Presidential Address
Prof. Gopi Chand Narang
President, Sahitya Akademi
Respected Chief Guest of the evening, Sri D. Jayakantan, Sri M.T. Vasudevan Nair, Prof. K. Satchidanandan, distinguished awardees, fellow writers, friends.
I extend my heartiest greetings to the Bhasha Samman Awardees and Translation Prize Awardees. I welcome all of you and am especially grateful to those who have travelled long distances to come to Hyderabad for the Award Function. Sahitya Akademi always makes a concerted effort to recognize talent and to give awards and honours to the most deserving. Nonetheless in return, the Sahitya Akademi too gets honoured by your presence and cooperation. It is a dialectical process. I welcome all of you who are present here.
On this historic occasion I also extend my sincere welcome to Sri M.T. Vasudevan Nair, eminent Malayalam writer and Executive Board member of Sahitya Akademi, and Sri D. Jayakantan, eminent Tamil writer who is the Chief Guest of the evening. Sri Jayakantan is one of Sahitya Akademi's longstanding Fellows. Recipient of many awards and honours, some of his novels have been made into films and received National Award. Recently, he has been chosen for one of the highest literary honours of the country, Bharatiya Jnanapith Award. I give him my heartiest congratulations. His presence this evening is a matter of great pleasure for all of us.
Of the four Bhasha Sammans, as the practice has been, two are given for the Classical and Medieval Scholarship, and two are given for the unlisted languages. The classical and medieval scholars chosen this year are Pt. Dukhisyama Pattanayak and Sri Kamlesh Datta Tripathi. Both are great scholars and have made valuable contribution in their respective fields. Pt. Dukhsiyama Pattanayak is honoured with the title of H.H. Mahamedhanandanath Saraswathi and Sri Kamlesh Datta Tripathi is decorated with the highest academic honour of Professor Emirates by the Banaras Hindu University. Bhasha Samman for unlisted languages has gone to Sri Hira Lal Shukla and to Sri Vinod Kumar Naik respectively for their valuable contribution to Gondi and HO Languages. The unlisted languages covered so far total 21 i.e. Pahari, Tulu, Bhojpuri, Kokborok, Khasi, Mizo, Santhali, Bhili, Ladakhi, Kui, Mundari, Garo, Ahirani, Lepcha, Gojri, Boro, Magahi, Maithili, Dogri and now Gondi and HO. I give all the four Bhasha Samman Awardees my heartiest greetings.
It is gratifying that in the Transaltion Prizes, this time not a single Indian language is unrepresented as all the 22 languages are receipients this year. This feat is being repeated after a gap of seven years when in 1998 all the languages were represented. The most intersting feature is that, steadily the direct translations are on the rise, this time 18 books out of 22 are direct translations and only 4 are through link languages. The break-up of source languages is the following : four books each are translated from Bengali and Urdu, three books are from Hindi and Kannada, two books from Marathi and one book each is from Assamese, Gujarati, Oriya, Sanskrit, Tamil as well as Telugu. The Kannada book Purva by Sri Byrappa has received prize in two languages, i.e. Tamil and Telugu. There are three women translators this year, i.e. from Assamese, Marathi and Sindhi. Further, the eldest of translators is the Malayalam winner who is 77 years old and the youngest, the Nepali winner is of 44 years. The spectrum thus created is filled by 20 translators of all age groups. This also needs to be noted that the Nepali awardee is almost a blind person. The genre wise break-up again shows that the graph of fiction is rising and translations from poetry are meagre. This time 9 novels, 4 collections of short stories and 1 play, i.e., 14 books comprise fiction, while collections of poetry number only 5. Biography, essay and criticism are represented by only one book each.
The importance and necessity of translation need not be over-emphasised, Nontheless, in the common parlance translation activity as opposed to the original text, such as novel, short story, play, poetry, is considered secondary. Translation as a sub-text of the original text is comparatively a modern concept. May be it is the later requirement of straitjacketed faithfulness to the original, which had a debilitating effect. In Indian tradition, it never used to be so as the transference of text from one language into another was more of the nature of adaptation, retelling and redoing which went on over a period of time.
Today, in Bhashas, generally the term used for translation is 'Anuvad'. 'Vad' means 'speech, speaking'; and 'Anu' as prefix means 'after, following'. Obviously the term so used also belittles translation. Thus one can see that both the conceptual expectation as well as the nomenclature have a debilitating effect. Hence a hierchy, /text// translation /, i.e., / text // sub text /. Viewed in this hierachical context of high and low, primary and secondary, the larger and wid-spread hierarchy of / creativity // non-creativity / is reinforced, implying that while text is creative, translation is non-creative. But is it really so ?
The word creative in fact is euphuistic. Obviously creative is one notch above the other. But as Hosserl put it, "The obvious has made us blind." How can a third rate short story or novel be creative, while a first rate translation non-creative. The marginalisation is certainly a construct, and it needs to be looked into, since a good translation certainly is not possible without creative involvement.
The creativity cannot be measured through fossilized constructs. Creativity is a product of love. It comes from your soul, your inner self. It is not in the thing being done, it is in your attitude towards things, how you approach a work. Any attainment, where one has bestowed one's love and care is always positive and this sort of posittivity is always creative. Creativity has nothing to do with anything in particular. It is the quality one brings to the activity. Writing a peom or a novel by itself is neither creative nor noncreative. One can write a noncreative novel or peom. But one can tend a garden in a creative way, one can design a dress in a creative way. Thus, if creativity is the quality that you bring to the activity you are handling, you can do a translation creatively, as it is the attitude, the inner approach - how you take up your translation. If you handle translation with love and care or with a touch of inner divine, and the language of the work and the language of transference, both are in your command, then be sure you are involved in creativity, and the end result, i.e., your translation is a creative act. Mind it, creativity is not in a particular work per se, it is in your attitude towards work. The fact of the matter is that, it is not the genres or modes of literature which are creative or non-creative, it is you, the person, the writer, the translator, who is creative or non-creative. If there could be uncreative novels and uncreative poems, there could be uncreative translations. As said earlier, it is the approach, the inner urge, the divine touch of the writer, the translator, that makes a text creative or uncreative. Whatever one does, if one does it lovingly, if one does it joyfully, if one's act of doing it is not purely economical, then it is creative. Those who make translation a love affair, achieve creativity. Your enjoying, clebrating your gift of language as gift of God, is certainly creative.
But if the sole purpose is fame, if one thinks one is creating, but in fact one is running after immediate gains, then one is not creating. To run after immediate gain is the role of a politician, an ambitious achiever. But if one does a thing with a divine touch, i.e., if fame happens, good; if it does not happen, still good. It should not be the sole criterion, The criterion should be that you are enjoying translating. If your act of translation is your love affair, then certainly it has the mark of creativity.
