‘Tamil is my next project’: Booker-longlisted translator Padma Viswanathan

I also had my first exposure to Brazilian popular music around that time, and, hooked, started looking into Brazil more broadly. I was thinking about writing a play there and started learning Portuguese to do research for it. I became close friends with my Portuguese teacher, a Brazilian dancer and choreographer, Sheila Ribeiro, who then hired me to manage a tour of her dance company in Brazil, since I had done that kind of work in Canada.

I was thrown into the deep end, but it was great for my Portuguese! So I guess you could say she realised I could work in Portuguese before I did. I started translating years later.

You move fluidly between multiple languages. What do you think of the mother language-foreign language binary? And in your daily life, which language feels like home?

I wouldn’t say I move fluidly between languages the way many do. In India, the mother language/foreign language binary has broken down in many contexts, as in North America, where many people speak a non-English language in their home communities but go to school and work in English and feel equally comfortable in both. I’m not that secure speaking my other languages, although I become more so when immersed.

Tamil is actually my next project: although it’s my heritage language, I grew up largely in English and without access to formal instruction. Now, translation from Tamil is happily on the uptick. (Aniruddhan Vasudevan’s translation of the Perumal Murughan novel, Pyre, was longlisted for the International Booker three years ago.)

I have gotten involved in several initiatives already, as a judge for the ASV Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation and as a speaker at the Living Tamil Lit Fest, to be held in New York this April, and hope to spend this summer in a Tamil-language intensive in Madurai. Language acquisition for me, in other words, requires both interest and opportunity.

As for “home,” that has always been a vexed notion for me in every way. I think a sense of home is something I am building as I go along in life.

The Booker judges have praised On Earth As It Is Beneath for its “spare yet masterful prose.” How much of that spareness lives in the original Portuguese, and how much is your contribution?

Ana Paula is terse, as are her protagonists, or at least within the limits of Portuguese. (For example, a character “signals yes with his head” in the original but just “nods” in English!) Translation into English generally compresses prose brought over from romance languages, but Ana Paula does a lot with silence, allusion and the unexplained, so I did attempt to recreate or, as you put it, rebuild that style in English.

In the narrative or descriptive sections, I tried to find words that did as much work as hers did, and in the dialogue, definitely wanted her characters to be laconic. The book is also melancholy in places and funny in others and Ana Paula’s lean, dry style is at the root of all those beats and registers.

How much time did it take to translate the novel? And, after months inside Ana Paula Maia’s voice, does it take time to find your own again when you return to your own fiction? Or do the two muscles work separately?

It took about nine weeks, five drafts. For the third draft, I retyped the entire manuscript from start to finish over just a few days, aware that Ana Paula seemed to employ a sort of freewheeling association with her relatively curt language. I wanted my own process to reflect that and to give the prose an urgency or momentum that comes from going fast.

After translating On Earth As It Is Beneath, I didn’t go straight back to writing: I had a novel come out a few weeks later (The Charterhouse of Padma) and was promoting that book, and also editing On Earth. Otherwise I spent that winter selecting stories for the forthcoming Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories, which I’m co-editing with Daniel Hahn, and teaching, which is ongoing.

After I translated another Ana Paula book (Bury Your Dead, also forthcoming) last summer, though, I did return to work on a long novel. Since I’m in the midst of that, all I had to do to re-enter my own voice was to reread the 300 pp (pages) I had already written.

Padma Viswanathan is a writer-translator. (Source: amazon.in/AI)

As a writer-translator, what is the practical difference between summoning a character from your imagination versus summoning one from someone else’s prose?

One of the fascinations of writing fiction is feeling that I can know people much better than I ever can know them in real life. I know many of my characters as well as I know myself, if differently. I know their histories, if not how these might be operational in any given moment, yet I can anticipate their decisions and reactions.

Sometimes I even fail to understand them the way I fail understand myself; I don’t always know why I behave in a disappointing way, or understand my own limitations. My own characters are like that for me: I can write them without fully fathoming them. Whereas I feel I know characters in books I translate only as well as I know real people I’m close to: I know only what I’m told about their histories and feelings; I hear their voices in my head; I usually love them, but as a friend and ally, not from within their own skin.

You previously translated the 20th-century Brazilian classic, São Bernardo (by Graciliano Ramos), while On Earth As It Is Beneath is a contemporary novel. Does the age of the text change how you approach it?

It does, somewhat, but enduring writers transcend their moment. Graciliano Ramos’s books, São Bernardo and others, are timeless. I’ve heard it said that every great book deserves a new translation once in a generation. And when we retranslate, we always update the language, trying to give new generations an experience close to the original readers’.

So, I translated São Bernardo into the sort of English that 21st century writers might use to write a book set in the 1930s. There’s a sleight of hand, one that very much interests me, as a historical novelist. Otherwise, I often say I don’t employ my knowledge of “Portuguese” when I translate so much as try to discern an individual author’s own Portuguese, their voice.

Viswanathan reading at the 2015 Neustadt Festival. (Photo: flickr.com/photos/wltonline/22595296621/)

What is your process when you come across a passage or word that does not easily translate into natural English? Do you call the author, consult other translators, or grapple with it until it yields?

All of the above! It can be clarifying to talk to the author where I can’t resolve an ambiguity that seems to require resolution, but while the author can help me to understand it in the source language they are unlikely to provide a translation solution. I might then discuss it with a Brazilian friend, or with my husband, who is a very accomplished literary translator himself.

In the case of On Earth As It Is Beneath, Charco, the publisher, specialises in Latin American literature and provides their translators with editors who work from the same source language. So I had the chance to bounce some of the hardest bits off of a translator-editor who knows Brazilian Portuguese, a huge blessing. It was fun and made me feel much more secure about a number of my choices.

Take me inside a single day of work on On Earth As It Is Beneath. What does the physical process look like—do you write by hand, use software, read aloud, make charts?

I’m a daily writer and when I’m translating, the book or story I’m working on gets my morning slot. (This is unlike, for example, Tim Parks, who writes his own fiction in the morning and translates in the afternoon. Apart from the fact that I often teach or have other duties in the afternoon, I like to be fully immersed in one text at a time, and mornings are when I do my best thinking.)

For the first draft of a book, I have side-by-side documents on my computer screen, the original and my first draft. I might do the same for a second draft. I love to make charts, especially of an author’s favorite words—most authors, myself included, have words they like for meanings that can’t be covered by a single word in English and so charts are a way for me to try to calibrate lexical range.

I will also track anomalous or regional or otherwise particular words, and make other notes on challenges or research. By the fourth draft I’m working on the document without much reference to the original, hoping that it’s increasingly standing on its own.

Recently, Arundhati Roy withdrew from the Berlin Film Festival after comments by jury president Wim Wenders suggesting artists should “stay out of politics.” How do you see the relationship between art and politics?

Though I am a Wenders fan, I found his remarks more inane than offensive. Politics are not limited to the actions of politicians. Each of us inhabits a world inflected by politics and every artist is also a citizen, which is to say that it’s incumbent on us to engage with the world and develop ethical responses, particularly in the face of oppression, exploitation and violence.

But every piece of art and every artist doesn’t have to evidence that engagement in the same way or in every instance. Good art changes the way we see the world, often in very intimate and personal ways, though these insights can have political outcomes, especially if our work touches someone in power.

So let’s turn the question: instead of speaking of literature intervening in politics, let’s speak of readers defending freedom of expression. Artists and writers are endangered around the world, threatened with physical harm and silencing.

I started a program to provide sanctuary to international writers under threat, supported by the wonderful Artists Protection Fund, but I had to pause it. It’s not a great moment to try to bring endangered international artists to the US. Still, we can all keep working to protect threatened artists, writers, journalists and others in our home places and around the world.