“Doubling Ourselves”: Keynote Address by Naveen Kishore

“Doubling Ourselves”: An Online Workshop on Literary Translation

Sponsored by the Gratiaen Trust in Association with John Keells Foundation

Supported by the Dept. of English, University of Peradeniya & the Seagull School of Publishing, Kolkata

6th March 2021

Keynote Address by Naveen Kishore

(Founder, Seagull Books)

I am a publisher. One who has learnt to ‘disrespect’ the notions of boundaries as we know them. Out of reasons that are political. As most things these days need to be. And yes cultural. Boundaries. Man created. Nation made. To me the idea of culture travels. Translates. Turns the reality of its own self into the reality of the one defined by our idea of culture as ‘the other’. Therefore transgression. Not just of boundaries but also of imagination. As in subverting existing frameworks by suggesting different ones. New ways of being a community.

Instead of opening up possibilities, we set up nation-states that ghettoize the book. Make it a commodity to be hounded, chased to the ground. Bought and sold across territories, across languages. Like literary slaves.

 I guess what I am attempting to express is that in this, our world of publishing, too much time, energy, money is spent on creating structures that ultimately box us in.

In these dark times it is important to teach our young the possibility of resistance. The constant need to be vigilant, aware, involved, active. The activity that translates a creative impulse into activism. Translation as need. Need to right that which is wrong. Writing wrong—describing through your writing the ills the injustices that remain hidden in the midst of a dailyness that is so taken for granted as a way of life, as in, ‘this is the way things are, have been, will be, nothing to be done’. So: translating these stories into existence. Translation as midwifery? Challenge the language you have so carefully cultivated. Revisit the meaning of words you have since childhood imbibed as universal truths. Consider the act of translation as impulse, as motivation, as a ‘telling’ of that which would otherwise remain ‘untold’: speaking out and speaking about the forbidden? Maybe. Do not let the frames that rule the act of translating from one language into another blinker your vision into thinking the job is done. Translation as action. Activism as a tool for the translators who take up causes. As a translatable act of not just the body being thrown physically into the fray should the situation demand this of you but the soul too. The soul translated as body made visible, made passion. Translate your passion. Singular. Plural. It doesn't matter. What matters is to subvert the status quo. Translation therefore as subversion. Translation as a literary act. As cinema. As theatre. The possibility of drama made visible, translated into action. Resistance as a way of life. Ways also of living a life that is not without hope. Therefore, a life of Hope. A life that suggests the possibility of goodness.

My ears trained in theatre. I writetalkhearread in an act of simultaneous translation. Across languages. Dining tables I grew up at had a mother from Lahore gently talking in Punjabi—not just talking but narrating, an entire Hindi film scene in smooth polite intuitively visual Punjabi while my father translated into pure (shudh) Hindi the finer points to his mother, my grandmother who was from Uttar Pradesh. And I? Listening with barely concealed excitement to this magical description of a Raj Kapoor and Nargis scene being enacted in Punjabi and, in my head, translating it all into my ‘first-language’ English and then asking questions that interrupted her performance!  

This is common enough in our homes. Thoughts and words jostle with nuance and emphasis, with tone and accent—all of which can be lost in translation if we read them, but they do pinpoint our language origins when they are heard. 

‘As long as poetry was oral’ you say and I salute this thought even as I continue to suggest that the act of reading poetry in one’s mind is still an ‘audible’ one. Only the level of whispering has changed! If written the way it is heard, there is the possibility of a silent hearing during the very act of reading.

There is of course the ‘I’ the ‘me’ of the writer as we perceive her and then there is the ‘I’ the ‘me’ of the writer as she is. One that remains hidden until the act of writing translates it. Making it ‘unhidden’. Translating the ‘other’ within. The other that lies in wait while she, the writer, battles language, struggling to find words and meanings and emotions that will shed light on her hidden otherself. The act of writing that is also translation?

The writing as an act of intuition, actively, even furiously, translating thought into language. This storytelling does not always position itself in the objective. It is, rather, personal and political. It also allows space for the reader to take away what they can or wish to and attribute their own meanings to the stories. It is left to the reader to find motivation or strategy or allusion or method in her texts. A ‘readerly’ act of translation? Maybe.

The act of reading is also a translation. To decipher, decode, make assumptions. Reading as objective. Reading objectively. The personal and the objective versus the subjective reader who filters through her own lenses.

Books are crisscrossing continents, languages and territories, flying with ease through the universe of ideas. I cannot repeat this enough: in a globalized world, your geographical location is redundant.

As long as your money is as good as everyone else’s and you produce books to exacting standards of excellence and have a reasonably courteous distribution system, you should be able to publish from anywhere. No borders to hem you in!  This practice of borderless-ness in a world that leans towards its opposite.

I am often asked about ‘sustainability’, about ‘structure’, about ‘vision’ and the ‘ability to reinvent’. I never have convincing answers. I have no scientific or rational methods of arriving at ‘things; I live hand in hand, or hand in glove, and therefore complicit with ‘uncertainty’ and the ‘intangible’. The opposites of structure. I am aware that I also live in a time that does not lend credence to that feeling at the pit of your tummy, that ‘gut feeling’. Particularly not in business or politics. In fact, it is fast fading even in the arts.

Underlining all this is an urge to survive and to do things. Specifically, ‘things in the arts’. And this is precisely what independent publishers have been doing for so many decades. ‘Survival’ carries with it a sense of the precarious, of just about ‘keeping your head above water’. This is true but it need not necessarily make for a strained unhappy look! As long as you manage to take care of your daily necessities—the urge to produce a certain kind of book that few wish to buy; or make it possible for an experimental performance to take place because you persisted with it; or again the belief that led to exhibiting an artist’s work that no one else wished to present—the rest will fall into place.

I founded Seagull Books in 1982. To publish in theatre and cinema and the arts, areas not being published or documented in India until then. We used English as our language, so that works across the country, written in the various Indian languages, could suddenly be available to most everyone. English was our link language in India, so we chose to translate into that language. Fast-forward to 2005. We founded Seagull Books London Limited. Found a distributor to take our books into UK and USA and the rest of the world. The spirit of translating into English remained the same, except this time the languages from which we were choosing our stories were languages of the world—French, German, Italian, the African languages, Spanish . . . once again we use English as a link language to bring new stories to new audiences. That project is now about 600 books old, and has spread from our initial areas of theatre and cinema and the arts to fiction and poetry and philosophy and memoirs, all of which have in common their unique concern with and expression of different aspects of the human condition. The human condition. And how vulnerable that condition is, today more than ever.

Our vulnerability to ideas makes us receptive to all that is new. There are no strategies except those that come with hindsight. Retrospective logic. Method that unveils itself after you have said yes to books that you perhaps often liked because of their title. Or the instinct that taught you to read the 150-word gist from French–German–Italian publishers while you swiftly made a choice. This one will work for me. Maybe. Or perhaps you trusted a growing group of translators with exciting wishlists. And yes, also publishers who came to you with their own instinct about what to offer you. 

We publish what we want to publish. What we want to publish is what we find meaningful to us. Often this appears to be out of sync with trends around us. That is okay too. The principles are to do mostly with freedom, on the one hand. As in free to publish what we find exciting for today. And the human condition, on the other. Everything that rings a bell under this heading is worth considering. Across cultures. Across languages. Borders. Ideologies. The known author gets as much space on the pedestal as the not-so-known one. We see ourselves as a part of a world community. So, we openly share ideas connections thoughts resources with other publishers. Principles that respect translators and authors with equal courtesy.

Ours is therefore a practice that will always remain vulnerable. Especially in these dark times when culture is slowly but surely being hijacked by forces that are anything but benign.