— Boris Dralyuk, Editor-in-Chief
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Saturday, November 13, 2021
Spotlight on Translation: November Edition - lareviewofbooks - Translation
NAR relies on the dictionary in its latest volley against the DOJ - Inman - Dictionary
The National Association of Realtors‘ latest volley in its case against the U.S. Department of Justice includes images from Merriam-Webster’s dictionary that define the words “close” and “open” — a stark example of how far apart the two sides are as they battle over whether the DOJ can investigate two of NAR’s rules.
On Friday, the 1.5 million-member trade group filed a response to the DOJ’s opposition last month to a petition from NAR to quash or modify the federal agency’s civil investigative demand seeking new information on rules regarding buyer broker commissions and pocket listings.
The thrust of NAR’s argument is that the DOJ agreed — as part of a settlement agreement the agency abruptly withdrew from on July 1 — to close investigations into two rules: NAR’s Clear Cooperation Policy, which requires listing brokers to submit a listing to their MLS within one business day of marketing a property to the public, and NAR’s Participation Rule, which requires listing brokers to offer commissions to buyer brokers in order to participate in Realtor-affiliated multiple listing services.
NAR contends that the DOJ did not actually close the investigations and the civil investigative demand the agency sent the trade group on July 6 continued those probes, which makes that demand “invalid.”
“In October 2020, the Antitrust Division unconditionally accepted NAR’s settlement offer, which required a commitment from the Antitrust Division to ‘close’ its investigation of the Participation Rule and Clear Cooperation Policy,” NAR’s attorneys wrote in the filing.
“In this context, the word ‘close’ is a verb that means ‘to bring to an end.’ That term must be construed according to its ‘ordinary meaning,’ and the Antitrust Division’s position, that it was free to ‘open’ that same investigation at any time, contradicts the clear meaning of the parties’ agreement.
“By its plain meaning, the verb ‘open’ means ‘to move (as a door) from a closed position’ or ‘to begin a course or activity.’ Thus, what the Antitrust Division has done is the exact opposite of what the word ‘close’ contemplates in the parties’ agreement.”
NAR’s response is 18 pages long with 547 pages of exhibits, including photographs of the dictionary entries for “close” and “open” starting on page 510.
‘Close’ means ‘close’
The DOJ’s public statements when it withdrew from the proposed settlement saying the agency was concerned the agreement would prevent its ability to protect real estate brokerage competition and would prevent it from pursuing other antitrust claims relating to NAR’s rules “show that it had agreed to close its investigation of the Participation Rule and Clear Cooperation Policy, and that it could not have open investigations concerning either rule,” NAR asserts in its filing.
“The Antitrust Division’s actions also confirm that it understood ‘close’ means ‘close,'” NAR’s attorneys wrote.
“Before trying to withdraw from the settlement, the Antitrust Division asked NAR to modify the settlement agreement to allow it to investigate the Participation Rule and Clear Cooperation Policy.
“The fact that the Antitrust Division sought a modification of the settlement agreement is a concession that the settlement, unless modified, does in fact place limits on the Antitrust Division’s ability to investigate NAR’s Participation Rule and Clear Cooperation Policy.
“The words and actions of the Antitrust Division therefore refute its claim that the settlement agreement imposes no limitation on further investigation of the Participation Rule and Clear Cooperation Policy.”
In a letter sent the same day as the settlement agreement was proposed in court, the DOJ informed NAR it had closed its investigations of the two policies. In that letter, the DOJ included a sentence that said, “No inference should be drawn, however, from the Division’s decision to close its investigation into these rules, policies or practices not addressed by the consent decree.”
According to NAR, that sentence does not mean that the DOJ reserved some right to future investigation of the policies because the DOJ did not ask for and the parties did not negotiate that term.
“Instead, it unconditionally accepted NAR’s settlement proposal, which did not include such a limitation, and that means that there was no such reservation in the settlement agreement,” the filing said.
“[T]hat sentence did not, and cannot, change the plain meaning of the settlement agreement. It only cautions third parties that they should not draw an inference from the Antitrust Division’s decision to close the investigation, which is non-controversial,” the filing added.
Because NAR did not negotiate the language of the closing letter or even see it before it was sent, then “the second sentence of the letter cannot be considered part of the agreement if it takes on the meaning proposed by the Antitrust Division,” NAR’s attorneys wrote.
“A party cannot introduce a new, material term to a contract after an agreement is reached simply because it no longer likes part of the deal it struck.”
What the filing does not address
NAR’s filing makes clear that the trade group considers the settlement agreement binding on the government and therefore its arguments to set aside the latest probe hinge on the court enforcing the deal.
But in its own, previous filing, the DOJ argued that the deal was not final and therefore the agency could withdraw from it.
“In 2020, the United States and NAR discussed, and the United States eventually filed, a proposed settlement that would have culminated in entry of a consent judgment by the Court,” the DOJ’s filing said.
“But no consent judgment was ever entered.”
The Antitrust Procedures and Penalties Act, known as the Tunney Act, required a public notice and comment period before any final settlement with NAR, and it was during this process that the DOJ’s Antitrust Division concluded that the reservation of rights provision in the proposed final judgment “should be revised to avoid potential confusion about whether the judgment would foreclose further action by the Division on matters not covered by the judgment,” the DOJ’s attorneys wrote.
When NAR did not agree to the modification, the agency withdrew from the deal as permitted by paragraph 2 of the proposed settlement, they added.
Screenshot from proposed NAR-DOJ settlement
NAR’s latest filing does not address this particular argument from the DOJ.
The DOJ acknowledged that it did agree to issue a closing letter confirming to NAR that it had closed an investigation of two of NAR’s policies. However, the agency’s filing indicates that it considers its latest demand a new investigation and not a continuation of the previous one, as NAR asserts.
“The three-sentence closing letter contained no commitment to refrain from future investigations of NAR or its practices or from issuing new CIDs in conjunction with such investigations,” the DOJ filing said.
‘NAR is moving forward’
This week, at its Realtors Conference & Expo, NAR is considering three MLS policy proposals inspired by the contested settlement with the DOJ: a rule preventing buyer agents from touting their services as “free”; a ban on filtering listings by commission or brokerage name; and a policy requiring MLSs to display buyer broker commissions on their listing sites and in the data feeds they provide to agents and brokers.
Mantill Williams
“The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) withdrawal from a fully binding and executed agreement goes against public policy standards and consumer interests,” NAR spokesperson Mantill Williams said in an emailed statement.
“NAR is moving forward on the pro-consumer measures in the agreement and remains committed to regularly reviewing and updating our policies for local broker marketplaces in order to continue to advance efficient, equitable and transparent practices for the benefit of consumers.
“Allowing the DOJ to backtrack on our binding agreement would not only undermine public confidence that the government will keep its word, but also undercut the pro-consumer changes advanced in the agreement. NAR is living up to its commitments to consumers — we simply expect the DOJ to do the same.”
Read NAR’s latest filing:
Email Andrea V. Brambila.
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Friday, November 12, 2021
How the fan translation of Squaresoft's utterly bizarre Racing Lagoon came together in just 6 months - PC Gamer - Translation
In 1999, Japanese RPG developer Squaresoft was on top of the world. Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 8 were blockbuster successes and every other quirky RPG it released seemed destined to become a cult classic. But even at the peak of its popularity Square was still releasing games it decided were too niche, too hard to translate, or too Japanese to release in the west. One of those was Racing Lagoon, an RPG that blended trendy street racing and bizarre, almost poetic writing into a game that nearly defies description. Imagine if E.E. Cummings wrote the script for a Fast & Furious movie and you'll be on roughly the right track.
22 years later, Racing Lagoon is finally playable in English—and we have a fan translator who goes by the name 'Hilltop Works' to thank for channeling its singular style into English, in the process coining the best gaming diss since 'spoony bards.'
"This lady who's the boss of Chinatown throws an insult at you, and I wanted to use 'green beans,' an insult no one's used before, I don't think," he says. "But you hear it and you kind of understand what it means, you know? 'Green beans' means someone who's kind of young, not fit to be where you are. The line was: 'Get it, green beans? Chinatown has rules.'"
In Japanese the insult is something simple like "brat," but the goofy localization works in a game that's famously quirky even in Japan. Hilltop says Racing Lagoon has had something of a rediscovery at home in recent years, because even there there's nothing else like it. "They call the speech Lagoon-go, 'go' meaning accent, where every character adds in random English words and speaks very poetically."
That unique language has made Racing Lagoon a challenging translation process, but it's also happened at a shocking pace in the world of fan translations. These projects often take years as volunteer writers and hackers come and go. Many are abandoned and never finished. But Hilltop announced Racing Lagoon's translation on May 23 and released the finished patch on November 11, just shy of six months later.
"When I announced the project and when I released the prologue patch, nobody else had worked on it. I did the programming, I did the editing, I was planning to do everything on my own until people reached out to me," Hilltop says. But he didn't anticipate how many people had had similar reactions to Racing Lagoon over the years as he had when first discovering it.
Tune In
PancakeTaicho cites Racing Lagoon's music as the main reason he fell in love with the game. "The soundtrack is a world unto itself that I just wanted to hang out in all the time," he says.
If you want to buy a super rare CD of the jazz fusion saxophone wailing over techno, be prepared to pay as much as $1,000.
"I just want people to see this game. This game is wild. This game is absolutely nutters crazy. There is just nothing like it, at all, and people need to see it," he says. "I think of this game like a beautiful diamond. It's a pure crystal—no part of it could really ever be recreated."
The late '90s street racing aesthetic is intensely nostalgic for 30-somethings who grew up watching Initial D, playing Gran Turismo, and lusting after Nissan Skylines. Suddenly there was a chance that this cult object could be playable in English, and people who loved the game jumped at the opportunity to help.
"My friends have been having to suffer through me talking about it non-stop for the past decade," says Syd-88, who joined the translation project not as a translator, but as an automotive consultant. Syd first played Racing Lagoon in 2011 and has wanted to help make it easier for other people to play it for years.
"The game dives into Japanese tuner culture as a whole in a way that I've never seen anything else before or after," Syd says. Gran Turismo was its contemporary, but only for legal racing. Tokyo Xtreme Racer tapped into street racing, but was more grounded, without Racing Lagoon's story or unique language.
Translator PancakeTaicho currently lives in Japan, where he first saw a copy of Racing Lagoon at a used game store on a trip in 2009. He loved Initial D, so he bought the game and unexpectedly found himself obsessed with the soundtrack. "I've listened to it more than anything in my whole life, I think," he says. PancakeTaicho actually tried to learn ROM hacking a few years ago and worked on Racing Lagoon, but didn't have the technical skills to make it work. When he saw Hilltop's tweet, he jumped at the chance to help translate. Before long, Hilltop's solo project had grown into an eight person team effort.
Hilltop works in videogame QA by day and on the Racing Lagoon translation in his spare time, divvying up the hefty script between volunteers and hosting editing sessions where they talk through scenes line-by-line. "Hilltop is like, I don't want to say jack of all trades, because that means it sounds like he's not good," PancakeTaicho says. "I think he's more like a one-man army. There's all the programming stuff, but I think he's also a really good localizer. He has a knack of helping find the right line, the right turn of phrase."
Racing Lagoon is actually only Hilltop's second-ever translation project after Dr. Slump, a PS1 game based on the comedic manga Akira Toriyama created before Dragon Ball. He studied computer science in college but never became a full-time programmer, and started learning Japanese years ago by listening to tapes on his commute.
"What could I do with these two skills? It was fan translation," he says. "I wanted to do something with my life. I was unemployed at the time, not really doing very well. And I had never really produced anything—ever, really—for public consumption."
Learning PS1 romhacking was difficult. For the first three months he was just trying to understand how to hack into Dr. Slump and wrap his head around data compression, a field of programming he didn't have any experience in. His notebook from the start of that project is filled with pages of assembly language code that he was trying to debug. Finally he understood it and was able to extract the script. On Racing Lagoon, the same process took only two days.
Though he now has a day job in gaming QA, Hilltop has found fan translation "hugely" fulfilling in a way no paying job ever has been. While most fan translators seem content to treat it purely as a hobby, and others are professional translators who take on the occasional passion project, Hilltop is somewhere in the middle. He started a Patreon for Hilltop Works, which states that if he can get 600 monthly backers, he'll quit his job and work on translation patches full time. When we talked midway through Racing Lagoon's translation, he hoped that the flurry of interest when it was finished would bring with it more Patreon backers. "If I could do this forever, I would 100%," he says. "I would much, much prefer this to just about anything."
The question now is whether the group that came together on this project will stick around for whatever Hilltop decides to translate next, or if Racing Lagoon was an irresistible anomaly. It really is rare to find a game with a history as rich as Racing Lagoon's, that ties so directly into the broader culture of when it was made.
"Somebody went around Japan and laser scanned a lot of the locations for it," says Syd-88. "So somebody had a lot of passion and wanted to capture that moment in time. Hell, I'm not sure you could recreate something like that today. It wouldn't have the same charm or effect."
Hilltop adds that there's a running theme in Racing Lagoon about how parts of Yokohama, where the game's set, are being westernized—that things that were once written in Japanese lettering are being written in English lettering as part of the "21st century shift."
"A direct translation of the script would be gibberish," he says. "Half of it is weird, random English words—half of it is poetic nonsense, half of it is just obtuse ridiculousness. We have to cobble that together into a script that not only makes sense but still has that flavor, that still feels like you're playing a Squaresoft JRPG from the '90s… I wonder if really the whole thing is some sort of wild commentary that went over everyone's heads, in a way, about how the local culture, the local scene, was slowly getting overwritten by these western influences."
It's perhaps ironic that it took a full English translation to bring Racing Lagoon's commentary back to the surface after two decades. Even if the Racing Lagoon fan translators go their separate ways now, Hilltop has plenty of other ideas for PS1 games to work on next, and the hope to someday move beyond fan translations altogether while still remaining independent.
He loves the whole process: writing, hacking, reworking graphics. "The absolute dream scenario is I would actually work on, say some company wants to re-release a PS1 game, they'll hand me the disc and say 'give me this in English,' he says. "That would make me… that would be a dream come true."
The First English Translation of Hayao Miyazaki’s Favorite Childhood Book - The New York Times - Translation
HOW DO YOU LIVE?
By Genzaburo Yoshino
Translated by Bruno Navasky
Foreword by Neil Gaiman
All classic children’s books are works of philosophy in one sense or another. A grown-up novel may make all its points with action and emotion, but some underlying force of fable or allegory, of educational purpose, seems necessary to illuminate a permanent book for younger readers. “Mary Poppins” and “Charlotte’s Web,” in addition to the stories they tell, have not merely a moral to impart but a view of life to offer — in “Mary,” that the strictest and most severe people often have the most passionate connection to life’s mysteries; in “Charlotte,” a still deeper one, that death is as much a starting point as it is an end.
But few classics for young readers are as entirely philosophical and contemplative, as engineered to instruct, as Genzaburo Yoshino’s “How Do You Live?” Apparently nearly compulsory reading in Japan — one Japanese reader assures me that every summer list for 13-year-olds includes it — it has sold more than two million copies there since its original publication in 1937 (the same year in which the novel is set), but it is only now appearing for the first time in an English translation. (The ostensible reason for the new edition is that the book is to be the basis for a final film by the great animator Hayao Miyazaki.)
In his foreword, Neil Gaiman gently prepares readers — against expectations that his patronage might create, given his own vivid, kinetic style — for any disappointment they may feel with this book. Had he been given it to read as a boy, he admits, “I suspect I would have found it puzzling or even dull.” Indeed, where most classics aimed at the younger mind have some pleasurable lake of cool stuff on which to float the oil of philosophy, this one is nearly all philosophy — and a fairly dense and demanding kind, centered on what we would now call the philosophy of science, with excursions into modern economic theory, French military history and the dissemination of Hellenistic style in Indian sculpture. These mini-treatises, absorbing on their own terms and written in a tone of sweetly patient explanation, are not exactly what a mind shaped by horcruxes and lightning thieves expects to find thrilling.
Yet in another way, nothing is more engrossing than the story of an education shared, the true subject of this book. The premise, or pivot, that justifies the philosophizing is a series of exchanges between a young boy, appealingly named Copper, and his thoughtful uncle, who lives in the same Tokyo suburb to which Copper and his harried mother moved after his father died two years earlier. Copper goes to school in the center of the city, and one of the not-incidental pleasures of the book is its evocation of Tokyo in the 1930s, as in this view from the roof of a department store: “The trolleys looked as small as toys, and their roofs were slick with rain. The cars, too, and the asphalt road surface and even the trees lining the road and all else that was there were dripping wet and gleaming with the brightness of daylight shining from who knew where.”
Copper, we learn, has earned his nickname not from a metal or a color but from the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, whose courage in insisting on the heliocentric model of the solar system has become the boy’s benchmark. (It isn’t clear if “Copper” has the punning presence in Japanese that it does in English.) This lesson is one supplied by his uncle, whose letters of instruction on many subjects take up at least a third of the book, and act as a kind of counterpoint to the more mundane though neatly described escapades of Copper at his school. As he reports back to his uncle on these hyper-normal events — friendships made, teachers defied, bullies avoided — his uncle digs deep into an apparently bottomless bag of erudition and finds apropos examples for his nephew to consider as his adolescence unfolds. These include the difference between the interests of consumers and producers; molecular and atomic theory; the question of whether Napoleon Bonaparte’s heroism justified his sacrifice of French soldiers in Russia; and the dispute about the reality of Isaac Newton’s falling apple.
This all sounds … odd, not to say potentially tiresome. And it is odd, but tiresome it isn’t, chiefly because Yoshino has given the instruction a touching emotional root. On his deathbed, we learn, Copper’s father asked his wife’s younger brother to make sure his son became “a great man,” with a definition of greatness that was humble and startling: He wanted his son to be “a fine example of a human being.” And so his uncle’s philosophizing, far from being random, is designed to instruct the boy in the values of life. When Copper contemplates molecular theory, he is learning to see himself as an interchangeable part of a larger stream of life, to dislocate his own egotism, but the lessons in global economics that come soon after also teach that each molecule depends on all the others. We are nothing; we are everything.
One is put in mind, at times, of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, writing “The Little Prince,” and also, in a desperate time of war, using children’s literature to instruct readers in the necessity of pluralism and a dislocated love of others. Much of the content of “How Do You Live?,” a Western reader suspects, is in a similar way cagily related to the politics, and indeed the desperation, of a left-wing humanist responding to the tragic rise of militarized imperialism in Japan in the years immediately before World War II. (Yoshino was long a professor at Meiji University, and was imprisoned before the war as a leftist. The economic passages here bear the imprint of his Marxism, helpfully hybridized with Buddhist temperance and a love of Western science.)
Two things are apparent in Yoshino’s tale: how complete the “Westernization” of Japan was by 1937 and how complete it wasn’t. The comic highlight of the book involves a gaily improvised baseball “broadcast” by Copper; but the extreme deference and courtesy that informs Copper’s exchanges with his uncle feels very removed from the world of Babe Ruth and Ring Lardner. Everyone in 1930s Japan, it seems, a little shockingly, is expected to know about Napoleon, but what they know is his dignity in defeat.
The book concludes with a beautifully realized double climax that’s a remarkable twinning of its micro and macro worlds. In the schoolyard, Copper fails to come to the rescue of a friend who is being bullied by brutal older boys. Guilt-ridden, he is urged by his uncle to write a letter of apology, with no expectations of reward. The tone of the letter seems, to this reader, overly filled with shame, but it works to anneal the injury. Soon after, the uncle offers a disquisition on, of all seemingly abstruse subjects, the development of Greco-Buddhist art — the “Gandhara” style — which even this not-entirely-art-ignorant reader knew little about. (It is worth Googling for a peek at the extraordinary work, in which Hercules stands beside the Buddha.) Copper’s uncle untangles the mystery of the style’s creation, showing how Greek artists brought east by Alexander the Great took up Buddhist subjects, which turned the physical affirmations of their own work more mystically inward. “And so, Copper,” his uncle says, “the Buddhist art we know doesn’t arise from Buddhist ideas alone. Nor was it produced using Greek sculptural techniques alone. It’s something that was created by joining the two things together.”
What begins as a seemingly abstract art-historical lecture becomes a moving, appropriately climactic plea — never more relevant than today — for hybrid humanism, for an understanding of the mixed and heterogenous nature of all human culture. Here again, one suspects that, in its time and place, this was not merely as moving as it remains, but also unusually courageous and dissident.
At the very end of the book, the omniscient narrator suddenly turns to the reader and asks, in a final single-sentence paragraph, “How will you live?” (The italics are mine, but the emphasis is implicit.) A hard book to assess via the blunt thumbs-up or thumbs-down rating system on which we’ve lazily come to depend, “How Do You Live?” is nonetheless not easily forgotten. Many American 13-year-olds will doubtless find it “dull,” as Gaiman worries, with too little narrative action — or action of any kind really. But some may feel, as this reader did upon closing it, inclined to affirm an unusual truth: “I am wiser for having read this book.”
Rotarians deliver dictionaries | People | huntingdondailynews.com - huntingdondailynews.com - Dictionary
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Rotarians deliver dictionaries | People | huntingdondailynews.com huntingdondailynews.comHow To Translate Official Documents Correctly? | Sponsored | state-journal.com - State-Journal.com - Translation
Translation of official documents is one of the most challenging tasks for professional translators. An outside observer may not recognize the amount of time, effort, and knowledge necessary for this type of translation, but translators come across many obstacles in this line of work.
There is no room for mistakes when translating wills, contracts, birth certificates, corporate proposals, bank deposits, and other legal and personal documents. A single spelling error or an overlooked number can tarnish the validity of the whole record.
If you want to ensure that your translation is of high quality, this is what you should have in mind.
Understand the Legal System that Governs the Document
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Common Law
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Civil Law
You need to understand the basic concepts of the legal system that governs the document you are translating. This is essential if you want to keep the correct legal meaning in the translated document.
Maintain a Clear Structure
The original document and the translated one need to have a similar style and structure. You should aim to deliver a translation that closely follows the organization of information in the source document. An organized source document is a basis for a clear and correct translation. If the original document isn't well-scripted, you should clarify this with the client.
Discuss Any Ambiguities With the Client
The digital world has created new opportunities in every branch. Many translators offer their translation services online, which also means that the communication takes place via email. While certain documents are straightforward, you might come across assignments with ambiguities.
Before you dive deep into translating, make sure that you understand every aspect of your work. Some questions you might want to clarify are:
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What is the purpose of the legal document?
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In which country will the document be used?
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Which formatting option should you use?
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Should the document be certified?
Never resort to assumptions if a part of the document or client’s instruction is unclear.
Check the Spelling of Proper Nouns
If the alphabet of the source and target document differs, do some more research. Inquire whether there is a certain way in which the mentioned name, address, or any other proper nouns should be spelled. Translators tend to use different variations when spelling proper nouns, so you should look into the target state’s rules. The translation needs to match the official registration with the federal government, so you should choose the spelling used in the client's passport or another official document.
Double-Check the Uncertainties
When you have a dilemma, don't go with your hunch but turn to plausible sources for help. There are a plethora of digital libraries designed to assist official translators. You can check out Translate Hub, an online resource of tips, practical guides, and job opportunities for professional translators. You might come across a post that demystifies the issue you have.
Another excellent idea is to ask a lawyer in the target country for advice. They can give you recommendations, help you understand the document better, and solve any legal uncertainties.
Stay Away From Machine Translation Shortcut
Google Translator and other translation tools may seem like a handy option for speeding up the process. However, the use of these tools can easily result in misinterpreted information.
Translation software has seen an improvement, but it still doesn’t rise to the level of human translation in terms of correctness. So if you want to ensure that your document translations are impeccable, rely solely on your abilities.
Don’t Rush It
Quality translation takes time. You need to invest time and focus if you want your translations of official documents to be on point. If you bit off more than you can chew, better get in touch with online certified translation services and pass some of your work onto them. These services can promptly provide you with accurate translation so you won’t have to let down a client.
Wrapping Up
The goal of legal translation isn’t to translate word-per-word but to make sure that the document performs the role it is set out for. The pressure is great as a single mistake can create a big problem and result in a complicated legal process. If you want to make sure that this doesn’t happen to you, keep these tips in mind. Paying attention to detail, asking the right questions, and being well-informed are the pillars of successful translation.
Eric Wyatt is a translator, researcher, and writer. He combines his experience in translation with his talent for writing to create informative and engaging posts. Besides using the power of the written word to spread his knowledge, Eric is also a frequent guest speaker at translation conferences.
Interview: Jerry Pinto, Translator, Battlefield - “All translation is difficult” - Hindustan Times - Translation
Ranaangan, a Marathi novel published in 1939, explores the love between an Indian man and a German Jewish woman. The story unfolds aboard a ship sailing from Genoa to Shanghai on the verge of World War II. Battlefield is Jerry Pinto’s English translation of filmmaker and playwright Vishram Bedekar’s only novel.
Updated on Nov 12, 2021 05:30 PM IST
Syed Saad Ahmed
What was your first impression of Ranaangan?
I read it many years ago and what remained was its effortless cosmopolitanism, acute sense of fascism’s dangers, and prescience.
When did you decide to translate it?
I suppose one falls in love with a book. The difference is that there is no feeling of “Mine, mine, mine”; instead, the feeling is “Ours, this should belong to more of us.” That’s when I set aside my writing and give priority to the voice of another writer.
At the launch of Ranaangan, you said that it’s a book we should all read — and not just because you translated it. What makes it so compelling?
Ranaangan came out in 1939. It deals with the horrors of othering, how you can turn a whole community into the ‘Other’, how you can treat them brutally and end up carrying the guilt of that treatment, as a society, as a nation. These processes end up hurting both sides. That’s why I think it’s a book we all need to read. I believe that each choice we make as individuals — whether it is a joke we crack, a news item we refuse to read or an event that we try to explain away — brings us closer and closer to the inflection point.
How was the novel received when it was published?
I believe it was well-received, but there was a measure of bewilderment about that reception. The form of the novel was so different. It took in diary entries, fables, letters, flashbacks, surreal dance sequences and it took place aboard a ship — a capsule of time and space where anything could happen. Like a German woman and Marathi man falling in love.
What place does the book have in the Marathi literary canon today?
The book is canonical, but it occupies its own space. It does not sit with any other books. The new form that it suggested was not picked up afterwards. But its place is assured; it is still read widely.
What was Vishram Bedekar’s engagement with the politics of the day when he wrote the novel?
Instead of interrogating a long-dead author, we can look to his novel for answers.
Here is Chakradhar, a Marathi man, falling in love with Herta, a European woman. He has been in love before and had his heart broken. She has loved before and had her love wrested from her by the Nazis. They cling together for the short, sea-soothed span of 10 days, and then the tugboat arrives from the harbour.
Bedekar speaks from several interiorities. He offers a first-person account of what it must be like to be Jewish in a nation that denies them the ordinary pleasures of citizenship: Jews could not sit on park benches, for instance, and like African-Americans of the time in the USA, could not use toilets that non-Jewish Germans used. Bedekar inhabits the person of Chakradhar, who listens quietly to Indians debating nationalism.
The book has a multicultural milieu that seems apt for English. How does the author depict this milieu in the Marathi original?
The Marathi that Bedekar uses is what one might call Punekar Marathi. It is the Marathi that Narayan Surve (whose poems I am working on) would call with a certain measure of uneasy affection, Saraswat Marathi. But here’s the thing. Chakradhar speaks no German. Herta speaks no Marathi. They must have been speaking in English to each other. Was the dialogue then a homecoming when it was translated into English?
The novel has been translated earlier. What drove you to translate it again?
This is a classic. Classics deserve multiple translations.
What kind of research went into the translation?
Translation is a vital enterprise of our culture. Think of what our Anglophone life would be like without Marquez, Hergé, Camus, Shonagon, Bama, Byapari… The list is endless. We are refreshed and restored by translations. So I am constantly looking for the next book to translate. In the process, I read many books which don’t work for me. All these are part of my research.
What were the challenges in translating the book?
I have always said that translation is the act of settling a family of words in a new culture. You have to take into account the Marathiness of the language, the notions about language with which the text has been created, and the statelessness of English. People talk loosely about how difficult it is to translate from an Indian language into English. My answer to that is: All translation is difficult. All languages are inadequate when confronted with the cultural specificities of sprezzatura, albela, kintsugi and schadenfreude.
Some readers say your translations don’t read like translations. Are there any choices or techniques you use to arrive at such a result?
I work hard, I think. I read the book several times before starting. I write the first draft in longhand. I key it into the computer and as I do that, I begin to feel the irregularities and angularities of what I have written. I smooth out and read the translation to a friend — the first time generally to Neela Bhagwat, who taught me Marathi many years ago. Then I work on it again and read it to Shanta Gokhale. Another reworking. Then I read the book against the translation and see whether it needs some roughing up. That’s when it goes to my editor, Ravi Singh.
This is your ninth published translation. How has the experience of translation changed over the years for you?
I was hoping it would get easier — it hasn’t. Each book brings a fresh set of challenges, but it remains exciting and that’s what keeps me at it.
Syed Saad Ahmed is a Delhi-based writer, photographer and filmmaker.
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