The day Gabriel Garcia Marquez passed away, I duly posted a tribute on my timeline remembering how reading One Hundred Years of Solitude many years ago had charged me with an urgent desire to be a writer. Though Ruskin Bond and R. K. Narayan, who taught me that beauty reposed in simplicity, have been my literary heroes since my young years, it was Marquez who later made me want to actually write. And that, when I look back, is quite an anomaly. How could a man who wrote in a language of which I know only one word, ‘gracias,’ make me want to write in the language that I now mostly think and write in — English?

The realisation of it suddenly shifted my focus from the writer to the agent that carried the magic of an alien literary work with such forcefulness that influenced me to become what I am today. With a lancing sense of guilt, I returned to the book to memorise the name, Gregory Rabassa, and quickly read up about him on Wikipedia. The man who breathed life into the novel was Marquez, but the man who spread its fragrance around in the English speaking world was Rabassa, the pollen carrier. I then spared an earnest thought for all those unsung linguistic wizards who transferred the fluid charm of literary works to myriad cultures without causing the slightest dilution of it.

Translation has often been an underrated and uncelebrated craft. It has now been reduced to a job that is mostly commercial in nature, done for the purpose of ‘conveying meaning’ than to meet larger aesthetic objectives, often ending in the bizarre. I was once asked to proof read an advertisement copy that was translated from English into Malayalam by an agency. The translated copy was so archaic in tone that I suspected it was either dipped directly in Google or the person who did it suffered from acute classic hangover. It could never have sold the product it claimed to advertise, for the translator clearly didn’t have the customer in mind when he did the job. More.

See: Khaleej Times

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