Lost (& Found) in Translation
/ Poetry Note by Harini V
This movie scene from the movie “Lost in Translation” features Bill Murray playing a Hollywood actor for a Japanese advertisement. The translator does not fully translate what the director speaking in Japanese is saying, causing Murray to feel very confused.
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Watching summer leaves brown to autumn shades, I sift through this year's poetry submissions, pleasantly surprised by the many prompts that allowed for earlier works to be reimagined. Many poets took the challenge to relook poems written in mother tongue languages to be translated or rather transcreated into English poems. Some poems written in English were then translated to a mother tongue language, even by those who might have been better positioned to write in English.
Often translations get spoken of mainly in terms of its limitations and the language barriers we need to overcome. But not all is lost in translation; some new aspects of the poems can also be found through this process. Instead of curbing the creativity and style of the poems, the act of translation gives a new lease of life to the poem, often pushing the original poet’s imagination in novel ways. Similar to the proclamation in Ada Ngo’s rebirth poem, the poets seem to converse with one another saying “Professor, let me –tell you something you don’t know.”
The strong collaboration between this year’s SingPoWriMo with its sister organisations only shows how much this challenge has succeeded across language boundaries pushing for more of the spotlight to be placed on mother tongue languages. I’m excited to celebrate the first time SingPoWriMo’s Tamil charter poems featured side by side in a digital edition. (You may start with "முகவரியில்லாப் புன்சிரிப்பு" by Mariappan Arjunan.) Often when creating literature in a city-state like ours, one can feel that we have a limited audience and often writing only in your mother tongue can further limit the community you can engage with and the readers you can capture.
As someone who kickstarted the Tamil charter of SingPoWriMo and organised the competition from 2018-2020, this year’s collaboration warms my heart. The new generation of exco-members of NLB’s Tamil Young Writers Circle happen to be all young Tamil women poets, Priya, Poorani, Premikha and Ayilisha. They have successfully brought SingPoWriMo Tamil to new heights and shared selected winners’ poems in this collection.
SPWM Day 24 of the visibility prompt invited writers to do a direct translation of mother-tongue poems in Google Translate and later piece together a transcreated poem. Having only access to English and Tamil, I could see how most transcreation captured the crux of the poems, while the tone and images written were often familiar to an English reading audience rather than a Tamil audience. Seeing my poem in shades of “black and white” translated to English, I could see how my poem which was primarily about loneliness could be pushed to include other areas such as homesickness and memory which was reflected in Miguel Barretto Garcia’s rendition.
One translation that came across as effortless was by Gan See Siong’s take of Mathikumar Thayumanavan’s “unfaithful”. The poem in several places captures the innate rhythmic quality that is natural/ to Tamil,
“What I ravel/You unravel/I need you to stop and follow my heartbeat/Our unified beat is the sound of the cascading waterfall/A spider weaves its web onto the breasts of an Artha Mandapa statue/ It disturbs the light passing into the structure/I need you to sit still/Let me come to you/Only then will nothing stand between us.”
Apart from viewing translations as a way to cut across language barriers and experiment with medium, several prompts pointed at themes such as “rebirth” and “me, myself and I” and “unspoken” gave opportunities for poets to write about the challenges in expressing oneself, and oftentimes what festers beneath silences. For The “cultural exchange” prompt, Elizabeth Fong’s poem titled “Cooking Dinner in My Mother’s House” takes us through a mother’s kitchen and her labour of love behind the stove. Each action, from cutting the vegetables to preparing the broth, are just some of the ways of expressing her maternal care and saying “I love you.” In expressing actions and sentiments which often go unnoticed, these prompts translate these everyday occurrences into something profound.
As a bilingual writer myself, I have fallen prey to such thoughts before. As we look to the UK and the US’ immigrant literature, we might often see immigrant cultures translated into English works. The hyphenated categories “Indian-American” or “Chinese-American” do provide a useful way for third culture kids and immigrants to pen their valuable experiences and emotions. In comparison, we could use English in Singapore as an intermediary and not always the final product — for pushing the boundaries of translating these experiences into paper.
Moving to Georgetown in Washington DC, during an epidemic, where many people continue to be uncertain of their futures, I’ve had to make daily adjustments myself. Feeling a little lost while translating is similar to feeling lost in a new culture or country. Your lack of experience and unfamiliarity gives you a unique lens to understand your new environment, which those who have been born and bred into might see differently. Much like crafting new pieces, being in a completely unfamiliar territory and making sense of it based on your sensibilities and lived experiences is similar to being lost. Yet, it is also an invitation to reimagine and find parts of yourself that have been dormant for a while.
