Dwelling on silenceRAJI NARASIMHAN
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The Taming of Women by P. Sivakami, Translated from Tamil by Pritham K. Chakravarthy.
Despite shortfalls, the translator’s empathy with the original shines through.Raji Narasimhan
The strength of this translation is its translator’s total empathy and rapport with the original, with its theme. This gives him the immense advantage of winning reprieve for the many awkwardness-es of language that strew the translation. The word “crone”, for instance, that he has used for the physically disabled, ruthlessly side-lined yet alert and censorious mother-in-law of Anandhayi, the main character. I have not read the Tamil original: I don’t, thus, have the word used by the author. The word “kizham”, meaning old hag, occurs to me. But whatever the word, it would, very likely, be one that in context, invokes and absorbs into itself the basically insider status of the mother-in-law. “Crone” never attains this absorbent and illuminative quality. Even when the translation gains a momentum of its own, and the context becomes vivid and alive, its prose suffers a dent with the incursion of this word. Its tonal harmony gets ruptured: the imagery goes shaky, and all the craft — conscious or unconscious — that has gone into the fusion of language and narrative material, gets blemished.
Then, there is the plentiful use of literalisms. Tamil speech usages and conventions have been English-ed word for word. “O shut up. Stop your singing…”, for instance (page 34). The Tamil text, quite likely, does use the Tamil equivalent of “singing”. But the context gives an aggressive/sarcastic twist to the word, making it stand for “litany” — a boring intonation. The English hardly does this. “O shut up. Stop your singing…” is the rendering. “Singing” sounds just that, singing. Not the “yapping” as the context suggests, and would most certainly echo in the Tamil. “Swaying her waist like a sliced cucumber,” “twisting yourself into sixteen folds,” are some of the other literalisms that cut into the reader’s enjoyment of the story situations.