Anindita Kar

Anindita Kar is from Kaziranga, Assam. Her creative pursuits include poetry and short fiction, but it is in translation that she finds her true calling. She says that she translates in the way that one says their prayers; she speaks three languages in her day-to-day existence, and translates from two of these, Assamese and Bengali, into the third, English. Her work has previously appeared in or is forthcoming with Muse India, Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature, The Hindu, The Antonym, Routledge, to name a few.

Translator’s Reflections

Translation begins with selecting which poems will best introduce the poets and their poetic landscapes to target language readers. Nilima Thakuria Haque’s ‘Stitching a River’ is deliberately placed at the beginning of these translations from the Assamese as the river is a central metaphor for the riparian state, flowing through the land, through native psyche and its literature. As I write this, Assam continues to be ravaged by one of the worst floods in its history. Like the speaker of ‘Stitching a River’ the riverine population surrenders to the river’s whim for its survival. ‘Immigration’ alludes to issues of displacement, immigration, contentious citizenship, and related matters that plague Assam’s contemporary politics. ‘Nothing Remains of Baghjan’ draws the picture of a man-made disaster with long-term consequences.

The Assamese language has an inherent economy that springs from a peculiar use of compound words or word-chains that, if retained, would render the translation un-English. So, while the translations are inevitably wordy, the challenge was to not make their structure appear loosely knit. The translations have lost a part of their original music since end-rhymes and internal rhymes can not be carried over, but have almost intuitively gained a music of their own—‘to stitch gaping puddles/with threads and needles’, ‘to tell the tale of a tailor…’, ‘Their hearts flit and flutter/they grow thirstier by the hour’ are a few examples. Assamese also lends itself to a fluidity of tenses unthinkable in English. Let me say the language employs an ‘ever-presentness’, as if something is out there suspended in space but not in time, past, present or future. I have tried to tame the originals’ encompassing sense of time by confining it in conventional English grammar. In Sarifa Khatoon Chowdhury’s ‘Nothing Remains of Baghjan’, for instance, there is a shocking dearth of verbs in the cinematic unfolding of a series of images. A literal translation would have rendered an unacceptable brokenness to it. So I chose to judiciously plant verbs. A trace of the original can still be felt in the lines ‘In a charcoal forest/the cries of charcoal animals’. Despite taking liberties where it was necessary, I chose to keep the poems’ emotional vocabulary intact. In preserving their metaphorical ingenuity and beautiful imagery, I have chosen to use language in a way that the poems do not appear too cerebral.

Translation requires as much empathy and intuition as skill. More so in my case because Assamese is not the language of my ancestors, but is the language of the land where I was born and that breathes life into me.

*Stitching the River, Acrylic on canvas by Kishor Kumar Das