These are exciting times for editors of literary publications. While the uproar over the outing of bestselling Neapolitan author Elena Ferrante in the pages of Robert Silvers’ New York Review of Books is yet to die down, the byline of prime suspect Anita Raja has appeared in the fall issue of Lee Yew Leong’s Asymptote, a journal of world literature published from Singapore. A note from Leong clarifies that Raja’s essay, ‘Translation as a Practice of Acceptance’, was in the bag before Italian journalist Claudio Gatti’s article on Ferrante’s secret identity appeared in the NYRB. The man has the luck of the devil himself. Interpreting vocabulary and idiom forces the translator to confront cultural questions embedded in language, which are often invisible — or negligible — to the monolingual author. Raja illustrates these, drawing on issues raised in translating Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann and Georg Büchner. Curiously, the essay does not refer at all to Raja’s compatriot, fellow translator and semiotician Umberto Eco, though it will strongly remind readers of his 2003 book Mouse or Rat, where he defined literary translation as a process of negotiation in which author and translator, the original tongue and the idiom of the target language, are locked in a never-ending struggle to be heard. This is not plagiarism, of course, since intelligent translators generally come to the same inescapable conclusions about their craft, and agree to disagree only on instrumentalities. Besides, Raja frames the matter differently. While Eco painted the relationship between writer and translator like a non-violent Darwinian struggle, Raja sees it as an act of accession, when translating “a great writer with a great linguistic capacity”. This is not frictionless capitulation, though, for she also writes, “The text of the other jostles the language of the translator.” But capitulation follows as “the translator submits to the authority and wonder of the original text, and offers her own language with love, with passion, with admiration, and even with devotion. If these conditions are fulfilled, then to translate is to position oneself to accept a tightly structured text, to surrender, word after word and sentence after sentence, to the text’s needs, to compel one’s own more modest linguistic capacity to grow and rise to the level of the original.” If this is indeed Elena Ferrante, she is able to keep her personas of translator and author apart with schizophrenic efficiency. She continues: “Accepting this inequality is not an act of surrender. On the contrary, deciding to translate is a refusal to surrender. The translator knows her own limits and yet, out of devotion, out of love, she is prepared to challenge them — or at least she chooses to try.” Raja’s article would be of particular interest to South Asian translators, since it raises signalling issues which we grapple with when translating into English. In the British Isles, warm is nice and cold quite miserable. That is why welcomes are described as ‘warm’ and deteriorating relations as ‘frosty’ in English. In the sensibility of most of India, which can be beastly hot for almost the whole year, ‘warm’ sounds minatory, almost as bad as the death sentence, and people travel vast distances in summer to holiday in the Alps. Translating idioms referring to the temperature is therefore problematic. Such issues used to engage bilingual Indian writers who had adopted English, like Kamala Das, too. Raja also refers to the gender politics embedded in language. For instance, the German das Elternhaus — the parental home, etymologically, ‘elders’ home’ — becomes la casa paterna in Italian. Stepping over the borders of language, the father figure enters the picture. India offers an interesting variation on the theme. It has been noted that states whose mother tongue does not feature grammatical gender tend to have lower rates of discrimination and crime against women. Convincing data to establish the truth value of this premise is awaited, but translators cannot help but note that the articulation of gender politics is slightly different in these languages. But since we are only human, while reading Raja’s essay, you can’t help searching obsessively for the signature of Elena Ferrante. And then you encounter passages like this: “By translating Christa Wolf I discovered that the work of translation can challenge the very limits of language. It was therefore particularly exhilarating work because it acted upon my poorer, more common labour of finding words, leading me along paths that I never would have dared to take on my own.” If this is the public identity of Elena Ferrante, Raja deserves an Oscar for dissimulation.
