 Hi, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are joining us from, today I want to ask you a question that, you know, when you look at the vast amount of books that we have in this world, and the number of languages in which they are written, it's absolutely impossible to read all of them, and especially because sometimes there are wonderful books written in other languages. And they say that some things cannot be translated and some things should not be translated, but today, to answer that question, we have somebody who is going to solve exactly this kind of a problem for us. So, without any further ado, I want to bring in my guest, but before that, let's give my guest a little time to do his makeup. So, Arunabh Sinha has done his makeup and he's all set to join us. Thank you Arunabh, I just want to say thanks for joining us today and we are going to decode the whole mysterious world of books, translations, languages and all the nuances. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me on your fantastic show, Vijay. So, Arunabh, I want to ask you this question about, let's get a couple of things right about numbers. You know, I'm told that you've translated about, how many should I say, 50 books, 60 books, what exactly is the number, there's a lot of controversy about that. So what is that number, how many books have you translated? Well, just over 60 translated books have been published so far and there are about another eight or nine lying with publishers. They'll come out in the course of the next, you know, five to six months, maybe 10. So it'll go up to about 70 by the end of the year or early next year. My gosh, 70 books you've translated. Well, some are quite slim to be honest. Then you're sort of taking away from this that that's absolutely phenomenal output and you've done over how many years would you say? About 15 years. So that's roughly five books a year. A little under, yeah, but I average about that much in terms of publishing, yes. So how do you sort of do it, like, you know, churn it out like that? So that's the mystery I have to figure out today because how do you manage to write because it takes me three to four years to write one. And you kind of do four in a year. That's embarrassingly prolific. Well, you know, for a moment, Obijit, you're a musician, right? You sing, do you think you'd have a problem singing 100 or 200 songs a year, even if you had trouble writing one? You wouldn't write the material is right there. All you need to do is render it in the manner that you'd know best. So translation is a little bit like that the material that you're going to put in another language is already right there. Someone has gone to the trouble, spent all those four or five or 10 or 20 years that you mentioned writing the first version of that book in the language in which it first came out. So for the translator, it is more a matter of taking that material and suiting it to the form and the demands of a new language. So it's not something that you can actually do slowly. Translators love metaphors for what they do. The one I like the most is walking a tightrope and it's hard to walk a tightrope very slowly because then you're definitely going to fall off. You acquire a certain momentum and you need to keep that momentum and go to the end of the line. So it's very similar with translation because you're not writing for yourself. You're not writing as you would. You're writing the way somebody else would in this other language. So you're putting on a new writer or a different writer's clothes as it were and also trying to write with their form of creativity and syntax and imagination and so on. So it is not something that you can hold on to for very long. So once you think you've got it, you just need to bash on very quickly and get to the end of the book before suddenly the spirit that has settled on your shoulders suddenly decides that, okay, I'm done with you. I'm out of here. So before the spirit can leave you have to finish it. So I have extended notes with translators around the world and everybody says the same thing. They all work quickly. Wow, that's truly amazing. So Arunava, you know, and I have great difficulty calling you Arunava because I have always called you Bultu. So, you know, if I switch back and forth for all the listeners, I've always known him as Bultu and so this is very awkward for me to say Arunava. It almost seems I'm talking to a stranger. So, but I want to get to this whole thing. You talked about, you know, getting to understand the syntax and the flavor and the language of the original writer. Is it a bit like, you know, when actors become characters, you know, so he's not a doctor, but he is pretending to be a doctor and he sort of must understand. This is how a doctor would respond when he's giving good news or bad news. And is that how it is with translation? Is that how you would describe it? Yes, that's an excellent example, an excellent metaphor really. It is very much like acting because you put on, you get into somebody else's skin and then you have to be true to that person the way you perceive them. Whether it is a generic description of the person such as an actor or a lawyer or a CEO or an entrepreneur like yourself or a trainer, you have to think, you have to try to figure out what how they would write. In this case, it's a narrower activity. You don't have to enact their entire lives. You only have to work out how they're writing. Fortunately, their text is already there to guide you. So you don't have to guess, you don't have to do any method learning or anything. The text is right there in front of you on the left hand side of your screen usually. And you read and as you read, you know, after you read a few pages, you sort of assimilate and you internalize. And to that extent, it's very much like acting. Suddenly you become that character. And in the same way when you're translating, suddenly you become that writer in a different language. Now, whether you're doing a good job or a bad job of it, of course, depends on how good you are one at acting and how good you are the judging an actor. Both are important, right? When you decide when you when you're trying to act. So the same way for a translator, it's a function of how good are you as a translator and how good are you at knowing whether you're any good or not or whether the work that you're producing is any good or not. So like everything else, all of this also comes with experience and you know, you have translating muscles like you have any other muscles and the more you use them, the better the function. So that's another reason that translators are prolific because they really need to keep those muscles going. Well, I suppose that should apply to any craft that you know, the more you do, you know, every time each of those 10,000 hours of deliberate practice actually makes you better. That's right. Yeah, not all of it needs to go out to the world. Mind you, that's important, right? But keeping up with the activity is very important. Tell me more about that. In the sense that, you know, when I started out, I knew that I would have to and I started out quite late by standards of most translators. I mean, I was in my 40s when I actually started translating and it was a roundabout route because I used to do other things professionally. And I still wouldn't say I'm a professional translator in the sense that it doesn't add up to all the things that a profession provides. But because of other things that I used to do, I didn't get to translating till much later. As I said, it was, as I keep joking, it was the time for a midlife crisis and it was a toss up between a red Ferrari or something equally reckless and something interesting like translation. So that's how it happened. But before, because I started late, I knew that I had a lot of catching up to do in terms of building my translation skills. So one of the things I would do is what I call Riaz, which is that I had pick up over besides what I was working on for publishers, I would just pick up texts of various kind on my own and work on them, work on translating them. This was not meant for publishing. This was not even meant to be shared with anyone. But it is what got the grease flowing, you know, and it also the other thing about translation is that like acting, you have to be able to write in a hundred different voices. You can't just have your own. So you need to practice in order to be able to slip into all these different voices. So that Riaz stood me in very good stead. I think for the first five or six years, I did so much Riaz that I was working enough on translations to produce the same number of books that I do now. So, you know, those muscles really got lubricated. So that means you sort of would take a book, try translating it and, you know, sort of go through that whole process. Yes. And you mentioned something interesting about speaking in a hundred different voices. Now, give me an example of, you know, how that happens. Talk to me about that. Well, every book to begin with, every book has its own unique voice, which is a function of a certain constant element, which is the author's voice, which which you see some elements repeating themselves from one book to another by same author. And then each book has its own voice because the author is adopting a different perspective. One might be written in the third person by a ubiquitous narrator. One might be written in the first person by one of the characters in the book. Something might be written very adventurously in the second person as well. So then one person will use a very classical vocabulary, old fashioned words, long sentences. Another will be very modern. And this is also a function of when they lived and wrote. So, you know, I've translated Bunkim Chandra Chhatapad that who was, whose first book came out in 1865, four years after Tagore was born. And I'm translating authors whose books have come out six months ago. So a gap of about 150 years. Naturally, their writing styles are very different. Their relationship with the language or stensibly the same language, Bangla. But it's very different in terms of the way words are used, constructed, configured. So each book brings its own voice and it's a voice that you hear in your head as you're reading it very closely, which we all do as readers. I mean, when we read, when we're reading, we're actually hearing a silent voice reading that book out to us. Which is a sort of combination of our own voice and the writer's voice. And the better the writer is, the more the writer's voice becomes prominent and our own voice recedes, right? So when you're reading a book closely for translation, exactly the same thing happens. You're hearing a voice which speaks in certain cadences, in certain forms of music. There are silences, there are pauses, it speeds up, it slows down. You know, it's someone telling a story for effect in a drawing room. Even if it looks the same because it's all printed words on a white page, the fact is that each story is being told differently and you're hearing it differently. And as a translator, it is that voice that you have to echo as much as possible within the confines of the new language. Now, in my case, because I translate from two culturally very distant languages, Bangla and English, this involves a lot more of jugglery because if you're translating from, let's say, Bangla to Hindi or from French to English, there's already a lot in common between the cultures that are produced, works in those two languages. So they're contiguous, that journey is not as long. But from Bangla to English is a huge journey. There are many things that are said and expressed in Bangla that you cannot say and express in English. It's either not possible or it'll sound ludicrous. In fact, I'll give you one example. One of the things, as you know, which is being a fellow Bengali, is that an act of tenderness that we sometimes perform, especially let's say grandparents perform with their grandchildren, is what we call in Bangla Gai Hadbuleya, right? You know what that is, which is very tenderly. Now, it's going to sound ridiculous the moment I put it in English. It's very tenderly running your fingers over the other person's arm or brow, somewhere on their skin, right? Now, imagine how creepy that sounds in English. The moment you put that, it becomes a terrible thing to do, right? It doesn't sound remotely loving or affectionate at all. So, you know, the language into which you're translating has its own cultural framework of what is tender and what is not. How would that translate into English? What would you say? So, you know, you have to probably say something like tenderly stroke them or stroke their arm. Although it is not actually stroking, but you are trying to achieve the same impact. You are trying to convey to the leader that a tender act is being performed. So, that is the quality of the original text that you're protecting when you take it over to the new language, right? You're trying to say that the grandmother is being very loving and affectionate with her grandchild. Now, if instead you go literal and you say the grandmother ran her fingertips tenderly over a grandchild's arm, it's not going to sound very inviting. Yeah. So, this is the kind of thing that you have to work on while maintaining the voice. I mean, you know, if it is described very brusquely in the Bangla text, it has to sound equally brusquely in English. If it is described lovingly, then it has to sound loving and so on and so forth. So, you are also looking at not just the words, but also the emotion, the context, maybe imagining the scene, which kind of a place it is and all that. Is that how it is in your head? Absolutely. In fact, what the academics call effect, which is the way the emotional response that a text evokes in you, that is perhaps the most important thing that you try to produce. Because meaning of the words is actually the easiest task. Anybody can do it. You can take any set of words and put down their equivalence or near equivalence in another language. So, is it possible to do that in Google Translate? It is actually if you go, it's not very good with sentences, but you can do it word by word if you like. And if you've noticed, looked at some of the machine translations that appear, let's say on Facebook, when you put in a post in another language and you... I mean, I'll just take different language into English as an example. Try putting in a post in Bangla or Hindi and you will see an English version which may be funny and laughable, but it is not widely inaccurate. And then you realize that it is weird not because it is inaccurate, but because it does not capture any of those other dimensions. It is going only for the meaning of the words. As a result, it can't catch metaphors. It can't catch idioms, for example. If you have an idiom, it'll mean something else altogether if you take it literally. So, this kind of thing is why machine translation, I hope at least in my lifetime, is not going to be able to catch up with literary translation. Although it can do a good job of interpretation and technical documents, that's fine. I think that works quite well. So, when you're translating, therefore, you are actually taking a whole bunch of things across. And that too, not as individually desegregated things, but actually as a combined package, right? Because when you're reading a text, you're not reading it as having 10 components. Like music. When you're listening to music or a song, you're not as an average listener. You're not thinking of it as a combination of notes, rhythm, percussion, guitar chords. You're not. You're just listening to the whole thing. And then you're either getting jumping up to dance or you're moved. You're thinking of your romances or your shedding tears. So, that's the effect. And imagine if you take a song, you know, take a Beatles song. I mean, I'm just going for Beatles because no matter what your age, you'll have heard it. So, if you take, I want to hold your hand, for example. And you rendered it in a different language in a way, not because of the words, but because of the pace and the musical backing and so on, that makes you want to weep. Then it will be a terrible translation, right? I mean, of course, you do these things because you deliberately want to create a different effect. That's fine. But as long as you're saying, I want to do create the same effect in a different language, you're going to have to pay attention to the pace, rhythm and all those things that you mentioned, right? The chords, the rumbets, the works. But you can't, again, unlike music, you can't lay on those tracks individually. What you do is one complete creation which has all these components which you've heard in your head. When you're reading that text, you've heard and seen, as you said, and imagined all these things. And then you're basically writing down a version in another language and you're checking it to see, am I still hearing, seeing, feeling, imagining all those things. And it's not a mechanical deconstructed process of translation. It's not like you list down the 10 things that you will, you know, this sentence, I identify these 10 things. So let's see how I can get these 10 things into the new sentence. No, you don't do that. You take the sentence and you write it in the new language. And then maybe you see, am I getting all those 10 things or not? And like everything else, you know, you get used to doing something. Then you know, automatically you, even the first time you tried, you're going to be fairly close to the end result. So when you read, you know, a book, let's say you're translating from Bangla to English. Do you sort of read it one time in Bangla and hear the English translation in your head? Increasingly you'll be, you might be interested to know this. Increasingly I'm trying not even to read the book beforehand, if it is at all possible. In the sense that I'll read a chapter or two just to make sure that I do want to translate this book and I enjoy it enough to do it. But I try not to, because you know why, then that freshness of the impact that reading a text for the first time, that freshness is lost if you've already read the text a couple of times before, you know. So then your version also becomes a little jaded. But the joy of hearing a new song and singing it immediately. So, you know, that brings something, a new quality to it, right? But the point is that music is meant, I keep coming back to music or the performing arts. See, we don't, when we go to listen to a concert, for example, or watch a dance performance or even a play, we're not expecting the performer to have to be doing it for the first time. We know that they've done it many times, so there's a certain practice tease. But when you're reading a book, you don't imagine that the writer has actually written that book ten times and finally arrived here. You think that there's a certain freshness to it, right? So just as the writer wrote it in a burst of spontaneity and edited it afterwards, the translator needs to try and work in the same way. But as you mentioned, sometimes when you're reading a book in Bangla, you're not with the intention of translating. But because in Bangla, there's a lot of confusion. So that's another untranslatable thing. But basically, you know, no matter where... Tell me this. No matter where Obhijit Bhaduri goes, he will always hold training sessions. Oh, gosh. Even if he's given a tour of heaven, he's going to be training the angels there in better radar. No. How terrible then. I know, but you get the idea, right? So even when I'm reading somewhere, yeah, I'm at least checking it for translatability. And sometimes I'm playing with some of the words and phrases in my head. So it's annoying. It's very annoying. You can't be a pure reader. And even when I'm reading an English book that has been translated, I'm also thinking, wow, this is really good translation. And that takes some of the joy out of it in a way, but it also adds joy in different dimensions because then you catch certain things that you see the translators doing because you're a fellow practitioner. And you feel why it's like a footballer watching a football game. They'll watch it very differently from the way you and I will watch it. So it's got its upsides and its downsides. But it is a tremendously involving activity. I mean, you're never not a translator. Whether you're actually at any given point of time translating a book or not, you're a translator 24-7. So it's a little bit like saying that when you get trained and understanding human emotions, you can sort of read the subtext and say, okay, the person is now saying it for effect and the person is being manipulated about. So you can be constructed in some sense. It also takes away the joy of spontaneity of hearing it. And you kind of say, okay, this person is doing this. And I remember one time I was talking to a friend of mine who was a filmmaker and he was saying that when I watch the film, I have to sort of sometimes tell myself, okay, I'll watch the film for the first time, like somebody in the audience. Then I'll go back and watch it many times later if I like it, that, oh, okay, I get it. He took the shot from this angle, cut it, moved the camera, put it back, then he cut it again. It gives the impression that this guy is talking to the other one from a distance. Oh, I like the fact that he's used the light to move and not the camera because that gives the impression the camera has moved. Actually, it hasn't. And I'm saying, oh my God, and so many things happening in your head. He says that's why I have to switch it off and watch it for the first time. When did you first start hearing this voice in your head? 15 years back or was it earlier? No, it was earlier. I've been hearing the voice ever since I've been in college, really. And I used to do a little bit of amateur translating then. And as a matter of fact, the first novel that came out, that I translated and that was published, I actually worked on it many moons ago, soon after college. That was Chaurangi by Shankar, which he had commissioned. And I translated it and I gave it to him. And I actually left Calcutta immediately after that and I moved to Delhi. Because you didn't want him to, you know, if he was upset, you didn't want to be reached. Yeah, that's right. I mean, here it is. And I'm going straight to Hora Station and getting on the train. And no mobile phone told me so you don't know where I am. Exactly. Yeah. So 14 years later, an editor at Penguin Books called me and said, look, we want to publish Chaurangi in translation. And we got in touch with the author who said there is already a translation and he doesn't remember the name of the translator, but he sent us the print out, which was an old dot matrix print out on those accordion sheets in those days. And fortunately, the smartest thing I had done was put my name on it. Wow. So the editor in question knew me because she's also from Calcutta and Calcutta is really a small village. So she said, are you the one? I said, wow, this is a real blast from the past. So it came out 14 years later exactly. But in these 14, meaning 14 years, I did no work on translation. I was a journalist. First I worked in the print media. I actually worked with the business magazine, unbelievable as it may seem, because I had zero formal knowledge in anything to do with business. I worked with business today for eight years. But business today at that point, soon after I joined, pivoted from being an old fashioned business magazine to being a management magazine. So that was convenient because it meant that we were all learning. Management was a big thing suddenly in the 90s after liberalization and there was not enough B schools in India. So a lot of people, especially those who were already employed, were very interested in learning things about management. I remember, I think it was in 1995 or 6, I went to the editor and said, look, there's this article somebody sent and I'm editing it and I'm going to send it to you. It looks very exciting. It's a six page story. It's on something called email. And the editor read it and he came running out and he said this is the cover story for the next magazine. So in 95, I think we business today ran a cover story on something called email. So that's the kind of thing that we used to do. So which was really more about research and writing. The subject was not, I mean, you know, you were not bound to a particular subject. So I did that for eight years, but it was very intensive and there was no time for anything else. And then the internet came along and we started writing about the internet and I used to actually do that myself. I used to write quite a good deal. There was such a lack of expertise at that point that on the strength of three articles I wrote in business today on the internet, the management school in Goa asked me to come and teach. Teach a course on the internet. I was like, are you serious? I'm a complete fraud. And they say, well, even these three articles, you know 300% more than any of us does. So anyway, those, I mean, it's exciting because, you know, those were days when new frontiers were being discovered. So from writing about the internet, I soon actually moved into the internet to work on first on internet media. And then soon when I got in there as a journalist, but within a year or so I realized that the real game on the internet was less about being a journalist and more about managing the product. So much of it had to do with the user experience. So pretty soon I segred into becoming a product manager on the internet. And because, you know, it was opened, it was like the wild west. Anybody who went in first and set up a homestead could claim that the land was theirs. So it was something like that. You got in first and you did three things and you said, hey, I'm the boss here. No, I know you don't know this. I know how to do this. So I've always sort of worked in that way in the sense always moved into areas which did not need so much of embedded expertise because not enough people had it. And I could do, you know, bluff my way through it and also do the homework to learn as much as I could. So it was very interesting because, you know, I never thought that being a business journalist for eight years in and writing about managing and editing and rewriting pieces on management and marketing and technology. That is to say personal technology. I didn't realize at that point that it was actually priming me to be able to for the rest of my working life do new things at the drop of a hat. Because, you know, back then you used to think of careers as being one long trajectory from start to finish. And, you know, you didn't move left or right. You didn't go sideways in any direction. So it's amazing really, you know, when I look back how things you do at one point, only because it seems exciting then eventually prepares you for something else altogether. But the base set of skills for the lack of a better word. I mean, I'm a little hesitant to use the word skills because it is somewhat overused and misused nowadays, especially in the context of education. But, you know, what I mean, I mean, more than the ability to do something which I think anyone can learn, it's the willingness to do it when you haven't done it in the past. I think that is what in many ways this odd, my odd journey through journalism and internet product management eventually brought me to a point where I translate books. I work as a books editor on scroll.in and I teach at a university. I teach creative writing which includes translation courses. So it's very strange how all the streams have converged almost without my having been aware that it was possible or even expecting it to happen. And now, sorry, oddly enough, we're now setting up a translation center at Ashoka University which requires a lot of work on the internet because it involves setting up databases of translated works and websites. So now I'm back to working on those things. So I'm also the sort of amateur internet expert on some of these things. So, you know, it's amazing how everything you work on at some point comes back to you and asks you to do more with it. I kind of think that that also happens with pretty much any profession if you sort of look at it because when you start your career and I remember writing about this in one of the articles that everything that I did when I finished from B school, you know, the name of the school has changed at diploma or degree that was given. That's now called something different. So the profession used to be, you know, you were sort of entering something called personal management, you know, and people were still using the word like labor relations because that's what the diploma said, that labor relations. And the institute, that's what it was called. And the institute, yeah, and labor relations institute and then it became human resources and people said, no, it's basically the same stuff explained differently and then it became talent management and in each one of them, different elements have become more prominent, but the mix that you worked with that remains the same. So for example, now if you see there's a lot of work which is happening in employee relations and I believe is that it's going to become far more prominent going forward. As compared to let's say when I started, everyone said that you need to start your career in a factory because that's where you learn what really matters. But now when you sort of look at that, the factory has moved into a different setup altogether. Office and home have got merged. So in this hybrid reality, you're going to sort of look at that differently. For you, would the, you know, did the pandemic mean a very radically different shift or you kind of sat at the same desk and translated which you did anyway? How was it? To be honest, I count myself as really lucky in that the pandemic didn't come in the way of any of the work that I did, which was incredibly fortunate. So, you know, the translation, yes, as you said, I translate. Frankly, I translate wherever I can hold a laptop or an iPad and occasionally even on my phone. So I can translate anyway. So and in any case, I was mostly homebound. So it was not a problem for me. I think one minor problem was having people around at home. I was not used to that. But it was a bad thing to be honest. So that was that was simple. My editing work for scroll in any case was work from home. I mean, I used to go into the office now and then, but it was not necessary. I worked from home. I went into the office just to have coffee and meet people and teaching at Ashoka University. We were among the first to pivot to online classes fairly smoothly. I think frankly, it was the benefit of having some privileges in terms of having good infrastructure and teachers and students who have access to computers and the internet and so on. So all this allowed us to pivot very quickly. I mean, we broke for the midterm break in the middle of March 2020 and we never went back. So within a week, we had moved to online classes. Just within a week. I mean, we left the campus thinking, okay, see you in a week. And in that one week, everything changed. And by the following Monday, we were holding classes on Zoom. So that is actually in some ways given back given me a few hours of my life back because it's a long commute from home to the campus. So to that extent, I've actually got a little bit of more time to translate or read or sleep. So no, it doesn't change all that much for me other than the fact that teaching online is not really as satisfying or learning online for that matter. It's not really as satisfying. And of course, it is not inclusive either because even at a private university, you still end up with the students who not all of whom have the same quality of access. So at Ashoka, for example, those who have not had computers or access to the internet were actually brought back on campus so that they could use the campus infrastructure. So I don't know how it is. Meeting your students in little rectangular boxes where they seem trapped is not the same thing as meeting them in a common space. Oh, I totally agree with that. I mean, I just think that for me, the greatest thrill lies in being able to interact with people and responding to them. Otherwise, everything is extremely flat two dimensional and sort of surreal. It is efficient, but I just think that we make too much of a deal about efficiency and not enough about the experience of teaching is so dissatisfying. Personally, I always think that the workplaces, you know, and you sort of in some sense use exactly that phrase, which is quite interesting that you should do your work at home perhaps and then go to office to socialize. You know, have a cup of coffee, ideate with your friends and maybe brainstorm about something different that you want to do, all of that. Because otherwise, you kind of really, you know, today, when you read about what so many psychologists are talking about that the mental health challenges are actually ironically for all the introverts, because, you know, when the lockdown happened, people said that it's good for the introverts because, you know, they don't now need to meet people. Actually, the introverts, you know, are experiencing a lot more burnout, so a lot more of this. The extroverts are unhappy for a different reason that they want to go out and they want to meet people and they want to do that. But even the ones who want to stay at home are experiencing the byproduct of this. You know, when I look at translation, one of the questions I always wondered when I look at your work, you've done a lot of fiction, you know, you've obviously done poetry. I have got some of the books that you've done on Sunil Gangapada. Of course, my soul regret in life is that I never got to meet him. He was my absolute hero, you know, when I came to writing. What was he like to work with? No, I didn't really work with him. You know, he was like many others who write in Bangla, they were not particularly interested in English translation. So it didn't matter too much to them. When you look at, you know, many of the films, when you see a book which gets made into a film, you know, it's Harry Potter, I remember. So seeing that, in most instances, people say that it was disappointing because, again, the voice in your head and the pictures in your head, you know, especially if it's really well written, you can almost sort of say that this is what the person looks like. This is the kind of clothes the person wears. So you actually construct the film in your head. And when you construct it in your head, no matter how good the director is, in most cases, you do land up feeling very disappointed. You know, the film Ray which has come on Netflix now has been sort of clobbered for exactly the same reason. But I think it's an unfair kind of thing. What do you feel about it? Yeah, for example, to begin with, these are two different media. So it's unfair really to judge the quality of a film on the basis of its relationship with the text on which it is made. I don't think that that's a fair way of looking at it. It is using the text as a starting point, but each medium demands its own way of storytelling. So for example, in film, you're not going to be able to present internal thoughts. You can't present anything that's going on inside a person's head, right? So automatically what are you going to do? You're going to actually cut down on those elements and you're going to put in more of conversations and actions. You don't have a choice there. That automatically people who relate very closely to meditative passages in texts are going to be very upset about that. I don't take that very seriously. In fact, there are two responses I'll give you. When Jhupal I.D. was asked about the film version of the namesake, she said it's Meera Nair's namesake. Which is I think right. I mean, the film is Meera Nair's and the novel is Jhupal I.D. Was that statement expressing disappointment that I don't relate to it at all? No, she was saying that the moment I said, yes, make a film out of my book, I knew that it was going to be somebody else's film. I mean, an intelligent writer would be stupid if they thought that a book written in words can be reproduced in the same way in a completely different medium. In fact, if anything, only bad books can happen to only bad books. Because only bad books have those elements which don't need any change. Sorry also. You know, a lot of times popular fiction spells out everything. He felt bad. Exactly. When the characters have no internal life or when there is nothing happening outside of the action, then it's easy to take a book and reproduce it as a film. It's practically a screenplay already. But that's a very ordinary book. The qualities of a book that you really remember, great literature, are not those, not the action. It's actually everything else, the subtext. And of course, the text, the music of the text itself. How are you going to put that in film? You have to create a different kind of music in film. And then the writer Shankar, who, two of whose novels were made into film by Shraddha Jitra. So, you know, it's interesting that Ray's texts are being shown up as examples of stories that have not been done justice to by filmmakers. And yet Ray himself, barring two or three, all his films were based on literature, based on text. And he faced resounding criticism in many cases for so-called deviations from the text. So, you know, it's something unique to the way of working. It's not specific to one film model for the other. So when Shankar was asked about Ray's, about Ray adapting his work, he said, of course, Shankar being Shankar always spoke tongue-in-cheek. He said, look, you know, if you have a daughter and your daughter gets married, are you going to criticize your son-in-law? Gosh, that's brilliant, brilliant sort of way of putting it, you know, without putting it. Yeah. So I guess, I mean, you own your baby and you think that nobody else can make your baby again. And that is correct. And they shouldn't either, right? If your baby is so unique, then how can that baby be cloned? Shouldn't be cloned, if anything. So that difference is actually a sign of good filmmaking or is it a sign of good writing? Which one is it? I think it's a sign of good writing to begin with. Because, you know, there is clearly material in the written form that cannot be put into the film. So the filmmaker then has to improvise and do other things. And that, I think, means that the text has qualities of literature, the written word, that are unique to that medium. Which cannot be used in other mediums. Do you watch a film and then write a story which is exactly that? I mean, have you ever tried doing that? People have done it, you know, they call it the novelization of the film. My question is, what's the point? If the work works well as a film, why not watch the film? What is the point of artificially, you know, pulling it out and putting it in? You never thought of writing this book. You're only writing this book because the film is popular and you think that you can cash in on that franchise. I don't think that makes sense. I don't think these books have worked particularly either. They may have made a temporary splash, but largely no. So I'm not hung up on the congruence between the story of the film or the treatment on the film and the text on which it is based. But I would, as in the case of translation, like to see the values of the text reproduced in the film. So, you know, if the text is a highly effective text that makes me pause and think and wonder, it would be lovely to have something like that from the film as well. And yet at the same time, if the film can take the same story and make me laugh and giggle and feel joyous, then maybe, hey, what's wrong with that either? If you take, like if you've heard Deep Purple's version of Help, they turn it into this plaintiff plea. But the Beatles' Help is not plaintive at all. It is very energetic. So I think it's all right. Ultimately, you judge the work on its own strength. Right? When you see the same book done once in, say, English and then once as a Bengali film, let's imagine you translate the book from, you know, Bangla to English. And then, you know, then there is a movie made in Bangla and English. So these are then four different pieces of work. They're four different pieces of work with varying degrees of closeness to the original. But certainly, each one is a unique piece of work. And it has to be. It has to be faithful to the medium in which it is being made. It has to be faithful to the time in which it is being made. Even if you make a period film in 2021, you're not going to make it the same way that it would have. Let's say you're making a film today that's based, that's set 100 years ago in 1921. If the same film were made in 1921, it would look very different from the way you're going to make it now. And I don't mean just in technical terms. I don't mean just in technical terms. Your worldview is different. Your sensibility is different. You know much more of what has happened in the intervening 100 years. And like it or not, that is going to impact your view. And as a viewer, I would want that to happen. I want to be able to understand what you make of the world. And therefore, with your understanding of the world, how do you look at something that happened 100 years ago? That is what I would like to see and absorb and reflect on. So each time you make it, it's a different work. Some books are translated over and over again at intervals of 20, 30 years. New translations are made of old texts. Oh, there's no end of it. I mean, the one great example, for instance, is Albert Camus, the outsider, which has been translated, which has at least four different English translations made at different points of time. And you can actually put them next to each other and figure out roughly. You can get it down to the precise year, but you can certainly put them in chronological order as a reader and say, okay, this is the oldest and this is the newest. And these two came in between because you can see little changes that are taking place. So it's interesting. Any book is written for a contemporary readership. Whether it was written in 1956 or 2016, it doesn't matter, right? So like, for example, the first novel in the Bangla language and many say the first novel in India was written by Bongkim Chandra Chhattabhada. It was called Durgesh Nandini, the Castellan's daughter. It was a racy historical romance. You know, we think of Bongkim Chandra Chhattabhada as this August figure, one of the founding fathers of Indian literature. He was 26. Okay, he was 26 at the time. He had written an English novel which had bombed spectacularly. The freedom movement was on. He didn't know who he was at that point. He didn't have his thinking perfectly formed. Who does at 26? No one does, right? Unless you are one of those annoying startup founders. So he wrote this racy novel, okay, where there is inter-religious romances and there's swashbuckling battles. And if you read it today, you will say, wow, this is what you call a masala film, right? So he wrote it for a contemporary audience. Now the question is, I translated it in 2010, I think. In 2010, do I make it sound like a period piece which is so dull because it was written 150 years ago? Or do I say, no, what I will try to be true to is the contemporary intent of this book. And let's see if we can also make it racy for today's reader and not a relic, not a historical period piece. Of course, it's set in that period. Turns out that novel was also not set in 1861, it was set in the 15th century. So that was convenient. He was already writing a historical novel. So you start thinking of these characters as being racy by today's standards. If they were racy then, they will appear pretty dated now. So it's not that you make up anything, you add anything to the text, but in your head, you just imagine them as contemporary racy characters. And then you take that same text and you start writing and you suddenly find that, hey, you're writing it in this zip-zap-zoom kind of fashion, which is very far removed from what people associate Bunkim Chandra with because they are reading him 100 years later. But when they read him at that time, they were reading him like Chitin Bhagat. So their expectation was not anything else. When you translate so many different writers, you've done a range of people. How do you pick a writer or do you pick a book? Which of these? I pick a book, but very often what happens is that one book leads you to want to find out more of what that writer has written. So sometimes I have ended up translating three or four books by the same writer. Who is that? Well, most number of books by the same writer. That would probably be Buddhadev Gosho. I've done five of his books. Then Shongita Bondapada, I've done three of hers. Tagore, I've done about four or five. And there are several writers whose I've done two or even three in some cases. So that happens. You do and you develop, you know, every translator also develops an affinity with certain writers. Maybe there's something common in their worldview, something common in their artistic sensibilities. So sometimes I've read some very good books which I've not attempted to translate because I know that there's something, it's not for me. It will find another translator who will do a great job, but I will not be able to do a great job with this book because there's a barrier somewhere. I can't quite develop that relationship with it. Although I can see it's a wonderful book. So that happens as well. It's like music, right? You know that there's some great music, but you will not sing it. When you think about, you know, you're very, very prolific on all the social media platforms. You know, the fact that you've got Arunava as a, you know, handled on Twitter, that's a giveaway that, you know, you obviously have to have been one of the earliest adopters of the medium. You know, when you, do you kind of find that you want to ever start writing in Bangla in those mediums as well as a way of just sharpening the craft that you ever thought of doing that? Well, I'm already translating into Bangla. One books come out, two more are coming out this year. And I do post some translations in Bangla on social media. I see that on Facebook a lot. So the listeners who are, you know, just watching this, you know, I really recommend you follow Arunava on Facebook as well as Twitter. We put out some really incredibly powerful pieces of writing. They are great pieces of writing, regardless of whether you've read that piece or not. Thank you for that. I really enjoyed reading that. A question for you is that do you ever think that you want to do English to Bengali or Hindi? That's what I'm doing. No, no, no. I mean, and then would Hindi to Bengali, you know, do you want to do something like that? Yes, I'm in fact, and you're the first to know, I'm actually toying or trying to formulate the notion of taking a Hindi text and translating it both into English and Bangla. Simultaneously? Well, I mean, not literally simultaneously, but yeah. It's a little bit like the juggler when you practice, you know, they say, when you sort of move to three, you are really beginning to learn to juggle. And then when you can move to five, you are a professional. So it's a little bit of that. So we are going to see one day five languages. I don't know what five, but I think I can read Hindi well enough to be able to translate from it. Certain kinds of text, the modern text, I won't be able to do it with older texts. So would you do Premchand? I would not. I would not. I would not do Premchand because I don't have my reading in Hindi is not so deep as to be able to place Premchand in a certain context of the use of the language. But with modern writers, it's easier because their language is closer to the kind of language. I don't use Hindi in everyday life except transactionally. I don't use it for leisure or for professional purposes. But because I live in Delhi, a whole bunch of conversations take place in Hindi anyway. And there's a lot of writing now naturally that uses this kind of parlance. And I will need help. It's going to be slow and I'll need some validation. But I do want to do this because also another thing is that as you get older, you also want to try more difficult things. Whether you succeed or not is less important. But you want to try because otherwise your muscles are trophy. And sometimes when you're doing something over and over again, it becomes a little easy. And it's wonderful to be able to do it with ease. But it's also equally exciting to take on a truly challenging task, which you are not very, it takes you into uncomfortable, uncharted territory. I don't know, maybe that's something that I've always had, but I have not given up that idea. And what would be something which today seems unachievable, but you still want to give it a shot anyway as far as your work is concerned, what would that be? Well, I'd like to learn maybe one of the South Indian languages and translate from it into English and Bangla. I haven't even taken the shortest of steps towards it. And I don't know when I will or if I will, but it's still very much there as a dream hope, pipe dream, whatever you want to call it. You know, you've done a lot of translation of writers from Bangladesh. Yeah, so maybe I've read only a couple of them. So I have the impression that you've done quite a few. So do you Baila choose contemporary writers or are you done, you know, people who... You mean from Bangladesh? Well, Bangladesh is only a 50-year-old country. That's true. If it's Bangladesh, then it's not very old technically. But of course, they were older writers and they've been writing for a much longer time. Well, no, I've not specifically limited myself to certain time periods, but it so happens that the book, I mean, the greatest novel that I've translated so far out of this large number is actually this book, the new book that's just come out called Kwaab Nama. It's written by a writer from Bangladesh named Dr. Uzzaman Ilyas. And it is undoubtedly the greatest novel I've translated. And it is, honestly, I mean, you know, if publishers used to ask me when I pitched translations to them, but where is South Asia's 100 years of solitude? And this is actually South Asia's 100 years of solitude, not in terms of similarities, but in terms of excellence and fastness and magic. I don't mean magical reality, but just magic that texts can do. So he wrote it in the 90s. It was published, I think, in 97. He was actually fighting cancer as he was finishing it and he died soon after. So I don't know if you'd call that modern. You know, people of our age tend to think of the 1980s and 90s as modern till you realize that it's not anymore. Those are very far in the past and my students remind me all the time because every time I talk to them about, oh, you know, a recent novel published in 1997 and they're like, we weren't even born. Our parents weren't even married. Not even born is out of the question. They're all born in this century. But you know what I mean. So yeah, the whole definition of modern also changes as you go along or contemporary, let's say changes as you go along. 20 years into this century already. And so when you sort of started to translate, what was the trigger? The trigger was this reputation. And its reputation and hundreds of people telling me that it was untranslatable. So I started it as a challenge to myself. And then a little further down the line, I realized that I would be able to pull it off, though at one point I had serious doubts again. And I used to tell everyone that either this book will make it or I will make it. I don't think both of us will survive to see the world. But well, so about a third in, I realized that, okay, this can work as a book. I mean, but I'm still very, very nervous about it because it's got such an enormous reputation that I'm quite sure that some people will tear it to shreds. Having read the Bangla version, they will feel that the English translation is completely inadequate. I'm perfectly prepared for that. And my thinking also is that the first translation is very necessary for a great book. And you know, if this translation is inadequate, someone else will come along and do a better one. But they couldn't have done that better one without this one to begin with. So when there's a better translation, will you feel bad that it's better than what you've done? Yeah, I'll feel bad because I'll feel like, why could I not have done this? But I'll also feel good because if I recognize it as a better translation, I'll feel, yes, I'm very glad that it's come. You know, I always, when a book gets published, I'm always the most fond of my most recent kid. You know, in some sense. And then you kind of think of the older ones. Is that how it is for you? Or is the first book very special for you? Is the last book very special for you? So see, there is this peculiar thing with translators, which is that by the time, you know, you submit a translation and then by the time it comes out, you finish two or three others. So your relationship with that, with the latest book is actually kind of quite tenuous by then. Because you're already, you know, your closest relationship at any given point is with the book you're working on. And it's the same with authors, right? Mostly they will finish a book and they will not necessarily be working on the next one before the last one comes out. Absolutely. You get so drained. Every time I'm in the last stages of a book, I think this is the last one. I'll never write another one again. With me, it's like if I finish a translation at 7 o'clock, I'll start a new one at 7.15. My god. Really? Yeah, it's substance abuse. Basically, that's what it is. So, and also you read your own work and you hate it because you, you know, the flaws just jump out at you afterwards. Absolutely. As soon as it's printed, you immediately look at it and say, oh my god, I think I should run one more round. Yeah, exactly. I don't even read it because I know I'm going to be terribly unhappy. How many drafts do you do of a translation? I do one big original draft and then I edited fairly quickly. How many hours a day do you write? I try to write about six hours a day, five to six hours a day. So about four hours in the morning and two at night. And then the rest of the day is teaching and scroll. The rest of the work day that is, which is pretty much the entire day. I mean, I don't have a life. All I do is work. Arunama, this has been just one of the most fascinating conversations I've had there because there's so much that you've told me which is so amazingly unique, the world of translation. I've never really attempted to translate anything and I'm just completely in awe of the fact that you've translated 70 books, which is bizarrely prolific. And more power to you. I hope you translate many more, wish you much more success. And when you're going for that big prize, remember that this is the prediction that you are going to be winning that huge prize money and you've got to share it with me. Until then, thank you so very much. I just want to say thanks to everyone who's watching it, who's joined in and who's stayed with us all the questions. I got so carried away. I didn't really quite take a look at the questions that you have put, but thank you so very much. Once again, Arunama, all the best. Just here and I'll catch you as soon as the sense. Thank you very much. It was lovely talking to you.