Bhasha Samman And Sahitya Akademi Translation Prizes - 2004
Sahitya Akademi Translation Prizes - 2004
The 'Bhasha Samman' Awards and Translation Prizes - 2004 of the Sahitya Akademi were given away to writers at a glittering function held at Hyderabad on 23 and 24th August 2005. The translation prizes were given to all languages after a gap of seven years - the last time being 1998.
The conduct of the event at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Hyderabad marks a departure from tradition as the Akademi's functions are usually held in the national capital. Gangisetty Lakshminarayana and Karamat Ali Karamat bagged the prizes for Telugu and Urdu respectively.
Gopi Chand Narang, akademi president, gave away the Basha Samman Awards to Dukshyama Pattanayak, Kamlesh Datta Tripathi, Hiralal Shukla and Binod Kumar Nayak. While the first two got classical and medieval scholarships, the other two were awarded for contribution to the unlisted languages of Gondi and Ho. D. Jayakantan, Sahitya Akademi fellow, Jnanapith Award winning fiction writer and Chief Guest of the evenning presented the Translation Prizes.
The Prize-winning translators were : Preeti Barua (Assamese), Sujit Choudary (Bengali), Jitendra Sharma (Dogri), M. Asaduddin (English), Mahesh Champaklal (Gujarathi), Ram Shankar Dwidvedi (Hindi), Chadrakant M. Pokale (Kannada), Rafeeq Masoodi (Kashmiri), Madhav Borcar (Konkani), Prafulla Kumar Singh "Maun"(Maithili), Puthussery Ramachandran (Malayalam), N. Kunjamohan Singh (Manipuri), Mrinalini P. Gadkari (Marathi), Bhanu Chetti (Nepali), Ch. Hemakanta Misra (Oriya), Jagbir Singh (Punjabi), Kundan Mali (Rajastani), Jagannath Pathak (Sanskrit), Yashodhara Wadhwani (Sindhi), Paavannan (Tamil), Gangisetty Laxminarayana (Telugu), Karamat Ali Karamat (Urdu).
K. Satchindanandan, Secretary of the Sahitya Akademi gave welcome address and M. T. Vasudevan Nair, Senior Executive Board Member and Jnanapith Awardee proposed vote of thanks.
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"I think that the Sahitya Akademi has done fairly good work in encouraging our languages and bringing them and the eminent writers in these languages together thereby contributing not only to the variety and diversation of India, but also to its essential unity, because both are essential, the variety and the unity. Persons who think that unity can be maintained by suppressing variety are, I think, completely wrong. On the other hand, if variety means separateness and break-up of the unity, that is fatal even for the various aspects of India."
- Jawaharlal Nehru
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My dear Jawaharlal,
When on the 15th morning you handed me on the train the English version of My Address, I just skipped over it to form a general impression of the translation. I had no time until now to go through it at leisure. Now that I am comparatively free, I have made a close study of the document. The impression it has created on me compels me to shake off my usual reserve for the moment, and offer my sincre tribute to your first-rate intellect and your exceptional talents. Your mastery over English extends far beyond what I imagined until now. I dare say some of the most accomplished men of our day could hardly undertake to perform a task of such magnitude in so many days, whereas it took you just a few hours and that too, without any special effort.
Translating, in a way, is much more difficult than composing in original. It is by no means easy to maintain the literay content of the original writing and at the same time convey through translation the literary style of the writer. Only a person with equal command over both the languages could have attempted such a task. What particularly strikes me in your translation is the fact that no feature of the original has suffered through it, and you have conveyed my Urdu literary style so successfully in English that I should not be surprised if it occurs to the reader that the original was English and not Urdu !
An equally impressive feature is your remarkable grasp of the architectonic imagination from which the details flow. You have perfectly visualised my magination which gave form and shape to my sentences and composition. In fact, you had a full picture of my theme when you started translating. Surely, it was a stupendous task, specially when my own compositions could not directly assist you.
In some places you have slightly changed the urdu version and expanded or abbreviated it to suit the exigencies of the English rendering. I have carefully taken note of all these variations and I am happy to find that you have improved upon my writing in some cases. In no case, has the spirit or the form of my writing suffered. Commenting on the Viceregal declaration I wrote as follows.
'Safhon par safhay parjanay kay badd bhi ba-mushkil isqadar batanay par musta-ed hota hai..'
Now, 'ba-mushkil' is the keyword of my metaphorical expression. While maintaining the background of my metaphor, you have conveyed it as follows :
'After reading page after page, the curtain is at last lifted with hesitation. We have a glimpse...'
What I wanted to convey through 'ba-mushkil' your expanded phrase brings out the meaning with greater emphasis, and I must confess that your version is more apt than mine. This is just to mention one among many such embellishments.
Yours sincrely,
A.K. Azad
(From A Bunch of Old Letters) Calcutta, March 27, 1940
