Arunava Sinha is one of India’s finest translators who bridges the gap between Bengali and English for the rest of the world.
Words are just another form of expressing emotions, expressions, and opinions. Different languages have different ways of saying the same thing and that is just simply beautiful. Translation is an art where words know no borders. And spreading his magic with these words from Bengali to English is Arunava Sarkar. He is probably India’s finest and prolific contemporary age translator who translates classics, fiction, non-fiction from Bengali into English and English fiction, non-fiction and poetry into Bengali. So far he has published over 82- translations.
Twice the winner of the Crossword translation award, for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), respectively, and the winner of the Muse India translation award (2013) for Buddhadeva Bose’s Besides India, his translations have been published in the UK and the US in English, and in several European and Asian countries through further translation.
Navigating Through Translations With Arunava Sinha
In an exclusive conversation with India.com, Arunava Sinha talked about his world of translations, its challenges and more. To start from where it all began for Arunava himself, we asked how he decided to pursue translation. Answering, he said, “You don’t choose these things, it happens accidentally almost. There was a writer whose short story I translated and he then asked me if I could do more. I was young and did not hesitate to give it a go. My first translation was published 14 years later. ”
Translation happens in cinema, music and equally in the world of literature and people often discuss and debate how the essence of things, and emotions often get lost in translation. But Sinha had a different take on it. He said, ” I don’t agree that it gets lost but it may get changed because different languages receive things differently. So, what you will get in any English text is not what you will get in any Bangla text. But that does not mean that something is lost. Some things or a few things just might change because it is set in a particular way in that language.”
He further added, “You need to take advantage of the language and what it can offer. Few things you can accommodate while writing in English and few you might be able to in Bengali and vice versa.”
He is currently working on a fictional text by Anika Agnihotri that is set in the pre-independence era where Mahatma Gandhi is leading his Salt March. He says a good translation is one that you read with complete belief that you are reading the book the way it was written.