"Translator Translated" by Anita Desai

Image result for anita desai translator translatedPrema Joshi is a “prematurely aged” instructor of English literature at a girls’ college, “a tired woman going home from work with nothing to look forward to, nothing to smile about,” who sees a way out of her malaise when she unexpectedly gets a chance to translate into English a set of short stories written in one of India’s many regional languages.
The focus here is the hierarchy that separates writer and translator, with the latter clearly in an inferior position and frustrated by it, and what happens when a translator violates that order. But Ms. Desai also uses the novella for satiric purposes, perhaps to exact vengeance on some literary nationalists in India; at one point Prema and her publisher attend a conference where they are hectored by “a pudgy man in a sweat-stained suit,” who imperiously demands to know, “What made you decide to translate these stories into a colonial language that was responsible for destroying the original language?”
...
"Translator Translated", is narrated by another solitary – an embittered English teacher. Prema's secret love is her mother's native language, Orissa, and "the unsung heroine of Orya letters, Suvarna Devi". Through a chance meeting with a publisher, Prema starts translating Suvarna Devi's stories into English. Her proudest moment is when this text is published, but the imagined glory of her meeting with the shy author shrivels in actuality as the ignorant, confident publisher monopolises Suvarna Devi, and Prema watches her chance of a moment of understanding and recognition slip away. Prema secretly starts editing Suvarna Devi radically as she translates, upping the emotional tempo, changing "red" to "crimson" and "anger" to "rage". But the author's family complains, the publisher drops Prema and her life suddenly "stretches out before [her] like an empty, unlit road". Suvarna Devi goes on living and creating far away in her village, but the secondary creator's fate is sadder: trying to write herself, Prema can only reproduce Devi's literary voice. Once again the dead hand of our system of consumption suffocates the living impulse to create.

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