Not Lost in Translation:
Not Lost in Translation: Not Lost in Translation:
Not Lost in Translation:
Chemmeen
ChemmeenChemmeen
Chemmeen
on Alien Shores
on Alien Shoreson Alien Shores
on Alien Shores
Mini Chandran
Mini ChandranMini Chandran
Mini Chandran
Abstract
The process of translation as it is generally understood often
implies loss of subtle linguistic nuances and cultural flavour in
the target language. Are there components that survive
translation and appeal to ‘other’ cultures and languages? This
paper attempts to answer this question by foregrounding the
Malayalam writer Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s Chemmeen,
which is one of the most translated works in Malayalam. The
success of Chemmeen in translation is a surprise, given the fact
that it is about a very specific culture, which is of the fisher
folk in the coastal region of Alappuzha and that it is written
in an almost untranslatable colloquial Malayalam. Obviously
there are factors that have surmounted the obstacles of
language and cultural difference.The paper focuses on the
components that survive the process of translation, like the
structural simplicity of the story that can be reduced to an
archetype or the elements of folklore that resonate even on
culturally alien shores.
The notion of loss is implicit in the process of translation;
the assumption is that complete equivalence between two languages
is impossible and that meaning slips through the interstices of
disparate cultures. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis underlines this
aspect: “No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be
considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in
which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the
same world with different labels attached: (Bassnett 13). Thus the
premise is that the wider the cultural divide between the SL and TL,
the more difficult it is to translate. Keeping in tune with cultural
differences, the linguistic nuances are also thought to pose a problem
for the translator. Are there factors that bridge this divide, and make
Translation Today Vol. 4 No. 1 & 2 2007 © CIIL 2007
52 Mini Chandran
easier the process of interlingual and intercultural communication,
which translation is? If so, would these factors determine the
translatability of a text across linguistic and cultural divides? The
goal of this exposition is to attempt an answer to this question by
foregrounding the English translation of a Malayalam novel,
Chemmeen, written by Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai.
Chemmeen (translated as ‘Shrimp’) was published in 1956,
and became the first Malayalam novel to win the Sahitya Akademi
prize. It sold well in Malayalam and was translated into numerous
languages in India and abroad. The first foreign language translation
was into the Czech language by Kamil Selabil. According to D. C.
Kizhakkemuri, the publisher of Chemmeen in Kerala, the novel sold
44,000 copies upto its 19
th
edition in Malayalam and 57,000 copies
in the Czech language. DC reminds us: “You must not forget that the
number of Czech speakers is not even half the number of Malayalis”
(Preface to the First edition of Chemmeen). The intersemiotic
translation into the cinematic medium was equally successful. It won
the President’s Gold Medal for Best Film in 1964, and is considered
a classic, noted for its acting, cinematography and music. So
Chemmeen, in its original language and its interlingual and
intersemiotic translated forms, can be considered an artistic and
commercial success.
What is surprising about this success is that Chemmeen is
not the finest of Thakazhi’s (as Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai is
popularly known) works. He is one of the best novelists of Kerala,
perhaps even of India and won the Jnanpith award in 1984. He has
written numerous short stories besides novels like Randidangazhi,
Thottiyude Makan, Enippadikal and his masterpiece Kayar.
Thakazhi himself has confessed that Chemmeen is a bit of a
‘painkili’, which means mushy or sentimental love story. It does not
have the social issues that he discusses in Randidangazhi or
Thottiyude makan or the thematic complexity of Enippadikal or
Kayar. Moreover, it is a linguistic nightmare as far as the translator
is concerned, because the characters speak the colloquial idiom of a
particularly small fishing community that lives only in a few villages
of Alappuzha. The Malayalam that they speak contains words that
are unintelligible to the rest of the Malayalam-speaking people in
Kerala.
Capturing nuances of dialect in English translation is a
major challenge for any translator. R.E. Asher, well known for his
English translation of another major Malayalam writer Vaikom
Muhammed Basheer, has written about the difficulty of capturing
the evanescent dialect in a foreign language like English.
(Incidentally, Asher has also translated Thakazhi’s works). When
confronted with the “Islamic terminology that is no more familiar to
the non-Muslim Malayali reader than it would be to the average non-
Muslim speaker of English,” Asher says he had no option but to
sacrifice such dialectical variations completely because there was no
English substitute for a vernacular dialect (xiv-xv). The form of
Malayalam that Thakazhi uses in Chemmeen is also unfamiliar to a
majority of Malayalam speakers. Interestingly, Narayana Menon the
English translator of Chemmeen, does not make any comment on the
equally vexing task of translating the colloquial idiom of coastal
Alappuzha. Perhaps, translation as a self-conscious activity was not
that well developed in 1962 when the translation was first
undertaken. Or perhaps, as A.J. Thomas argues: “Making the
translation eminently readable and racy, Narayana Menon got away
with it – at the cost of the narrative marvel of the original, through
deletions, suppressions, and mutilations,…” (Thomas 2005:45).
Thomas points out that Menon unabashedly foreignized the original
to cater to western readers, and the commercial success of the
translated version indicates the triumph of the translator. However,
the translator’s interventions seem to be in the domain of the cultural
ethos. As Thomas (2005) illustrates, Menon edits out portions which
he thinks would be meaningless for a culturally foreign readership;
rarely does he leave out a sentence because it is too colloquial to be
captured in a foreign tongue. This strengthens my argument that
there is an element, the dynamics of which we will do well to study
54 Mini Chandran
and understand, in Chemmeen that makes you forget language and
the related problematics when it comes to translation, which
encourages a look at the factors that are extrinsic to the language of
the novel to account for its, or any text’s, translatability, and its
appeal despite the apparent untransaltability.
Structurally, the novel is extremely simple probably because
Thakazhi’s characteristic narrative style is simple and linear. The
central characters are Karuthamma and Pareekutty, who are
childhood friends and now lovers. They belong to two different
communities, she to the Marackan (which is Hindu fisherfolk)
community and he to the Muslim community, and marriages
between the two are strictly forbidden. Despite this they are drawn to
each other in a love that is not destined to end in marriage. The story
is complicated further as he is Kochumuthalali, or the owner of the
tanning yards on the seashore whereas she belongs to a poor
fisherman’s family. Karuthamma’s parents sense the budding love
between their daughter and the young and handsome Pareekutty, but
turn a blind eye to it temporarily as he lends money to her father to
buy a new boat and fishing net. Chembankunju, Karuthamma’s
father, grows rich on Pareekutty’s money while Pareekutty falls
deeper and deeper into debt. Karuthamma is a mute witness to his
downfall. The nouveau riche Chembankunju arranges Karuthamma’s
marriage with Palani, an energetic and hardworking fisherman from
another village. Karuthamma bids farewell to Pareekutty and starts
her marital life with Palani. Life is good for them and a daughter is
born. Meanwhile, Chembankunju’s life becomes a misery as his
wife dies and he remarries. The ill-gotten wealth soon dissipates and
he is financially ruined. The relationship between Karuthamma and
Palani is marred now and then by Pareekutty’s shadow as Palani
accuses her, without any basis whatsoever, of infidelity.
Karuthamma’s resistance gives way one stormy night when Palani is
out at sea, and she goes off with Pareekutty. The next morning, both
lovers are washed up on the beach and Palani dies at sea, fighting a
shark.
The story can be reduced to the Karuthamma-Pareekutty-
Palani love triangle which is set against the myth of the Kadalamma
(‘goddess of the sea’) who is Preserver and Destroyer. She is
beneficent to the fisherman who leads a life of moral purity; even on
the stormiest seas, she guards the fisherman whose wife remains
chaste and prays for his safe return while he is at sea. It is not only
the man’s life, but the life of the community as well that hangs upon
the moral purity of the woman. The land, or in this context, the
seashore, is identified with the woman’s body because local lore
depicts a chaste woman who succeeds in bringing her man back
from the jaws of impending death.
Shorn of its cultural and linguistic trappings, the
Karuthamma-Pareekutty relationship is very much a love story like
Laila-Manju, Farhad-Shirin or Heer-Ranjha of the East and Romeo
and Juliet of the West. The story of the star-crossed lovers that ends
in death is very familiar and cuts across cultural and geographical
barriers. Patrick Colm Hogan underscores this point in his study of
literary universals by saying that “… every tradition tells tales of
conflict in two areas – love and political power” (23). He points out:
“Perhaps the most cross-culturally widespread version of the love
plot is a particular variation on the comic love story. This variation,
“romantic tragic-comedy”, in effect includes the tragic love story,
where the lovers are separated, typically by death, often with a
suggestion of literal or metaphorical reunion after death…” (24).
These ‘prototypical narratives’ that appeal to our emotions (Hogan
6) have the capability to transcend cultural divides.
Chemmeen follows this ‘accepted’ pattern of the tragic love
story. The central characters of Karuthamma and Pareekutty are
types, not rounded characters. Pareekutty is the typical romantic
lover living in the dreamland of his love. Palani is the antithesis of
Pareekutty in every way – he is a solid realist, a counterpoint to
Pareekutty’s romantic dreamer and lover, sparse with words where
Pareekutty is eloquent in love. Karuthamma is thus caught between
romantic love and the realistic man-woman relationship in wedlock.
The moonlight and song that are associated with Pareekutty is a clear
56 Mini Chandran
indication of this dichotomy between romantic aspiration and harsh
reality: “One moonlit night when the sea was calm, Karuthamma
heard a song which seemed to mingle with the moonlight.
Pareekutty was singing. It wasn’t as Pareekutty’s song that the music
sounded in her ears. Pareekutty’s entity was no longer there. She felt
as if she was being called to a world of joy and happiness, the call of
the seashore bathed in moonlight, the music of the seashore she was
bidding farewell to.” (Chemmeen 76) After Karuthamma gets
married and goes away to her husband’s house, the love-lorn
Pareekutty wanders on the seashore singing his heart out, like
Majnu, of the Laila Majnu story, made majnu (mad) by his love for
Laila.
This love story is framed by the Kadalamma narrative and
this mythical frame defines the relationships in the novel. The myth
of the sea goddess is common to most sea-faring countries. The Inuit
myth of Sedna, the Chinese myth of Mazu, the Greek myths of
Thetis and Leucothea are a few instances. There is even a goddess of
the sea named Bavers in Santharia, a cyber realm based on the
Tolkien myths. Myths are bound to evolve especially in a
community that lives in close proximity to the sea, dependent on its
vagaries for a livelihood. In Chemmeen, this myth is woven with
elements of the folktale. In typical folktale fashion, it is
Karuthamma’s mother Chakki who reiterates Kadalamma’s
contradictory qualities: “Do you know why sea goes dark
sometimes? That is when the anger of the goddess of the sea is
roused. Then she would destroy everything. At other times she
would give her children everything. There is gold in the sea, child,
gold” (7).
The world of undisplaced myth, according to Northrop Fyre,
is a world “with gods or demons, and which takes the form of two
contrasting worlds of total metaphorical identification, one desirable
and the other undesirable” (139). We discern this mythical aspect in
the description of Kadalamma’s fury when she drags fishermen to
the unplumbed depths of the ocean:
“The waves rose high on the sea. The whales approached
him with their mouths gaping. The sharks charged the
boat with their tails. The current dragged the boat into a
terrible whirlpool” (6).
When the benevolence of the goddess is transformed to fury,
the desirable world of the life-bestowing sea gives way to the
undesirable to oceanic depths that offer death to the human. The
contrast between the upper world and the Stygian depths of the
underworld are clearly brought out again in the scene of Palani’s
death when his boat is caught in a whirlpool: “The palace of the
goddess of the sea was at the bottom of the deep sea. There the sea
goddess was enshrined. Palani had heard descriptions of that palace.
He had to get there through a whirlpool, a whirlpool which made the
whole sea churn round in circles, knocking at the gates of the sea
goddess’s abode” (171).
The sea, as a huge water body, also teems with symbolic
associations. Water, according to Jung, is “the commonest symbol
for the unconscious” (18). He points out that drowning in water is
the prelude to the attainment of wisdom: “… the way of the soul in
search of its lost father … leads to the water, to the dark mirror that
reposes at its bottom (17). Frye also discusses the symbol of the sea
at length, where the sea is home to the leviathan, the monster which
devours, but is also a source of life-giving waters (191-192). But the
huge water body of the sea in Chemmeen does not regenerate; it
merely spews death and destruction. Karuthamma and Pareekutty
decide to merge their lives with the sea, and Palani’s boat is towed
by the shark, like Captain Ahab’s by the white whale, to definite
death. Palani is the scapegoat that has to be sacrificed so that the
fishing community of the seashore is saved from the fury of
Kadalamma, and the lovers united in death. This would fall into the
‘sacrificial tragic-comedy’ prototype outlined by Hogan, where the
“…physical, rather than a personal, social, or transcendental goal –
prototypically, food, plenty of the primary means for maintaining
life…” are taken care of by the sacrifice of a person (181-182).
Palani has to die to ward off the curse of famine and starvation
58 Mini Chandran
which was bound to stalk the shore because of his wife
Karuthamma’s sexual transgression. It is significant that after his
death, the lovers are united – literally and metaphorically, for when
their dead bodies are washed up or returned by an appeased
Kadalamma, they are in each other’s arms. Moreover, there is
promise of life hereafter as we see Karuthamma’s and Palani’s girl
child who can be the mother of the progeny to come.
The archetypal mother figure can also be located in the
Kadalamma myth. Jung stresses the infinite variety of the mother
archetype. He points out that many things that arouse devotion or
awe can be mother symbols, like the earth, the woods, sea or moon
(81). It is also associated with places that symbolize fertility.
Kadalamma in her benign form is the Bountiful Giver, the mother
who tenderly looks after her straying children, but she can also be
the terrible Destroyer. As Jung points out, “On the negative side the
mother archetype may connote anything secret, hidden, dark; the
abyss, the world of the dead, anything that devours, seduces and
poisons, that is terrifying and inescapable like fate” (82). The cross-
cultural examples that are cited by Jung range from the Indian notion
of Kali and Mary who is not only the Lord’s mother but in some
medieval allegories his cross.
The Kadalamma myth is dexterously woven with the
fisherman community’s belief that the safety of the man at sea is in
the hands of his woman who, remaining chaste, prays for his safe
return. In the folktale of the seashore, the first fisherman who fought
with the waves came back safely “Because, on the shore, a chaste
and pure woman was praying steadfastly for the safety of her
husband at sea. The daughters of the sea knew the power of that
prayer and the meaning of that way of life” (6). However, it is not
only the husband’s personal safety that is at stake, but the survival of
the community as a whole. It is the purity of the seashore itself that
is in the hands of the womenfolk, and any transgression could invite
Kadalamma’s wrath. “Because a woman strayed off the path of
virtue, the waves rose as high as a mountain and the water engulfed
the seashore. The seashore was infested with poisonous sea snakes.
Other monsters of the sea with mouths as large as caves darted after
the boats” (75) this notion of chastity at first appears to be very
culture-specific, or Indian, but the identification of the honour/safety
of the land with the female body transcends geographical barriers.
The universal phenomenon of the plunder and pillage of the land by
an invading and conquering army is parallelled by the rape of its
womenfolk. This “land-as-woman” symbol (as Annette Kolodny
terms it in her book The Lay of the Land ix) has been explored by
feminist theoreticians and more recently, by ecocritics alike and we
can safely assume that this is a symbol that would be read and
comprehended almost universally.
The power of the chaste woman is a recurring theme in
many other myths, like Penelope waiting at home for her husband
Ulysses while he is on his voyages. In India, we have the Satyavan –
Savitri story, where Savitri’s devotion to her husband persuades
Yama to do the unthinkable, which is, return Satyavan from the land
of the dead. Kannaki’s righteous anger reduces the mighty Pandya
capital to mere ashes and dust. Sati’s immolation marks the
destruction of her father Daksha, at the hands of her husband Siva.
Besides these very indirect echoes of myth and legend,
Chemmeen is imbued with the spirit of traditions and customs that
seem to pre-date the community. At the time of Karuthamma’s
marriage, the neighbouring women come together to give her advice
on the responsibilities of a wife, because it was “an age-old custom”,
and “if she [Karuthamma] went wrong, the community would blame
the neighbours” (74). Karuthamma’s decision to part with
Pareekutty is to uphold the time-honoured tradition of the seashore,
but she imagines that she is “reliving a story in a strange language
she could hardly follow. There must have been grandmothers who
suffered like this. The sea breeze murmured the same kind of sad
tale. In the sound of the waves, too, one could hear the same story”
(75). Tradition is continued through generations, and Karuthamma’s
blighted love story is but a link in this chain. This notion of
60 Mini Chandran
continuity elevates the story from the local and the specific and
places it on the level of universality that answers to some deep,
primeval aspect of human nature.
In his essay “The Task of the Translator” Walter Benjamin
discusses the translatability of literary works. He agrees with the
popular conception that in all literary and linguistic creation there
remains an element that cannot be communicated –“it is something
that symbolizes or something symbolized” (22). However, his
argument is that if the translator is able to get to the “pure” language,
“which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as
expressionless and creative word, that which is meant in all
languages”, then the translator’s task has succeeded (22). The mark
of the translatability of a text is its ability to be “identical with truth
and dogma, where it is supposed to be the “true language” in all its
literalness and without the mediation of meaning” (23).
It is perhaps the pure language of myth and folktales that
transcends linguistic and cultural divides that makes Thakazhi’s
Chemmeen a translator-friendly novel. Its structural simplicity
makes it a prototypical narrative with symbols that can easily
communicate to a reader in culturally alien realms. This aspect of the
novel is highlighted in the blurb on the dust jacket of the English
version:
“This is a book that deals with eternal values, and its
immemorial rhythms of sea and sky stir out hearts with
their haunting sweetness. The result is that Chemmeen
has the quality of a fable in which the lives, the
superstitions, the inner beliefs, the traditions and the
sufferings of the community of fishermen are portrayed
as a way of life with a deep and significant moral.”
This reductivity, which becomes an advantage in the process
of translation, also has the potential disadvantage of making a novel
an artistic failure. Somehow, Chemmeen manages to walk this
artistic tightrope fairly well, and hugely successfully. Its appeal, not
just to Malayali readers, but to readers in other languages as well as
in other media, is ample testimony to this.
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Routledge.
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Universals and Human Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge
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th
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62 Mini Chandran
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