“The biggest challenge is to ensure fluidity is preserved in the translated version”

Leticia Ibanez teaches French literature in a government high school and history of modern and contemporary Tamil literature at the INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales), Paris. Her research focuses on XXth century Tamil literary modernism and contemporary diasporic literature.

Léticia Ibanez, is a well known translator from Tamil to French. Here, she shares more about her experience as a translator. Excerpts.

AABP: What inspired you to become a translator?

Léticia: I started translating Tamil fiction into French while preparing my PhD about Mauni’s aesthetics (Mauni was a pioneer in Tamil Literary modernism). The first two years, I translated his short stories in order to read the texts closely enough to get aware of their nuances.

AABP : How did you choose the language you translate from and into?

Léticia: I translate into French only, as my mother tongue is the only language in which I feel completely at home. I sometimes translate from English, but a thousand other people can do the same!

AABP: Can you share a memorable experience from your translation career?

Léticia: Translating Shobasakthi’s Iccha for Zulma Publishing House was a transforming experience. I discovered another way of translating, for an audience that is curious but unaware of South Asian cultures and for whom reading should always remain a pleasure.As a matter of fact translating for general readership is more demanding than translating for other academics, it requires to be more creative and translate the author’s intention rather than the literal meaning.

AABP: What are some of the biggest challenges you face as a translator? How do you overcome them?

Léticia: I would say the biggest challenge is to ensure fluidity is preserved in the translated version. French and Tamil follow different rhythms. For instance, Tamil sentences first present the circumstances of the action, then the process that leads to the main verb. The French ones generally don’t have so many adverbial phrases. So certain sentence structures have to be reformulated in the translated version, all that while trying not to stray off the original version’s meaning.

I always wonder how the author would have put it if he had written in French. If this means deviating slightly from the original text in order to achieve a stylistic effect or convey a particular feeling in the target language, I do so, but only occasionally and in a controlled manner.

Another challenge is to help the reader understand implicit meanings specific to Tamil culture without being didactic or using footnotes. Take for instance body language. I am thinking about a passage from Maadhorupaagan (One Part Woman) where the protagonist’s mother is about to make a very delicate request to her son. As she stays silent and embarrassed, her son hands her a glass of toddy. She takes it in her saree’s pallu. The French reader cannot grasp the humility conveyed by this gesture, so it is the translator’s responsibility to make it clear without a lengthy explanation breaking up the story. I tried the following sentence: “She took it in a flap of her sari with the humility of a woman receiving alms,” but I know it can be improved !

AABP: Do tell us more about translating One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan.

Léticia: It was such an invogorating experience to try and find a French equivalent of Perumal Murugan’s style, especially transcribing the dialectal elements. It was my privilege to work for Perumal Murugan, whom I greatly admire. I was also happy to work on this project with his publisher Kannan Sundaram, his agent Jérôme Bouchaud and the Gallimard team. I hope they will publish another novel by Perumal Murugan and that this novel will be Poonachi!

AABP: In your opinion, how does literary translation contribute to the global literary landscape?

Léticia: Literary translation is in itself a blessing, in the sense that it broadens our world and makes it more diverse. In reality, the global literary landscape is a space shaped by power relations and cultural dominations. English is overwhelming there. We must fight to ensure that lesser-known languages get represented as much as they deserve to be.

AABP : Do you feel that translated literature is gaining more recognition in publishing today?

Léticia: The global book market seems to be more open to lesser-known languages than it was twenty years ago. The multiplication of international book fairs and literary prizes such as the International Booker Prize are undoubtedly playing their part. Fingers crossed that this continues.

AABP : What do you think makes a translation successful—fidelity to the original, readability, or something else?

Léticia: It seems to me that a successful translation is one that strikes a balance between readability, faithfulness to the author’s intentions and accents of the original language. In my opinion, a text translated from Tamil shouldn’t sound as a text translated from Oriya or Hindi, it should retain some features specific to the source language, as long as it sounds natural in the translated version. This is one of the many reasons why literary translations should always be done from the original.

AABP : What advice would you give to aspiring translators?

Léticia: If a publisher contacts you to translate a novel, ask for a long deadline (more than a year) because only time will allow you to take a step back from your work and revise it many times until you get a satisfactory result.