Nanjil Nadan (pseudonym of G Subramaniam, b. 1947) is a major contemporary Tamil novelist, short-story writer and poet. Winner of the Sahitya Akademi award, he is celebrated as an author whose work is rooted in the soil, depicting as it does the land, people and culture of the Nanjil region (comprising the Kanyakumari district of southern Tamil Nadu and parts of Kerala), and creatively employing a distinct rural speech variety. Wrong Side Up is a translation of his debut novel titled (literally ‘upside down /inverse ratios’), which was published in 1977 and made into a film in 2002.
It is the story of the struggles of Sivathanu, a young first-generation graduate from a rural farming family, subjected to pressures from family and society. The major struggle arises from hypergamy; the conflict, within and without, starts in the very first chapter and goes on till the last. Sivathanu is forced into the marriage owing to his frustrated efforts to find a job and to the need to support his parents and younger siblings who are sunk in poverty. The oppressive incompatibility that results—a clash of class and not caste—is not so much between him and his partner as between himself and his in-laws, and between his parents and in-laws. Now, such a situation may not strike a Western or Westernized community as a disaster, but, especially in rural and semi-urban communities in Indian society, the very idea of a veettu mappillai (literally house son-in-law) is regarded as the height of indignity and dishonour, and even as loss of identity. (Hence perhaps the English title.) The couple do love each other and have a child. Sivathanu eventually does secure a job and goes away, but his wife refuses to join him, under pressure from her parents and used to the comforts of her prosperous parental home. When later she is willing to leave and wants him to come and take her, he insists on her coming on her own, impelled, as he admits, by his male ego. The ending, a tearful reunion in the last chapter, is a kind of triumph for him, but he has suffered intensely enough.
Thillainayagam’s translation on the whole succeeds in carrying the Tamil novel’s plot, setting, themes, style and tone to the English-reading community. It meets the challenge of conveying the rich ethnographic density that is the hallmark of Nanjil Nadan’s work. Whether it is descriptions of agricultural operations, depictions of the region’s flora, the minutiae of domestic festivals and observances, or the inner conflicts in the hero’s mind, the translation is adequate for the job. The appended glossary helps with items of vocabulary that are distinct to the region.
The greater challenge is always the translation of dialectal features. Rural dialects, by the very nature of their speakers who live close to Nature and have a vital relationship with the past, are characterized by an uninhibited physicality and immediacy that are not common in urban communication, which tends more towards abstraction, cerebration and generalizations. Verbal images, metaphors, similes and proverbs are not just embellishments in rural speech but are organic to it; they are its means of expression. Take for instance the idea of social overreach, the recurrent motif of the story. It can be symbolized by the conventional metaphor of the sparrow which, however high it flies, can never become a kite; or by an earthier saying: ‘If a lamb tries to shit like an elephant won’t its anus split?’ So with similes. Sivathanu, being dressed up on the wedding day, compares himself to a ram being garlanded and worshipped before being killed as sacrifice. At the wedding, his poor relations, standing opposite the bride’s party, are like ‘overripe mangoes packed in bundles and sold cheap’. And Parvathy, at her in-laws’ home, is like ‘a transplanted creeper that takes time to adapt itself to a new environment, soil and water’. Sometimes the tenor (upameyam) may be Nature and the vehicle (upamanam) human, e.g., ‘Paddy sheaves heavy with ripe grain had slumped like a woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy.’ There are scores of such images, similes and sayings that are successfully translated.
The translation may sometimes entail a choice between a literal rendering of an expression into the target language and being content with a near-equivalent already existing in it. The hero is unable to resist the persuasion of a mediator whose determination to see the marriage through is like ‘the grip of a monitor lizard’. Now, this is a literal translation of a familiar, rather clichéd, expression in Tamil (), but it may not make immediate sense to a non-Tamil reader. Would ‘a vice-like grip’ be an easier and felicitous option, though it is a cliché too?
Sometimes a citation, evidently intertextual to a learned Tamil reader, may not have the same impact when translated without mention of the source. Sivathanu, helpless to act as a free agent, feels he has given ‘them’ the right to say, ‘We have bought you, you must dance to our tune’ (chapter 7). Now, though the Tamil text does not mention the source of the quotation, the words ‘Annan Suyodhanan’ (Elder brother Suyodhanan) reveal the source to be Bharathiar’s Panchali Sapatam and the speaker as Duhsasana addressing Draupadi, who has been lost in the dice contest. The intertextual reference reinforces the intensity of the agony felt by the protagonist here. A note would certainly help in such cases.
Going back to the use of dialect, there are situations where dialect performs a thematic function. Our hero is not only a son of the Nanjil soil and master of its speech variety but also a well-read, highly sensitive young man, a product of a liberal education in both Tamil and English literatures and in the sciences. Tormented by his failure to get a job and left with no option but to pursue the hereditary occupation of farming, he mocks at the incongruity of his own situation in a series of questions such as ‘Did I learn Kepler’s laws, Sangam poetry, Shelley, Byron, Pilgrim’s Progress, Manonmaniam, King Lear and Macbeth…only to weed our field?’ This is followed by another series of questions, queries, commands and comments that he would hear all the while from fellow farmers. (Nanjil Nadan is well-known for the way he piles on details to achieve an incremental effect.) Now the incongruity has its impact only because the former series is in the standard register of the learned scholar while the latter, dealing with the inexorable mundane reality, is in the native dialect. That effect is lost when both have to be translated into standard English.
And then there is poetry, or poetry in prose, which Nanjil Nadan’s writing often is. I was particularly struck by a passage at the end of chapter 25. Sivathanu is looking at Parvathy sleeping and breaks in thought into a romantic lyric, maiyunda vizhikal mahilvil tilaikka …and ends up wondering, ‘Is she of this world?’ While every attempt has been made to render the denotations, connotations, tone and attitude of these lines, how do we transfer the economy of the tight parallel patterning, the brilliant images and the alliteration?
All said, the ultimate questions for a literary translation are: would it impel a non-Tamil reader to ask for translations of other works by the same author; does it drive the Tamil reader to go back to the source again and again? I think Wrong Side Up would; it does.
T Sriraman is former Professor, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. He has translated some of Indira Parthasarathy’s plays, R Chudamani’s stories, and recently, an ethnographic novel by K Bharathi.