Riddles of Belonging: India in Translation and Other Tales of Possession

One: Humoring the Melancholic Reader of World Literature

16 o n e Humoring the Melancholic Reader of World Literature “All Is . . . Lost!” If in the previous chapter I argue that we must join in the games others play, in this chapter I do one better—by beginning with a riddling tale of translation. The story I have in mind is of origins so obscure that I am sure few know it; I turn to it here merely because the provocative questions it raises address almost too perfectly my own theoretical interests (an overlap that will, no doubt, provoke some well-warranted skepticism in the cautious reader). One can assume the reason for the story’s obscurity is that it is not readily available in English and is written by a name few would know. I’d like to think of the author as a latter-day Borges, this one writing in a language (and in a country) that has inspired some of the world’s most popular fictions. The story tells of an earnest translator named Mr. Worth who, not unlike Borges’s character Pierre Menard, sets out to complete a collection of stories Humoring the Melancholic Reader of World Literature 17 that contain perfect translations.1 Before Mr. Worth can even embark on such an undertaking, however, he must ascertain how one might judge perfection in translation. Answering such a question soon becomes a project in its own right, one that propels the narrative. The story details Mr. Worth’s struggles against those subtle cultural forces that assert translational standards more and more persuasively in terms set out by critics in the home country than in the source: some less than encouraging words from an editor here, a few well-reasoned but still passionate scholarly appraisals there, not to mention the kind but certainly not neutral advice from a group of fellow writers in the source culture that perhaps those readers over there don’t really understand us. “Us”? Indeed. This, in a word, is precisely the question the story raises. As a character he’s made to be likable enough, and so you hardly notice the gradual shift of alliance, hardly notice the shift in pronouns, in point of view. If you had heard me tell it (as I did in my own academic version of an oral performance, one early spring afternoon in Ithaca, New York), you might have assumed this to be yet another of those inevitable tales of a translator’s divided loyalty. Traduttore, traditore, as they say (not just any “they”—Freud, too, repeats this little adage across languages).2 In the story the translator begins making modifications to the stories he writes, thinking his interventions will render them more readily understood in their own terms, a course of action our increasingly unreliable narrator seems reluctant to protest. The very narrative style no doubt makes us uneasy— playing, as it does, along the edge separating fiction and nonfiction, teasing our sense of right and wrong. Are we meant to be responding with outrage? With mirth? The story seems to be setting up some kind of trap, but it is not clear who or what is being trapped, for what ends. What is the point of a telling such as this? Within the story it soon becomes clear that in the name of being faithful to the original, Mr. Worth commits perhaps the most egregious act of infidelity . Not all at once but gradually. At first the modifications seem slight, a mere act of interpretive decisiveness where there had been ambiguity; a rhetorical flourish that allowed the translation language to stretch its limits in a way it could be imagined the original had stretched its own language; some background provided where it was presumed there might be confusion . Soon enough, however, Mr. Worth finds he is writing not the stories the authors had so dutifully written and published for distribution to the 18 Humoring the Melancholic Reader of World Literature original readership but the ones they told by way of example—over dinner, in heated discussion, in informal, intimate settings. Before too long he has begun recreating stories he heard from the authors’ families, their neighbors, and finally his neighbors. It seems he would take up any story that conveyed a particularly rare or insightful point of view. The final capitulation comes when he begins writing not stories he’d actually heard told but ones he imagines...