GAINS IN TRANSLATION

LE Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — originally written in French — has been translated into more than 300 languages.

- FLY LEAF VR FEROSE

It is the most translated nonreligious text in the world, second only to the Bible.

That children’s books dominate this global list is no surprise. Alongside The Little Prince, we find Harry Potter, Alice in Wonderland, The Adventures of Tintin, and The Adventures of Asterix. Children’s literature, in its innocence and universality, often travels farther than books meant ‘for adults’.

My own reflections on translation were rekindled when I read the obituary of Edith Grossman in The New York Times. Grossman was no ordinary translator; she elevated the craft into an art form at a time when translation was not even considered a serious academic discipline.

Her versions of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera and Cervantes’ Don Quixote became classics in their own right. Grossman insisted that her name appear alongside the authors on the cover —a radical but necessary assertion that translators are co-creators, not invisible intermediaries.

I feel a personal connection to this debate. Some of my books have been translated into multiple Indian languages, opening my writing to readers I may never meet.