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.In addition to this potentially sizable market, the audience would in-clude many fluent Hindi speakers like Krishna, who haven t read anyHindi literature (in Hindi) since their high school days in an English-medium school when they were required to read writers like the fatherof modern Hindi and Urdu prose, Premchand.Often the Hindi litera-ture curriculum in secondary schools in India is government-prescribed,dry, and lifeless and generally not a favorite subject among students.Inaddition, the study of Hindi literature at the university level in Indiadoesn t have a reputation that s commensurate with the genius of the lan-guage, and therefore Hindi departments are not considered appropriatehomes for the bright and ambitious.This is a tragedy, and one that is dra-matized in detail in The Girl with the Golden Parasol.But for the purposes ofChoosing an English for Hindi159 this discussion, the point is that Krishna, and many others fluent inHindi, would be much more likely to read The Girl with the Golden Parasolthan * @ 2 @ $ M 0 @ 5 > 2 @ 2 \ @.In sum, translated well, marketed properly, this book might have apretty large audience in South Asia.And what if the translator decides that Kris is the target reader? Oneimmediate point of comparison is that, given the tiny number of transla-tions into English published annually in the United States, the numberof readers might be much smaller than in South Asia for The Girl withthe Golden Parasol perhaps an unfair fate for such a funny, relevant,and timely novel.Can marketing play a role? Is it wise for translatorsto think about marketing before starting a translation? It is undeniablethat many South Asian writers and writers of the South Asian diasporawriting in English sell books: Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, VikramSeth, Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Chandra, BharatiMukherjee, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, and others.Would it be cynicalor unfair to try to ride the coattails of these writers, and try to marketUday Prakash as the next Jhumpa Lahiri?But he s not Jhumpa Lahiri.And that s the point.Uday s voice is quitedifferent from Jhumpa s, Salman s, Rohinton s, and the others.All of thegreat South Asian and diaspora writers writing in English have theirown, distinct voices, and all should be given a chance to be heard.Udayshould too.Unfortunately for him, he happens to write in a language farless well-connected than English is.But he has a lot to say about a partof India that s not often depicted in the media or written about, and thatI think U.S.readers would be very interested in.It s not just Uday: thereis a lot more literary activity on the Indian subcontinent happening inlanguages other than English.I don t think it s controversial to assertthat readers, particularly English-speaking North American readers,would profit immeasurably from exposure to these works.But in orderfor readers to discover them, good translations must exist.Though many people in the United States (editors, publishers) mayargue that translated books don t sell, cultivating good translations issimply the right thing to do.Kris, the potential American reader, has pos-sibly won me over with, if nothing else, a persuasive need to hear othervoices from the subcontinent.There s another, very practical, reason it makes sense for me to translatethis book into American English: it s my mother tongue.Even though Ithink I could probably do a passable imitation of colloquial IndianPart II: The Translator at Work160 English, I have innumerably more tools at my disposal if I translate intocolloquial American English.So do I forget about Krishna, my potential Indian reader? I don tthink I as a translator should give up on any potential reader.Shouldn tit be possible to translate into a distinctly American idiom of Englishwithout alienating a South Asian English-speaking audience? Couldn t Istill include Hindi words like dhoti, adivasi, puja, ustad, chunni, and yaar inmy English rendition, stealth glossing where necessary for those whomight need extra context? Could I still leave those words as-is for SouthAsians, who will hopefully not find the gloss to be an annoying redun-dancy, or feel as if the text had been pre-chewed ? It should be possibleto translate with an American audience in mind, but without forgettingeveryone else.After all, translation is about enlarging the conversationof literature.Now that thought has been put into the question of audience, I wouldlike to turn to concrete examples that can be placed under the generalcategory of translating cultural differences.I chose the following ex-amples not because I ve done a perfect job negotiating all the complexi-ties of each problem every translator knows that nagging feeling thatthere s always a better solution but because I hope they offer interest-ing insight into the particular problems posed by Hindi and how I wentabout tackling them.Let s begin with B ( , juthan. B ( is not just leftover food, it s leftoverfood that has been made ritually impure by someone else s having touchedit.At a family dinner in South Asia, you rarely hear Oh, are you goingto finish that potato? accompanied by a hand reaching across the table.Traditionally, once an eater touches his or her food, that food is off limitsfor everyone else: it becomes impure and is no longer food; it has become B (.A rigid interpretation of the caste system is largely responsible forthe notion of you touch the food, no one else can eat it. Each caste makesits own food and doesn t like to eat food prepared by another caste, par-ticularly one lower down the ladder.In contemporary India, there arecountless people who may follow this notion a little, or a lot, or not at all.But it is a concept that is very much alive in the culture.The first two instances of B ( occur in back-to-back sentences.Ourhero, Rahul, is imagining a fat, rich man who never stops eating.Priorto this sentence, this man s arrogance and gluttony have been described.Retaining only the Hindi word B ( for the moment, the two sentencestranslate, As he eats and eats and begins to get full, he starts to flick offChoosing an English for Hindi161 the B ( from his plate.Millions of hungry people could be fed with hiscontinental, nutritious B (. There s no direct equivalent outside of South Asia for the concept offood rendered ritually impure because it s been touched by someone, ora particular someone.I first thought about segregation in the UnitedStates as a potential source of cultural stuff to help me with B ( : afterall, it wasn t so long ago that African Americans were forced to eat atseparate lunch counters and drink from separate water fountains.But Irejected this possibility, concluding it was too specifically American,and began to think in more general cultural terms: food can go bad, itcan be moldy, past its expiration date.When there s something reallywrong with food, it s less often because a particular type of person cameinto casual contact with it, more often because it s spoiled.So, the first occurrence of B ( I decided to render as spoiled mor-sels. I decided on morsels because it seemed to both preserve the sa-tirical tone of the passage and fit nicely with the register of continental (which is the same word used in the Hindi). Spoiled is about as goodand evocative a bad food modifier as any other I could think of
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