Flight of the bumblebee: how translators make the impossible journey between languages

Are translators like bumblebees, not meant to fly but flying anyway? “Say what we may of the inadequacy of translation, yet it is, and will always be, one of the weightiest and worthiest undertakings in the general concerns of the world.” — GoetheLanguage is our greatest intangible artefact. People feel, talk, dream and communicate in thousands of language systems which evolved with its users. They are for the most part unintelligible to one another and have distinctly different features. Some languages — notably Indian — don’t have words for certain colours: consider mauve, cyan, teal, sienna. What about burnt sienna? Any equivalences on the subcontinent? Our angry “Eeaayh…?” could translate as “Whattt?” but loses the snarl of authority behind the Indian huff.What can we do?We try to translate.I was moved to write this article because I found a 1998 letter from a student at the University of Leeds, and sighed with relief at the progress translations have made since those difficult days. “…Your talk got me thinking about aspects of writing I would never have considered. I have just read the novel Outcaste by Matampu Kunjukuttan. It is absolutely gripping, and the translation a great feat, the use of language striking and powerful from the first page. The footnotes were very useful to someone like me who has no knowledge of the novel’s cultural context.” At a time when publishers of translations were repeatedly scoffed at and told that we were wasting time and resources, that letter was oxygen. A script which had taken four years to shape had actually crossed an ocean and found at least one reader.Are translators like bumblebees, not meant to fly but flying anyway? They are enjoying a brilliant spell all over the world as armchair readers break out of their comfort zones, as airport bookstalls display translated books, as awards finally recognise the pivotal importance of the art, and academics from Pudukottai to Patiala introduce translations into English Literature classrooms.From the archives to InstagramWhile working on a series of early stories translated into English from Indian languages, Keerti Ramachandra emailed: “When I was going through lists of writers, I came across Raja Kembhavi and spoke to his son; he said they didn’t have a single story. All of it was destroyed by termites and damp!” Two other instances were how K. Lalitha (co-editor of Women Writing in India; 1990) located handwritten copies of Tarigonda Vengamamba’s poem in her aunt’s puja room nearly 40 years ago. Another rescue operation of writings already halfway down the abyss included Tutun Mukherjee’s descriptions of how she found rare pieces in Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati and Urdu in very small libraries while collecting one-act plays for her book Staging Resistance (2005). “No one even knew whom to approach for permissions.”Crossing the moatPublishers rely more than they’d like to admit on translators who never give up searching for writers old and new. For languages such as Tulu or Angika, it is that much more difficult to get past the watchtower. Editors might know or be persuaded to understand the value of a particular text in a particular language, but sales teams are usually reluctant to experiment with anything that doesn’t look like what brought a good inflow the previous year. This is the perennial difficulty. Uncovering the new is the stated goal. But most often, the third book of an already successful writer is what wins a contract. ‘Gulabiya’, a recent translation from Angika; and (right) the upcoming anthology, ‘5 Stories: Sinhala’. Though it frequently fails to excite those who can read the original works, translation is a fragile miracle of understanding. Even today, to me, every translated piece is like a cache of jewels. The opening paragraph of a Sinhala story in the upcoming collection, 5 Stories: Sinhala, propelled me into something like a puranic forest. “Sirinal kattadiya the exorcist tightened the last knot. The Yaka groaned softly, and his head drooped over his neck as he was choked. What he felt at this moment, above all, was an overwhelming sense of sadness and — shame. Then Sirinal kattadiya lifted the Yaka with two fingers and put him into a small bottle.” (‘After Taming the Yaka’ by Prabhat Jayasinghe; translated by Madhubhashini Disanayaka Ratnayake)Overcoming technical difficulties with what Hugh Kenner calls emotional discipline, translators make the invisible visible. It is a clairvoyant absorption of another world into the familiar. Often, the words blur, they slide, they sit around like granite. Choosing between ‘kingdom’ or ‘realm’, a translator sweats blood. And when a translator has done that, what she writes becomes a work of her own: distinct from the original and yet the same.To inject a slight warmth of irony, let’s recall Ezra Pound who wrote, “Some translators think of everything, positively of everything save what the original author was driving at.” This trend continues in carelessly edited translations. What are we to make of “electricity technician” and “he was overstepping himself”? Isn’t it time editors realised that arms are not hands? Clearly, the translator saw no difference at all.Which brings me to my tribe but more of that in another article.The writer coordinates a translation project for the Tamil Nadu Textbook and Educational Services Corporation. Published - September 25, 2026 05:50 pm IST