Translating Agyeya’s monumental novel Shekhar poses certain interesting challenges, pleasures and impossibilities.
First and foremost, Shekhar is a watershed moment in the development of the Hindi novel. Not only is it one of the first formally experimental novels but it has also been an exceedingly important one to so many people. Perhaps no other novel other than Premchand’s Godan has produced so much secondary critical work, with dozens of monographs devoted to the singular innovations that Shekhar produced. As a result, being attentive to both the formally innovative aspects of the work as well as the long tradition of scholarship on it meant juggling quite a few things in the air at the same time.
Secondly, and unsurprisingly, Shekhar is the product of a polyglot imagination. The novel freely relies on allusions to English, Sanskrit, Bengali and other languages. Part of this is because the main character travels the length and breadth of colonial India, but part of it is also due to Agyeya’s own multilingual interests. Moreover, despite the fact that the main character insists on retaining and even building upon Hindi and its attendant cultural traditions (usually because they are being encroached upon by a colonial English), the novel does not hold on to the same political impulse. It was one thing to be able to work in what is already a highly challenging Hindi that Agyeya so deftly deploys, but quite another to be able to track down all of the other literary traditions that he was utilizing. This was made even more difficult by the fact that in a number of places, Agyeya’s narrator (perhaps Agyeya himself) incorrectly remembered certain poems. It was something of a translator’s dilemma whether to retain the errors in memory that were likely the result of the novel’s composition in prison or to clean them up. In most places, I have opted for correcting Agyeya’s lapses in memory as I could not find any literary reason to retain the errors. Wherever possible, these emendations have been noted in an endnote for any enterprising scholar.
Thirdly, Agyeya and his critics all refer to the ‘missing’ third volume of the Shekhar series. Two volumes have been translated here, but the third was never published. As Agyeya hints in his own preface to the novel, he believed that the purpose of the third volume had evaporated. Drafts of this third volume probably exist somewhere, but it seemed to me a mistake to try and track them down for the purposes of this project for a few reasons. Notwithstanding the author’s own desires that the volume not be published (which is important enough), the third volume was never an event in Hindi literature. No one saw it and clearly no one read it. Thus, to have it translated into English and brought in that form for the first time did not seem warranted.
Fourth, as the endnotes will demonstrate, I worked from two different editions of the novel: the Mayur edition and the Saraswati edition. Having both was useful because errors in one would often be resolved in the other.
Fifth, I have tried as much as possible not to rely on transliteration of Hindi nouns for which there are no good English equivalents. While there are clearly cultural and historical values to retaining some words, there is also the danger that this shirks the responsibility of a translator to try to take one world view and make it stretch to accommodate another. In this, I have been guided by Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Task of the Translator’. Benjamin makes a rather novel argument that what good translations are doing is not flattening out the perspectives of another language or culture but rather pointing always to the places where the destination language (in this case, English) has to grow, evolve and change to be able to understand another. In that sense, a good translation ought to be able to defamiliarize the familiar language. That’s only really possible, in my opinion, if one tries (and fails, inevitably) to find new ways of making English evolve to deal with experimental Hindi fiction.
Finally, this translation would not have been possible were it not for the tireless work of Vasudha Dalmia. Vasudha was not only a marvellous collaborator in this translation project, but in many ways its inspiration. I discovered Shekhar in one of the many Hindi seminars I took with her at the University of California, Berkeley, and ever since then she has gently nudged this project along. She has also been over each inch of this translation, editing and emending it, noting all of the text’s infelicities, until it was polished. It bears underlining that while no translation is the work of a single person, this translation in particular bears her imprint on it in a marked way.
In saying all of this, I mean to point to the places where I faced the most challenges; these were not always the moments of my successes. In those places where my language skills (especially in Sanskrit and Bengali) were not adequate, I relied on the work of other scholars and translators to help me out. Those have also been indicated in the endnotes. This work has been years in the making and several people have given feedback and support for which I am ever grateful; the mistakes in this text, it bears repeating, are, of course, my own.
Austin, Texas
March 2018
Snehal Shingavi