would she serve chai at the tea, and what would she call it? It might depend on the guests.

I’d like to discuss this question of different English-speaking audiences by sketching two readers, one Indian and one American, and looking at the different ways that they might influence translation strategies. Then I will discuss specific translation examples, drawn largely from my English version of Uday Prakash’s Hindi novel The Girl with the Golden Parasol (Penguin India, 2008; Yale University Press, 2013), and see how two readers might react to different possible choices.

Uday Prakash is one of the most important, daring, original, and funny voices in contemporary Hindi literature over the past twenty-five years. In The Girl with the Golden Parasol, Rahul, a non-Brahmin college boy, falls in love with Anjali, a Brahmin girl. One might assume that caste isn’t a problem in today’s modern India, with its call centers, high tech, and new cars, but in this coming-of-age campus love story, Prakash shows how private lives can still be crushed by the age-old system of caste, a rigid hierarchy further fortified by new forces of globalization. The story is also a stinging satire about abuse of power, corruption, and the question of who owns language.

I’d like to posit a character sketch of one possible reader: Krishna, twenty-two years old, living in South Delhi, who did an M.Sc. in biology at Delhi University, is currently working in human resources for an ad agency, and sends romantic poems to lovers via text message on a new Panasonic smartphone. Krishna eats pizza, parathas, paneer, burgers, papadum, fries, dosas, and Uncle Chipps, in no particular order, and, like many South Asians, is a polyglot, equally comfortable speaking Hindi, English, and Panjabi, often switching among all three languages in the same sentence—though Krishna may prefer to read in English rather than Hindi (more on this later).

Krishna loves to read, mostly fiction written in English or translated into English, and this year has read a John Grisham and a Dan Brown novel, all of Harry Potter, Two Lives by Vikram Seth, The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo, English, August by Upamanyu Chatterjee, José Saramago’s Blindness, Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, García Márquez’s No One Writes to the Colonel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, and The Immortals by Amit Chaudhuri.

If I decide as a translator that Krishna is my ideal reader, I can leave some Hindi words in the English translation. Words like dhoti, adivasi, puja, ustad, chunni, and yaar won’t need to be translated—or even require a “stealth gloss,” where I would try to sneak a definition of the word or phrase into the English text, hopefully without the reader realizing he or she is being taught a new word or idea. Krishna will get the significance of names of figures and places like Ravana, Ayodhya, Madhuri Dixit, Naxalites, Sita, and Chanakya without explanations, “equivalents,” or footnotes.

In other words, there will likely be many fewer cultural differences I’ll be responsible for translating for Krishna, even though Uday Prakash’s novel will be read in a different language than it was written in.

Leaving certain words from the Hindi in the English translation won’t be the only difference in strategy if I translate for Krishna. I might also decide to write in a more South Asianized English. I might use an idiomatic phrase like, “I am just coming,” confident that Krishna would take this to mean what in American English would translate as, “I’ll be right back.” Sometimes Uday’s characters use English words in their Hindi or even speak in complete English sentences, like when the protagonist, Rahul, bursts into tears, and his friend implores him (and this is the Hindi), “Don’t be senti, Rahul!” “Senti” comes from the word “sentimental,” and here means an excessive public display of emotion: when someone loses it, can’t keep a grip on himself, fails to keep a grip on himself or hold it together. Krishna would know what “senti” means, and I could leave this, and many other instances of English-in-the-Hindi, as is.

We will momentarily leave Krishna enjoying a caffe Mexicano and spicy veg puff at the local Barista location, at 15 Defense Colony Market, in South Delhi.

Ten-and-a-half time zones away, sipping a chai iced-tea latte at a Starbucks in Chicago, is Kris, the second possible reader, reading a copy of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. Kris grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, did a B.A. at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, majoring in poli sci and minoring in English, then pursued an M.B.A. at DePaul, making many friends who were South Asian, or of South Asian origin. During that time, Kris attended bhangra dance parties and was invited to an Indian friend’s wedding in Cleveland. Kris has recently taken up yoga.

Kris, like Krishna, also loves to read. Before The Namesake, Kris, too, read Vikram Seth’s latest book, and A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry, is a favorite. This year Kris has read the last Harry Potter, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore; Kris reread Ondaatje’s The English Patient, finally finished García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and enjoyed the new Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina.

If Kris turns out to be my reader, I can count on someone who has some exposure to South Asian culture, primarily through food, music, and for lack of a better category, fitness. But the cultural differences between Kris and the Hindi will be far greater, and much more translation will need to be done. Hindi words I might feel justified leaving in Hindi for Krishna will require some kind of explanation for Kris. If I do want to use some of those Hindi words, either because I decide it’s important to “give some of the flavor of the original” or because they turn out to be simply the most precise and economical words available, I’ll have to stealth gloss in a way that does not cause readers’ eyes to glaze over.

What are the pros and cons of choosing either Krishna or Kris as the ideal reader? Translating for Krishna—in other words, for a South Asian English-speaking audience—would have several benefits. Chief among them, perhaps, is that the audience would likely be much larger: more people would read the book. South Asians are accustomed to reading translations, and there is a lot of literary commerce (although, sadly, not nearly enough) among the twenty-two official languages of India. The “associate official language” of India, English, is obviously an extremely important bridge language on the subcontinent. Therefore, The Girl with the Golden Parasol, translated with a South Asian audience in mind and published in India, could expect to draw as readers English-literate speakers of Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Maithili, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Panjabi, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, and other modern regional South Asian languages who are curious about Hindi literature.

In addition to this potentially sizable market, the audience would include many fluent Hindi speakers like Krishna, who haven’t read any Hindi literature (in Hindi) since their high school days in an English-medium school when they were required to read writers like the father of modern Hindi and Urdu prose, Premchand. Often the Hindi literature curriculum in secondary schools in India is government-prescribed, dry, and lifeless—and generally not a favorite subject among students. In addition, the study of Hindi literature at the university level in India doesn’t have a reputation that’s commensurate with the genius of the language, and therefore Hindi departments are not considered appropriate homes for the bright and ambitious. This is a tragedy, and one that is dramatized in detail in The Girl with the Golden Parasol. But for the purposes of this discussion, the point is that Krishna, and many others fluent in Hindi, would be much more likely to read The Girl with the Golden Parasol than .

In sum, translated well, marketed properly, this book might have a pretty large audience in South Asia.

And what if the translator decides that Kris is the target reader? One immediate point of comparison is that, given the tiny number of translations into English published annually in the United States, the number of readers might be much smaller than in South Asia for The Girl with the Golden Parasol—perhaps an unfair fate for such a funny, relevant, and timely novel. Can marketing play a role? Is it wise for translators to think about marketing before starting a translation? It is undeniable that many South Asian writers and writers of the South Asian diaspora writing in English sell books: Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Vikram Seth, Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Chandra, Bharati Mukherjee, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, and others. Would it be cynical or unfair to try to ride the coattails of these writers, and try to market Uday Prakash as the next Jhumpa Lahiri?

But he’s not Jhumpa Lahiri. And that’s the point. Uday’s voice is quite different from Jhumpa’s, Salman’s, Rohinton’s, and the others’. All of the great South Asian and diaspora writers writing in English have their own, distinct voices, and all should be given a chance to be heard. Uday should too. Unfortunately for him, he happens to write in a language far less well-connected than English is. But he has a lot to say about a part of India that’s not often depicted in the media or written about, and that I think U.S. readers would be very interested in. It’s not just Uday: there is a lot more literary activity on the Indian subcontinent happening in languages other than English. I don’t think it’s controversial to assert that readers, particularly English-speaking North American readers, would profit immeasurably from exposure to these works. But in order for readers to discover them, good translations must exist.

Though many people in the United States (editors, publishers) may argue that translated books don’t sell, cultivating good translations is simply the right thing to do. Kris, the potential American reader, has possibly won me over with, if nothing else, a persuasive need to hear other voices from the subcontinent.

There’s another, very practical, reason it makes sense for me to translate this book into American English: it’s my mother tongue. Even though I think I could probably do a passable imitation of colloquial Indian English, I have innumerably more tools at my disposal if I translate into colloquial American English.

So do I forget about Krishna, my potential Indian reader? I don’t think I as a translator should give up on any potential reader. Shouldn’t it be possible to translate into a distinctly American idiom of English without alienating a South Asian English-speaking audience? Couldn’t I still include Hindi words like dhoti, adivasi, puja, ustad, chunni, and yaar in my English rendition, stealth glossing where necessary for those who might need extra context? Could I still leave those words as-is for South Asians, who will hopefully not find the gloss to be an annoying redundancy, or feel as if the text had been “pre-chewed”? It should be possible to translate with an American audience in mind, but without forgetting everyone else. After all, translation is about enlarging the conversation of literature.

Now that thought has been put into the question of audience, I would like to turn to concrete examples that can be placed under the general category of translating cultural differences. I chose the following examples not because I’ve done a perfect job negotiating all the complexities of each problem—every translator knows that nagging feeling that there’s always a better solution—but because I hope they offer interesting insight into the particular problems posed by Hindi and how I went about tackling them.

Let’s begin with , juthan. is not just leftover food, it’s leftover food that has been made ritually impure by someone else’s having touched it. At a family dinner in South Asia, you rarely hear “Oh, are you going to finish that potato?” accompanied by a hand reaching across the table. Traditionally, once an eater touches his or her food, that food is off limits for everyone else: it becomes impure and is no longer food; it has become . A rigid interpretation of the caste system is largely responsible for the notion of “you touch the food, no one else can eat it.” Each caste makes its own food and doesn’t like to eat food prepared by another caste, particularly one lower down the ladder. In contemporary India, there are countless people who may follow this notion a little, or a lot, or not at all. But it is a concept that is very much alive in the culture.

The first two instances of occur in back-to-back sentences. Our hero, Rahul, is imagining a fat, rich man who never stops eating. Prior to this sentence, this man’s arrogance and gluttony have been described. Retaining only the Hindi word for the moment, the two sentences translate, “As he eats and eats and begins to get full, he starts to flick off the from his plate. Millions of hungry people could be fed with his continental, nutritious .”

There’s no direct equivalent outside of South Asia for the concept of food rendered ritually impure because it’s been touched by someone, or a particular someone. I first thought about segregation in the United States as a potential source of “cultural stuff” to help me with : after all, it wasn’t so long ago that African Americans were forced to eat at separate lunch counters and drink from separate water fountains. But I rejected this possibility, concluding it was too specifically American, and began to think in more general cultural terms: food can go bad, it can be moldy, past its expiration date. When there’s something really wrong with food, it’s less often because a particular type of person came into casual contact with it, more often because it’s spoiled.

So, the first occurrence of I decided to render as “spoiled morsels.” I decided on “morsels” because it seemed to both preserve the satirical tone of the passage and fit nicely with the register of “continental” (which is the same word used in the Hindi). “Spoiled” is about as good and evocative a “bad food” modifier as any other I could think of. In addition, the sentence implies he’s been eating and eating for a long time—long enough for some of the food on his plate to become spoiled.

The next I translated simply as “leftovers.” To add an adjective, say, “impure,” to “leftovers,” as I considered doing, might stop the reader in his or her tracks. The reader might wonder who is it who has adulterated or molested the food, and think about the difference between “pure” and “impure” leftovers (is there one?). I decided leftovers are already crummy enough, and the word provides the same effect of humorous surprise at the end of the sentence that does in the Hindi.

is a noun, but particular food items, once impure, are described with the adjective . Our hero, Rahul, is a non-Brahmin, and his love interest, Anjali, is, of course, a Brahmin—and Brahmins traditionally have the strictest rules about who touches their food. The first time he lays eyes on Anjali, Rahul and his friends are sitting around on a sultry August afternoon eating one of the delicious late-monsoon treats in South Asia, corn on the cob roasted over hot coals, slathered with salt, spices, and lime. Anjali shows up, and a girlfriend of hers kindly offers half of her corn:

“Do you want some corn on the cob? I’ve only eaten half,” offered Renu.

Before Anjali can reply, another friend, Seema, jumps in and teases Anjali. The Hindi: “‘,’ .” The fact that Anjali is being teased gave me a certain latitude in translating , and here I felt comfortable using the precise but otherwise rather heavy and potentially out-of-register “defiled” for . I translated this sentence as, “‘Heaven forbid! She’s a strict Brahmin,’ Seema said in jest. ‘She’ll become an outcaste if she eats that defiled piece of corn of yours.’” Actually, it turns out Anjali’s not a strict Brahmin at all—she’s a modern woman. In the story, she ends up accepting Renu’s offer, and munches away on the delicious, defiled corn.

The next example concerns the Hindi word , which has seen a lot of action over the decades. Literally it means both of one’s own country (India) and something made and manufactured in one’s own country (India). The word swadeshi was a powerful rallying cry during the struggle for independence from the British, and, in that context, referred specifically to the ban of imported textiles. If you’ve seen the film Gandhi, the two images of the huge bonfire of British-manufactured clothing and Gandhi sitting at his spinning wheel give two good guide-posts for the emotional impact that can have. Something swadeshi can stir an Indian’s emotions and make him or her feel proud in ways few things can.

So when Rahul, our hero, lauds as “” the gorgeous back of Madhuri Dixit, one of Hindi cinema and India’s most beloved actresses, I was in a bind. The swadeshi-ness of Madhuri’s back, Rahul declared, was one of the things that made her unique, incomparable. Her natural and swadeshi back was compared unfavorably to the synthetic-looking and videshi—foreign—backs of other Indian actresses.

What can we do for swadeshi in English? What about “uniquely Indian,” “typically Indian,” “inexplicably Indian”? No, these phrases sound as if they belong in an ad for saffron-colored nail polish. “Indian born and bred”: that’s not right either, a bit too south of the Mason-Dixon line. What about those stickers and labels found on products that say “Made in the USA”? We can borrow this marketing device that appeals to patriotic feelings for the benefit of describing Madhuri’s back. Changing “Made in USA” to “Made in India” convinces me I can leave in swadeshi, a word I felt was important to retain. The translated sentences read: “Madhuri’s back was natural and authentic, and, unexplainably, a swadeshi one. Made in India. The others were unnatural, foreign imports, Rahul deduced, and that was why they held no charm.”

Holidays can be very culturally specific. “It was two days until Rakshabandhan,” the reader is told. This is the literal translation of the sentence. Since Rakshabandhan is not a well-known holiday outside the Indian subcontinent, I felt it needed some context. Rakshabandhan is not the equivalent of Christmas, but how would you translate Christmas—and describe how it is celebrated—for someone who had never heard of Christmas before? (Of course it would depend on whether it was an American Christmas, a German Christmas, or an Indian Christmas.) In any case, if “it was two days until Rakshabandhan,” was the first and last mention of the holiday in the text, I might be tempted to translate it as something only slightly more precise and literary than “important Indian holiday,” or make up a little English name for the holiday that gave a rough translation. But immediately following the news that Rakshabandhan is coming up is a lovely sentence that makes little sense if you don’t know something about the holiday. So, given that I’ve ruled out footnotes and a glossary,² I’m left with little choice. I need to prime the reader with a gloss in the text itself containing the minimal amount of information for him or her to understand enough about this holiday so as to make sense of the next sentence. It’s bound to be somewhat, if not very inelegant, and I can only hope that Krishna doesn’t feel that the text is being too pre-chewed, or, even worse, that leftovers are being served. The original “It was two days until Rakshabandhan,” with the added imperative to add a gloss, has now swelled in my English to, “It was two days until the holiday of Rakshabandan, when sisters tie colorful threads of affection—the rakhi—around the wrists of their brothers, or those they consider like brothers.” I justify this addition with what I hope is enough of a payoff for the reader in the following sentence. “Talk was thick about which girls, by dint of tying the rakhi around the wrist of a boy or a teacher, would cancel once and for all the one-sided soap opera and recast the once aspiring lover as esteemed brother.” This wouldn’t make much sense to a reader who didn’t know the basics of Rakshabandhan.

What happens when spoons start kissing ass? The Hindi word for spoon, , can also mean yes-man, ass-kisser, or, to give away the choice I made in this instance, lackey. The actively curries favor with some sort of superior to whom he has pledged prolonged servility and for whom acts of self-debasement often know no bounds. Think Smithers from the Simpsons and you’re on the right track. In South Asia, an important person is not an important person unless he or she has a proper flock of s.

There are plenty of s running around the college campus where The Girl with the Golden Parasol takes place. Among them is the clever and cunning hostel warden Upadhyay. The adult from the university who is in charge of the hostels where students live is the hostel warden. In the United States, we have wardens for prisons and little else; but the term “warden” was perfectly appropriate for both the character and the circumstances described in the book, so I decided to keep it instead of giving Upadhyay a bloodless American job title. I did change some Indian English campus terminology into North American English, for example, “transferring” to another university instead of “getting migration papers.” Others I did not change: Indian university students live in on-campus “hostels,” which I decided to keep, rather than changing it to “dorm,” which I thought sounded too American.

In the story, the students begin to keep files—which they call “de facto” files—on their professors and the college administration, chronicling the corruption and cronyism. The deeds and misdeeds of the hostel warden are compiled, including his relationship with the VC—that’s Vice Chancellor, or head of a university. The relationship between the VC and the hostel warden is characterized in the following sentence, which, though in Hindi, contains only one Hindi word—. The rest are English words transliterated into Hindi. “Solid Stainless Steel of V. C. Mister Ashok Agnihotri.” The first thing I have to do is let go of the dream of keeping the word in my translation, as perfect as it is in the Hindi—I just can’t seem to think of any connection in English between spoons and brown-nosing. With , sadly, it seems I must also say good-bye to solid stainless steel. But I want to keep as much from the solid stainless steel as possible. Stainless steel in South Asia has the general connotation of high quality, durability, being made to last. And it’s shiny. I’ve chosen “lackey” for over yes-man because “lackey” seems more evocative, and more likely to be able to support a couple of adjectives, for example, “loyal” and “lacquered.” It’s far from perfect, but our solid stainless steel has become a loyal lacquered lackey. He’s durable because he’s loyal, and, being lacquered, he’s undergone a special treatment giving him shine and luster. I tried to retain some of the alliteration of the original, even if being lacquered is a bit more baroque than the clean, cold, steely .

A —a word that seems to come up a lot while translating from Hindi—is somewhat related to a , but comes with more job security. is routinely translated without a second thought into South Asian English as “peon.” “Peon” is not only still a very valid job description in India, but for many is a job they’d be delighted to have: a kind of all-purpose office assistant who serves the functions of errand boy, file fetcher, gossip catcher, chai maker, and often behind-the-scenes power broker.

Say the word “peon” to a North American, however, and he or she will probably picture a Victorian-era indentured hunchback, dressed in rags, doing the most menial of menial tasks. “Office assistant” is the kind of bland, nonevocative American job title I didn’t want to give hostel warden Upadhyay. The solution that I think strikes the right balance between maintaining the sense of the servility of the position and still endowing the job holder with agency is “underling.” There is also a stickiness in the sound of the word I like. This is the solution for “peon” for now—until a better one comes along.

Finally, the case of the corrupted chai. What follows is an instance of translating cultural difference where perhaps too much thinking about how the reader might receive a certain word might become paralyzing for the translator.

If I’d translated this book fifteen years ago, I’d be translating it before it was written, which would have been very interesting and challenging as a translator, but I’d still have come across the word chai—tea—many times in the Hindi, and thought, Here’s an open-and-shut case. I’ll just carry the Hindi word chai right over into the English. It’ll be an easy, if not necessarily meaningful way to keep some of the “color” of the original. I would have assumed that enough of the American audience had been to South Asia or a South Asian restaurant, or knew the word chai from one of the many other languages it occurs in. Or, if all else failed, the word appears enough times in the book itself for any reader to figure out what it is the characters keep drinking.

Then Starbucks and its hot-beverage handmaidens in corporate America ruined the word “chai” by super-sizing it and making it into an expensive specialty drink. If I use the word “chai” in the translation, it is possible that Kris will picture a beverage of double-digit ounces, full of Splenda, topped with soy foam and two shakes of ground cinnamon.

The problem is that the chai in The Girl with the Golden Parasol comes in something like an oversized shot glass—though it should be sipped and slurped. This chai is boiled in a dented aluminum pot—not stainless steel—over a cow-dung fire and comes with a little layer of something brownish and thick and creamy floating on top that your average Starbucks chai drinker would likely describe as “gross,” but which, for the chai drinkers in the novel, would be considered the best part.

After all this, might “tea” be the better choice? Or should “chai” still be favored? What kind of advice might Faye Sollid give, if she were to invite us to her gathering? In the “Kitchen Hints” section of her American-Hindi Cook Book, she advises cooks that “unpolished rice contains minerals and vitamins which are lacking in polished rice. Use unpolished rice and steam it to save as much nutritional value as possible.” A round of chai for Krishna and Kris at Mrs. Sollid’s tea!

This is a fascinating cookbook, and it’s fun to imagine both American and Indian cooks trying out some of the recipes—say, for Apple Betty or Never Fail Cup Cakes. The point of the book was of course to teach local cooks how to lessen the homesickness pains of their American sahibs. But the point was also to share. “It is hoped that our Indian friends who would like to prepare simple, tasty American dishes will find [the recipes] useful,” wrote Sollid, in the introduction.

I wonder how many of Sollid’s Indian friends tried their hands at Old Fashioned Rocks or Spiced Vinegar? Sharing goes both ways. Citing the “keen interest” in Indian cooking, presumably among fellow expats, Sollid notes the inclusion of “representative Indian dishes” in the volume. She cautions that “the measurement system differs from ours [and] the Indian recipes may be difficult to follow.” But she hopes “that enough enthusiastic women will experiment with the difficult conversion problems for some future edition to include a great expanded section on Indian cooking.”

Enthusiasm, above all, is absolutely what is needed to work out “difficult conversion problems.” And sometimes even a lowly teaspoon can, and must, be converted into a loyal lackey, stirring in the sugar to make the chai sweeter.

Notes

1. I arrived at this figure by adding the most recent census figures of English speakers (but not “English users,” a category requiring only basic competence) in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.

2. My general rule of thumb with footnotes is that if there were none in the original, I won’t use any in my translation. Glossaries I generally object to for two reasons. One, I suspect that with a bit more work, much of the information contained in glossaries could be incorporated into the text itself with little or no disruption. Two, a glossary’s presence divides the readers into two groups: one that needs to use it and the other that doesn’t. It’s like saying, “If you’re not in on things, you have to use the glossary,” which is not in the spirit of why I am translating in the first place.