Rahul Soni on translating Geetanjali Shree’s 'The Roof Beneath Their Feet'

Though Geetanjali Shree has been a big name in Hindi literature since the 1990s, her International Booker Prize win last year has brought her work into sharp focus.

Her 2007 Hindi language book Tirohit is the story of two women brought together by fate and united through their love for the joint terrace of the Laburnum House that roofs several individual residential quarters, providing the people who live in them—especially women and children—a respite from the suffocations of everyday domestic life.

First translated in English 10 years ago as The Roof Beneath Their Feet by Rahul Soni, the translation has been freshly reissued by Penguin Random House in light of a renewed interest in Shree’s literary repertoire. In this exclusive interview, Soni talks about the insidious ways in which cultural-imperial power still works, the joys and challenges of translating Tirohit, the book’s wonderful English title, the rules he adheres to when translating, and more.

It did not, actually. This translation – The Roof Beneath Their Feet – was first published in 2013. In fact, several of Geetanjali Shree’s earlier novels are available in English. The translation of her novel Khali Jagah – The Empty Space – came out in 2011; the translation of Mai, her first novel, came out even earlier, in 2000, I think.

All this is to say that Geetanjali Shree has been a very prominent name in Hindi fiction since the 1990s, and English language publishers and translators in India have known of and been interested in her work and its possibilities in English for almost as long. It’s sadly only now, with the International Booker Prize win, that the media and a larger readership, within her own country – even within the language she originally writes in – have woken up to the existence of this significant body of work. And that is what has led to the reissue of this translation now. Which is a cause for happiness, sure. But it is also very telling of how colonised our mindset, by and large, still remains, how cultural-imperial power still works and also indicates quite clearly the state and status of literature in our country.

Geetanjali is, of course, only one writer. There are a number of other writers in various Indian languages – many of them very well-translated, too, and published in India – deserving of the attention of readers everywhere interested in world literature, who will not get that attention – in their own country or in the rest of the world – simply because they have not yet been “discovered” by a Western publisher or translator or prize.

I knew a little about Geetanjali’s work at that point, but not enough, and I hadn’t really considered translating it, to be honest. This was a commissioned translation, which came about over the course of a conversation with the author. And then Minakshi Thakur, who was working with HarperCollins at that point, signed it up.

Of course, I wouldn’t have taken it on if I didn’t think that Geetanjali was doing some very interesting things with language, too. My only concerns when taking on a project are, as I’ve said elsewhere: does the work speak to me? Or is there something I can learn, craft-wise, from translating it? It is important that a work provides creative satisfaction and opportunities to pick up more skills for my translator’s/writer’s toolkit.

Credit for that goes entirely to Geetanjali who was convinced from the outset that a straightforward translation of the title Tirohit – something like Hidden – would not work. It needed a lilt, a playfulness. This title came from her. And given the themes of the novel and its location, it fits very well. I had misgivings about the similarity of the title to Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, but Geetanjali stood her ground, and I’ve come around to liking it a lot – in fact, to me, now, this title feels so bound up with the identity of the book that I find it hard to think of it as anything else – even Tirohit.

Tirohit was a work that was very, very different, almost at the other extreme in some ways perhaps, from Magadh which I was working on and deeply immersed in at the time – maximalist prose as opposed to minimalist verse – and it would require a completely different approach, the creation of an entirely different kind of English. But then that is one of the great pleasures and one of the most important functions of translation – at least from a writer’s perspective – you’re not merely bringing a story to readers who cannot access the original, you are also, if it happens to be a literary work of merit and if you attend to it with the requisite seriousness, expanding the possibilities of the “target” language.

I remember struggling for months over the first paragraph, to hit the right note, and get the right voice – but once that happened, the rest of the novel came to me much easier, and the first draft happened rather quickly. There were many subsequent revisions, of course, as I refined and edited that first draft. And I made some minor — but, to my mind, important — edits for the new edition as well.

What were the particular challenges with Geetanjali’s work? Playfulness is key – there is wordplay, of course, there are allusions and echoes, there is rapid switching between registers, and things are hinted at rather than spelled out. There is a music to her sentences that does not come easily to “standard” English – nor do some of the other qualities enumerated above. It is tempting to either completely iron out and flatten the language or to over-explain. I’ve tried, I hope with some degree of success, to avoid these pitfalls and create a language that could carry all these notes.

The first rule of translating: there are no rules. Every text presents different challenges and requires a different approach. (I am only talking about serious literary work here, of course).

Second: I try to adhere to the “literal force” of the text and avoid interpreting. The text is the sole guide. What I like to aim for is to try and replicate the effects of the original in the target language, without adding or subtracting anything – that is the ideal.

Third, and this should be self-evident, but sadly isn’t – when you’re translating a work of literature, you should be producing a work of literature.

Every language has its own properties, some unique, some not so unique. I think it’s misleading to characterise any one language as being more poetic, more malleable, or more (or less) anything than another language. I think any language that has evolved enough to have a developed, complex literature is as capable as any other of a full range of expression. What great writers do, and what can be truly called “literary” texts (as opposed to what the publishing industry might designate “literary fiction”), is push at the boundaries of what their language is capable of. And as I said above, I think that is also one of the crucial functions of good translations – to push a language to do things that might not traditionally or historically be ways in which it has been used before.

There are so many brilliant moments, sentences, and scenes throughout the novel, and Bitva’s predicament (or situation) is not without pathos. But I think it is Chachcho’s and Lalna’s friendship that resonates with me most now – it is one that defies labels and attempts at labelling – and the fact that its indefinability is at the centre of the novel.

At a time when, more and more, in all sorts of ways and contexts, and from all quarters, we are faced with demands to identify with one thing or another, with attempts to pin down, to essentialise, it feels courageous – and essential – to resist that. Not everything needs to be slotted into easy categories or genres, whether it is people or relationships or books, or works of art.