awe of his mastery of the poetic craft and
immediately felt the need to recreate this
poem in a different language, as a challenge.
Educated at an English-medium school, I
had grown up expressing myself creatively
only in English, and this was my first attempt
at writing (I was not aware of the term
'transcreating' at the time) poetry in Hindi. It
came more naturally to me than I had
anticipated. In fact, I enjoyed the process of
recreating rhyme and metre in Hindi so much
that I decided to translate the entire poetry
collection, and continue translating children's
poems and illustrated books into Hindi.
Beastly Tales contains ten animal fables in
verse, collected from different parts of the
world (such as China, India and Greece). This
poem was Seth's own invention (from the
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Is translation approach affected by the linguistic direction and
cultural background of the writer/translator? Mohini Gupta
considers her translation of Vikram Seth's poems into Hindi
T
ranslation was thriving as an
unselfconscious 'lived activity' for
hundreds of years in South Asia, given
the area's linguistic diversity, before it was
ever theorised as an academic discipline.
Due to the strong oral culture of storytelling
and myths in the subcontinent, accuracy was
never a crucial factor in assessing translations:
the more dynamic the retellings – the more
'spice' added to the story – the better the
'interpretation'.
1
Contrast this with renowned
translation studies scholar Lawrence Venuti's
view: "The more fluent the translation, the
more invisible the translator, and, presumably,
the more visible the writer or meaning of the
foreign text."
2
So how do I, a translator from India
translating between English, Hindi, Urdu and
Welsh, approach ideas of accuracy in my
work? Does my own cultural identity feature
in my translation process at all? Does the
cultural identity of the author matter? What
about the linguistic direction of my translation
work – does this determine the decisions I
make as a translator?
Into Hindi: a new direction
At the age of 15, I read a poem by Vikram
Seth titled 'The Frog and the Nightingale'
3
as
a part of the English curriculum at my private
school in New Delhi, and was drawn to the
metre, musicality and humour of the verse.
Seth is arguably one of the most well-known
Indian English writers, credited with iconic
books such as The Suitable Boy (1993), and a
recipient of some of the highest civilian and
literary awards in India, including the Padma
Shri and Sahitya Akademi Award. I was in
Rewriting the rules
TALES RETOLD
Arthur Rackham's illustration, 'The Hare and the
Tortoise', for Aesop's Fables, published in 1912
