Milton, John

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323Cadernos de Literatura em Tradução  no. 4, p. 323-331ENTREVISTA COM GEETADHARMARAJAN, KATHAJohn MiltonÍndia: uma infinidade de línguas e dialetos, uma infinidade detraduções. O inglês é a língua das universidades, dos negócios e dogoverno, mas somente uma minoria de 5% fala inglês com algumafluência. Hindi é a língua franca do norte da Índia, e tem parentescocom outras línguas como bengali, gujarati e rajasthani, mas não com asdo sul, as línguas dravídicas como Tamil, Malayalam e Kannada. Ocontato entre o falante de hindi do Norte e o falante de tamil do Sulocorre em inglês.  Esta entrevista descreve o trabalho da Katha, umaorganização não-governamental que desenvolve atividades educacionaisem que a tradução é a fundamental.Tell me a little about the founding of KathaKatha was started by me in 1988. The first idea was to do something forchildren, a kind of health and environment magazine for children, whichwould also have a translation activity. I started working on these ideas in1988. In 1989 the children’s magazine was published, and I had a smallamount of money, and with that the society was registered in SeptemberEntrevista com Geeta Dharmarajan3241989. The idea was that we needed ways in which we could reach out tochildren who came from non-literate families, who were the first ones intheir family to go to school. But when we started sending the magazineout to these children, we found that many of them were dropping out ofschool, they were not very happy in school.  There were various reasonsfor that, and many of them never even got into school. So the whole ideaof the magazine shifted from being a magazine for children in school tochildren who were out of school but attached to various learningprogrammes being run by voluntary agencies. At the same time, the otherwork on translation was happening. In fact I was the only person in Kathaat that point. I was working on collecting stories, working with people indifferent languages, writing letters to them.Translation was central right from the beginning?From the beginning, yes, translation and children’s literature, children’sempowerment was central to the work of Katha.This was connected with learning English?Not at all. It was not connected with English. In fact, the very first translationthat was published by Katha, the first book, was supposed to be in one ofour languages, Tamil, and English. From the beginning the effort was toget it into as many Indian languages as possible, into the bashas, theIndian languages other than English. Only 5% of the population speaksEnglish, and there’s only 10% of that English speaking audience thatbuys and reads literature in English, but still, English is spoken in allIndia, it’s something pan-Indian. So it was possible for us to go intoEnglish, and as we did not find any money to go into Tamil, we stayed325Cadernos de Literatura em Tradução  no. 4, p. 323-331with English. But that was a constraint which was of economics ratherthan a desire.You began publishing the Katha volumes of translated short stories quitesoon after you began?I started work on it in 1989, and our first volume came out in 1991, withstories from 1989 and 1990, and it has been published every year  sincethen.And these were not specifically not directed at children?Not at all. They were the best stories that were being written in India. Wehad nominating editors in each language, who were respected in theirlanguages, scholars, critics, writers themselves. They read as many as ahundred journals that were being published in their own language,  andthey nominated three stories to Katha. We translated about 50 or 60stories that came to us every year,  and from them we choose about 14or 15 stories. It’s an annual search for excellence through the country.You seem to tend to prioritize fluent, readable translations? We have been working very hard on this, to make the translations fluentand readable. We believe that a translation cannot just stick to the word.It has to go beyond the word and carry some of the imagination andcreativity of the original. When you read an original you say, “I want totranslate this, I want more people to read it!”, and you want that samefeeling to be there in the translation. All of our books take about a year toedit and bring out, and the process is very complicated, complex andEntrevista com Geeta Dharmarajan326long. We normally have a rough translation made of story to see howsuitable it is. Then, once we like what is there, the story that is hidden in therough translation, because it’s normally it’s people who are just trying theirhand at translation just make a rough translation for us. Please understandthat we don’t have too much money. So mainly it’s students or people whoare very interested and have skills in two languages who do a roughtranslation. Then, after we look at it, we either go back to the same personor to somebody else – we prefer to go to somebody else - to get a finaltranslation. Once it comes to us, we have a resource person in that language.None of us can speak all the languages from which we translate, so wehave resource people for all of the languages. They compare the originalwith the translation and tell us where the translator seems to havemisunderstood the story or gone away from the story, has not got the rightnuance. We try to work towards a very nuanced text, and that takes manystages, and it goes back and forth, and we reach a point when the finaltranslation, after it has been edited in-house, is sent back to the nominatingeditor, the writer and the translator, and they put in their comments andsend it back. These comments are then incorporated, and finally we havea text we think is readable and is close to the original.Some of the translations don’t seem to convey information about specificIndian communities; they seem to be outside a specific culturalbackground. It may be because the stories are set in urban areas, where there is a veryhomogenized kind of society, or it may be a problem with the firsttranslation. There may have been a kind of flattening that happenedthere, and so it comes to us. What we have tried to do at Katha is tokeep, for instance, primary kinship terms in the original language. We try327Cadernos de Literatura em Tradução  no. 4, p. 323-331to keep words like paisa, which we would not translate into porridge, aspaisa has a very specific meaning and taste. This gives the flavour of theregional languages and culture.It seems that you place translation as central to Indian culture andliterature?Translation activities go back at least three or four thousand years. TheRamanan and the Maharabata have been translated over and over againinto many of our Indian languages, but I must say that there is a differencein the way it was translated. In India ownership is not the main thing. Wetake a story and we own it and then we rewrite it. We have two words,anwar, close to our idea of translation, and rupanta, a very free recreationof a story. Even today you will find many people who believe that if youread a story ten times, you take it in, then you give it to your reader inyour language in the way you want to. So the presentation is not a word-to-word or line-to-line equivalence. It is a story which comes from theheart of a writer, and then is taken into the heart of a translator, andcomes from the heart of a translator. We have problems with that. Kathadoes not do a rupanta; we don’t do an anwar, a literal word-for-wordtranslation, nor are we doing a very free translation. We believe that awriter must be brought close to the reader, and the reader must be broughtclose to the writer, which means that you need a middle way. And whatKatha is trying to reach is a point which could be a perfect middle waybetween the reader and the writer, so that both of them are travelling alittle distance, both are trying to understand each other, and there areenough signposts that the writer provides for the reader, and the reader iswilling to read the signposts and move ahead.Entrevista com Geeta Dharmarajan328And you’ve also been working with oral literature. We have been working with oral literature from 1994 on. We started bycollecting some stories from six different languages. We were so excitedby the stories and the riddles and the puzzles and the poems, the narrativesand the songs. Some of the songs came from women who were notliterate, who had gone on long pilgrimages and who sent back theirexperiences in the form of songs. When you hear these songs, you aretaken to another world altogether. About three years ago, we began anaward for oral literatures, and this year we have started the Katha resourcecentre for oral literatures, a memory bank where we are collecting stories,poems, riddles, songs that people remember.And so translation is central to the work you carry out with children? It is quite central. We are looking at translation and education, the storyand education. In the making of civil society, then here in India at least,the story becomes very central to our way of learning. We are not lookingat education being divorced from life and living itself. We live our lives indifferent ways, and we want to live it as well as we can. And in fact thestory is a very vicarious way of looking at life. It’s a way of learning, andacquiring interpersonal skills, communication skills, leadership. There’sa lot of learning that you can get from a story. And that’s what we do withour children. The Indian story doesn’t come in just one but manylanguages. Therefore this whole process of translation comes in. We doa lot of work with teachers, some who teach working children, others informal government schools and others in higher education. We havefound that the way you translate a story in a classroom will not always bea language translation. You’re translating it into action, body language,329Cadernos de Literatura em Tradução  no. 4, p. 323-331through your eye and face movement, how you express yourself. We’vebeen looking at various ways in which dance and theatre come intoeducation. This is something that has also excited people outside India,and now we have interns coming from the University of London, Texas atAustin and in the future from Chicago. So we see the Indian way ofteaching and communicating using various tools of translation, becomingmore important.I read your book on educating poor rural women, telling them theyshouldn’t have children before they’re 18, in the latest edition 21! There’sanother area that interested me – small business administration. Whatexactly is that?We work with working children, and they can only read in Hindi. Manyschools in Indian only teach in English, and they’re very expensive. If youlook around the country, you will find that there are many small businesses,micro-level businesses, small shops with a turnover of 20,000 rupees(US$500) a year, not much money at all. All of them are looking at waysin which their businesses can grow. They want some amount of e-commerce, to use their computers to make their accounts, and they don’thave people who can do that for them, as they can’t pay high salaries.Our young students, 16 and 17 years-old, who have been with us sincethey were small, are being trained and taking their diplomas in SmallBusiness Management, helping to make small businesses grow. We havealso started the Katha Information Technology and e-commerce School,which is again looking at IT and  e-commerce for small businesses.Isn’t there ever any resentment from government schools that you aretaking over what they’re doing?Entrevista com Geeta Dharmarajan330 We don’t take over what they’re doing. We started off with the story andsaid that there are many ways in which the story can be used, whetheryou’re teaching sociology or psychology or language or history of maths,and when we went in with our techniques, our pedagogy, the schoolswere interested, so we work with teachers to increase their presence inthe classroom. We are helping to develop new tools for classroom use,new pedagogies, new teaching and learning material. So we are workingwith the teachers to make them more effective, so there is no resentment.In fact, they welcomed Katha’s  intervention in their work.And how is Katha financed?Katha’s books are  self-supporting. Our books have sold well, and nowwe have our own marketing division, which sells our books, which areavailable all over the country.Do you get government grants?We do not get government grants for our books. We get governmentgrants for the working children’s programme. We get grants from theFederal Government of India and we also get it from the StateGovernment, which has also given us a building, and they pay for theutilities. The funding for that programme comes from various sources,including the government, and corporate businesses. We have academiccentres in some five or six universities, which work through the affiliatedColleges of Education. We are starting a media initiative in storytelling in2001. I believe that we have forgotten to tell a story to our children andgrandchildren, and the dependence on television is becoming excessivelyhigh. We believe that it is possible to reclaim the traditions which we had331Cadernos de Literatura em Tradução  no. 4, p. 323-331in storytelling. So we are bringing in traditional and modern storytellers,looking at films, and want actors to come in and help parents andgrandparents to tell the story properly to their own children. We’re lookingat the creation of the moral and value basis of civil society.You also have a course for businessmen?It’s called Lead, to build leadership. We have a one-year course andshorter courses which look at leadership qualities through the story:interpersonal skills, how you manage a rumour in your office, storiesgoing around about a person, then it builds up, and then you have bombon your hands. So how do you diffuse that? How do manage difficultsituations? We do that through the story.Geeta Dharmarajan, thank you very much.Entrevista concedida a John Milton em 15 de dezembro de 2000, emNova Delhi

Entrevista com Geeta Dharmarajan, Katha

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Entrevista com Geeta Dharmarajan, Katha

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