Staying timeless through translation

Even as Malayalam author, translator and academician Rizio Yohannan Raj released the English translation of her book Avinasom (2000), in the city on Tuesday, she said that the English version A Tale of Things Timeless wasn’t a regular translated version. “When the translation was proposed by my editor, I thought that I wouldn’t be able to do it myself, because it would mean that I would have to go back and read the original text, relive it and try to come up with equivalents,” said the author, speaking to a group of students and professors at the Asian College of Journalism.

Considering the fact that the Malayalam version of the book was inspired by a suicide note left by a total stranger, she remembered the writing process as being a very painful period. Not knowing if she could go through that period of turbulence all over again, Rizio felt it would be a wiser choice for someone else to come up with a first translated draft before she could work on it. This is where translator Supriya Nair came in.

“Once I read Supriya’s draft, it wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be,” she says, adding that her experience in the publishing industry helped her work on it like any other work she was editing. “This is a revision of the original, not really a translation,” she summed up after a thoughtful pause.

The story about a small-time writer Avinash Suvarna and a young journalist Laya Thomas, A Tale of Things Timeless is about the evocatively intense relationship between two people. It’s about understanding another person in order to rediscover oneself.

“The story is not just about the central characters. It’s about everyone – everyone who has an aspiration, everyone who wants to go beyond the humdrum of life,” she said, emphasising that she considers her novel a “timeless tale,” simultaneously providing an explanation for the title of the English version of her book. “I didn’t just want a translated title. I wanted something that would have the same evocative quality of the Malayalam title,” she said.

Published by Harper Collins, A Tale of Things Timeless is priced at `299.