Found in Translation and Other Things

How a writer rediscovered the power, movement and reimagination of language while translating her father's biography of pop queen and singing legend Usha Uthup

- Srishti Jha

Therefore one voice is suddenly dispersed Into many voices, since it divides itself Into separate years, stamping onto them The form of the word and its distinctive sound -Ronald Melville, translator

MANY years ago, an old writer asked me, "What language do you think in?" I said, "All the languages I know-Hindi, English and my mother tongue, Maithili. I keep switching. There is constant dismantling and rebuilding. But primarily English and Hindi." He smiled at me in a reassuring manner, sensing the turbulence I felt within answering his question. Along the way, many questions riddled my mind, but this one in particular kept appearing and reappearing. I chose to answer it differently each time, thinking about the relationship of language to life. One such moment was when I had to translate my father's work from Hindi to English. He wrote the biography of pop queen and singing legend Usha Uthup in Hindi titled Ullas Ki Naav (Boat of Joy). Translating the biography has been a journey of rediscovery-I rediscovered the power, movement and reimagination of language, and it all started by looking back at my relation with languages since I was a child.

I grew up in a household that was walled with books. Multiple voices, languages, narratives and characters would keep me in a world that could have been across time and space. Alongside reading the English classics, I was plunged into a landscape where generations of Hindi writers had created a whole different universe that emerged from the heart of the motherland. And then there was the holdall of translated works! Especially the Russian masterpieces that were not only available to me in English, but also in Hindi during the 1990s. My grandmother, a Hindi professor, was a voracious reader and my father would often call her 'his library of languages'.