Tomb of Sand

"This is an extraordinary piece of fiction, but also an extraordinary piece of metafiction. It’s a novel of Partition, which is obviously a genre within from the Indian subcontinent. And at the same time, it is also none of these things, it is sui generis . It’s an extraordinarily joyful and playful and funny book, despite the fact that it begins with an 80-year-old woman who has lost her husband retiring to bed for months on end, turning to the wall and refusing to engage with life. Even in those opening chapters, everything around her is alive. I don’t simply mean ‘living’, ‘breathing’, I mean even the inanimate objects, and the way in which the story tells itself, it’s all enormously alive. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter She encounters Rosie, a hijra —one of the third gender people of the subcontinent—and from their encounter she suddenly regains a new sense of life. She’s almost like a teenager again, and she’s moved in with her daughter, who finds her mother disappearing for days on end and flitting about the place like a teenager. Eventually, it deals with her travelling to Pakistan. What’s extraordinary about this book is the way in which it encompasses so many themes, and uses a style that is endlessly surprising. We do not have access to the original text, but it’s quite clear that there is an enormous amount of wordplay, punning and humour, an awful lot of onomatopoeia, cadence, rhythm – you don’t need to be a translator to realise that these elements are very difficult to carry across. At some level, the translate has no choice but to entirely recreate the humour, the rhythm, the wordplay in the target language. Well, I think that any translator worth his or her salt will reject the idea that anything is impossible to translate. Or rather: at a theoretical level, everything is impossible to translate, so it’s just a question of how to render the impossible. As J.M. Singe said, “A translation is no translation unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it”. Translation is not simply or straightforwardly about the meaning of words. Meaning is crucial to all translations, but even the translation of very standard conversation involves rhythm and cadence. There may be cultural references that are clear to the original reader but may not be clear to the target reader; you need to make a decision as to whether you need to gloss the reference, or simply leave it there and allow the reader to do the work, look it up, or whatever. If there is a hilariously funny passage in the original, it’s your job as a translator to make sure it’s hilariously funny in translation, and that will frequently mean changing every single word, because the chance that the same words will have the same effect in a different language is almost nil—even when they are related languages. In a more general sense, the process of translation involves giving voice to the voice you hear when reading the original text. That voice has a tone, it has a register, it has a particular cadence. If the text involves polyphony, the translator needs to be attuned to each of those voices. In Tomb of Sand , there are lots of sections that play on the very nature of Hindi as a language, that Daisy has needed to recreate to play on the nature of a language that is not Hindi. “At a theoretical level, everything is impossible to translate, so it’s just a question of how to render the impossible” People have this sense that certain things that are ‘impossible to translate’. Well, no word is impossible to translate. But it may take more than one word in one language to translate a word from another. We have borrowed the German word Schadenfreude , for example, because we happen to like it and there is no single word in English to describe the feeling. But that doesn’t mean we don’t know what it means. It’s the same thing with the Portuguese saudade , which is something like nostalgia or homesickness, but it has a particular resonance and emotional meaning within Portuguese. That doesn’t mean you can’t explain it. Translation, of fiction particularly but of any form of literature, is the recreation of the whole, and within that the translator may use different techniques to recreate the voice they hear on the page. If they do so successfully, then it has been translated. I mean, Finnegans Wake contains more neologisms in it than there are commonly used words in the English language, and the roots of those various neologisms come from a dozen different languages, most of which Joyce has some familiarity with. The entire book is a single sentence that loops back on itself, it is wilfully experimental in style, the plot, such as it is, is nebulous and involves the incestuous dreams of a sleeping landlord dreaming about Irish history and his incestuous desire for young girls. Everything about suggests it should untranslatable—both in linguistic and cultural terms. But Finnegans Wake has been translated into Chinese not once, but twice. Translators found linguistic ways around the problem. And while Joyce was heavily involved in the original translation into French, this did not prevent a later generation of translators from attempting it again in the belief that they could do something different. I wouldn’t say a better , but different."