<figure><img width="4000" height="3000" src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/2022120710124/639057119c7e80680e0ce13ejpeg.jpg" alt=""/><figcaption>Ajit Baral of FinePrint in Kathmandu (left) who published Faatsung, the Nepali language novel from Darjeeling by Chuden Kabimbo (right), and also translated it into English as Song of the Soil which has been shortlisted for the JCB Prize in India. </figcaption></figure>Darjeeling-based writer Chuden Kabimbo’s Nepali language novel Faatsung was translated into English as Song of the Soil and published in Kathmandu by Ajit Baral of FinePrint. Now, Song of the Soil has been shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature which honours Indian authors. Kabimbo and Baral sat down for a conversation recently. Excerpts: Ajit Baral: You often stress that literature transcends geographical and linguistic boundaries. You were trying to prove that, literally, when you travelled to Nepal looking for a publisher. What made you look for a publisher in Nepal, even though your debut book, 1986, a collection of short stories, was published in Darjeeling? Did you have any inkling it might cross borders and be translated into other languages? Chuden Kabimo: I believe love and literature don't have any boundaries. I was born in a small village from where it took hours to reach Darjeeling. I had thought I would tell the story of this smaller Darjeeling to the bigger Darjeeling, and if possible, to people beyond Darjeeling. But I didn't know that this story would go as far as it has.  When I finished the novel, I thought it would be good if I could get some copies to Nepal. This brought me to Kathmandu, the city of my dreams, whose landmarks I grew up hearing about on the radio. Why would Kathmandu believe in an ordinary writer from a remote corner of Darjeeling? I had no reason to be hopeful. But fate had something else in store for the novel.  I had travelled to Nepal hoping to find a publisher, but returned with the happy news of simultaneous publication in Nepal and India. My story had, as you said, already crossed one boundary. Every book makes a different journey. The writer guides the story forward, but after the book is published, it is the other way around. Perhaps Faatsung made me aim for the wider world. Nothing is more important for a writer than the trust of their readers. This trust gave me the courage to go to Kathmandu for the first time in my life. Readers in Nepal loved the book, which must be why the translators were interested. The year it was published in Nepal, Samik Chakrawarti translated it into Bangla in Kolkata, enabling me to cross yet another geographical boundary. It was then translated into English, taking me as far away as the UK. And then the JCB shortlist happened. The Hindi translation is now complete. Soon it will make another journey into yet another geography, and I don’t know where it will go next. Ajit, you yourself have been a part of this beautiful journey, first as a publisher and then as a translator. Did you ever think that this novel would come this far? <img width="640" height="982" src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/2022120710124/639057169c7e80680e0ce13fjpeg.jpg" alt="">Ajit Baral: No. Not in my wildest dreams. I knew that the book was beautiful and that it would do well. Remember, I had asked you how many copies you would have printed had you printed it in India, and you had said 1,000 copies. To that, I told you we would print 10,000 copies. That is how confident I was about your book. But I never imagined that I would translate it into English as well, and it would go on to be translated into several other languages and published in the UK and India.The idea of translating came to me much later while editing the Nepali book, when I got to appreciate it better. Chuden Kabimbo: I still remember the days when you started work on the manuscript. Whenever you would come across a sentence or a paragraph that struck a chord with you, you would write to me saying, ‘What a beautiful line!’ or ‘What a beautiful paragraph!’ And I would feel that you were my true reader. But when you found something wrong with my writing, you would say, ‘This doesn't make sense. Please rewrite this bit.’ At that time, I must say you came across as a mean teacher. After dozens of changes, I even started to get irritated. Did you feel annoyed about all the work you had to put into it?  Ajit Baral: No, never. On the contrary, it was a sheer pleasure working on your manuscript. It is always fun when a draft is so good it requires little editing. And yours was just that. I may have made you rewrite a few sentences, but these were just for clarity, to make them read better, striking out repetitions, or asking questions about a character here or an incident there. I was careful not to make substantive changes to your writing which is so lyrical.  Chuden Kabimbo: And that continued when you started translating the book …Ajit Baral: Yes, it did. As Jhumpa Lahiri says, translating a novel ‘is the most intense form of reading and rereading there is’. It became apparent that I had overlooked a few weaknesses in the text, which I flagged and you tried to fix them. A translator should fix problems, if any, in the original text. More so in texts that  haven't gone through rigorous editing. But Anurag Basnet, who vetted and edited the translation, a champion of fidelity to the text, suggested that I remain faithful to the original. Now that we are at it, how did you feel when you read the novel in English translation? Chuden Kabimbo: When you first sent me a draft of the translation to read, I found that my own story had a different taste. The story was the same, but the tone was different. Maybe this is where the power of translation lies. I cannot read Bangla, so I don’t know how that is. But when I read the Hindi translation, I found its tone was also different. It had its own rhythm as well. And I realised that Nepali idioms sound pleasant in Hindi only after reading the translation.   Translation is a bridge through which not only our language and literature but also our society and culture cross over to different places and milieu. With Faatsung being translated into three languages, I feel our geographical imagination is also transported to a new society. You can feel the snow falling when reading a Russian novel. Faatsung's Hindi translator Namrata Chauturvedi keeps saying that every language is endowed with the power of its geographical imagination and that geography plays a vital role in forming memories and experiences, which we tap on to write literature. When translating Faatsung, local references often threw her off. Having grown up in Uttar Pradesh, she hadn't seen a landslide or terrace farming in the hills, which is very different from the plains. It was therefore important for her to describe the geography in the novel. A translator has to imagine it precisely, she says, otherwise, the writing risks losing its poetic strength. You are also from the mountains, Ajit, but the story of the Gorkhaland movement is not your story, and you had to translate it for an audience that was culturally and geographically removed. How challenging was that? Ajit Baral: I cannot recall the translation being challenging on account of this. I didn't worry about certain references getting lost on readers, as I had no idea at the time that it would get published outside Nepal. In any case, our UK publishers didn't ask us to make any changes to help readers, either. In hindsight, however, we could have expanded the context of the Gorkhaland movement a little for the benefit of those unfamiliar with it. This leads me to post you a counter question: Would you have written Faatsung a little differently if you had known that it would be translated into many languages?Chuden Kabimbo: I don’t know if I would have written it a little differently. In any case, I had written a novel, and I don’t think one has to describe everything to make the reader understand an event in a novel. My concern was only the story, and I was more interested in how much of that time of the Gorkhaland movement I can bring into the story and how I can tell the pain it unleashed without boring readers.Yes, people in other languages may not have heard of the Gorkhaland movement. They may be unfamiliar with the grim times that Darjeeling experienced. They may also be unaware of the story of that movement in which thousands of people lost their lives. But a work of fiction is to provide a glimpse of how the events affected the characters. It is to sketch out how terrible that conflict was, or how much was burnt when that fire raged.And I believe tears don’t have any language. When you see someone weeping, you feel their pain even though they may speak another language. I wanted to write about Darjeeling’s pain, and tell the story of that sorrow. Read more: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/taking-nepali-literature-to-the-world/">Taking Nepali literature to the world</a>, Ashish Dhakal

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A novelist talks to his translator

<figure><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221114101124/637209f39c7e80680e0b5572jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="507" height="600"/><figcaption>Author Buddhisagar. Photo: BUDDHISAGAR/FACEBOOK</figcaption></figure>Buddhisagar’s novel Karnali Blues starts with a father, who says after seeing his newborn son for the first time, “He has a mole on the sole of his foot, so he will have to walk a lot but he won’t go off anywhere and leave us.”His mother then asks the baby, “Will you go off and leave us when you’re big?”A statement from one parent, a question from the other.In a Thamel restaurant on a sunny winter afternoon, Buddhisagar walks in wearing a brick-orange jumper and black pants, looking as if he just returned from a track meet-and-greet. He apologises for being late. “I walk everywhere,” he offers as an explanation.He does not look like any of the pictures on the Internet, those that make him out to be larger-than-life celebrated Nepali author. Maybe it is because he is not expecting to be photographed.Read more: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/review/former-gurkha-soldier-turns-author/">Former Gurkha soldier turns authors</a>, Chun Bahadur GurungThis is the real Buddhisagar, in his most natural state. Perhaps this is how he looks writing in his own company, while sipping tea from a local vendor and building stories out of childhood nostalgia.Like Brisha Bahadur in Karnali Blues, Buddhisagar was also born in Matera, and brought up in Katasé and Kalikot. Like the main character of his novel, he was not academically gifted. But unlike his fictional counterpart, he was rather shy, Buddhisagar  confesses. So the prolific author most likely did not go around looking for mischief or drawing moustaches on pictures he found around the house.Many call Karnali Blues an autobiographical fiction. “Some parts of the beginning of the novel are real,” the author admits.<figure><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221114101124/637209f59c7e80680e0b5573jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="725" height="960"><figcaption> </figcaption></figure>The inspiration for the novel came in a hospital, a place of both birth and death. “My father was sick and like in the novel, he was in Kohalpur. He died later, from brain hemorrhage as well,” he says.But Buddhisagar does not think he is our protagonist. He explains, “A writer is never one character. They are inside the minds of young and old, of men and women - they are everywhere in fragments. There are some parts of me in Brisha Bahadur. There are some parts of my mother and father in him as well. He is not all me.”After a pause, he adds, “Just look at the poems he writes. If he was me, he perhaps could have written them better.”There is also the juxtaposition in the book between the two Harsha Bahadurs — one is the breadwinner of the family and the other lies paralysed in a hospital bed.Read also: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/nepali-literatures-thulnani-toya-gurung/">Toya Gurung: Nepali literature’s Thulnani</a>, Muna GurungThen, there are the two Brisha Bahadur: the child who looks up to his father, and the youth who still does so even as the father lies on his deathbed.Father and son oscillate between having to give and receive care to one another. There is also the pacing of the past and the present in the chapters of the novel. The present moves in a numbingly slow pace as the human mind goes through moments rejecting death, and yet accepting the hopelessness enveloping it whereas the past rushes up to the narrator like a deadly current in a moody river that catches up to those who do not want to be caught.“What matters the most to me is <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/latest/writing-about-nepal-from-afar/">authenticity</a>,” Buddhisagar says,  sipping on a single-shot Americano. “Regardless of whether a story is autobiographical or not, the readers must think that the events happening in the story can actually happen in reality.”<img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221114101124/637209f89c7e80680e0b5574jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1222" height="900">Karnali Blues tells us about <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/taking-nepali-literature-to-the-world/">people and places that age</a> through immaculately detailed visuals of the great river’s tributaries weaving themselves into the story.Villages and towns also have characters and stories to tell. A tea shop by the river turns into a small market. The river becomes a <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/here-now/how-the-bagmati-civilisation-is-becoming-uncivilised/">dumping site to accommodate modernisation</a>. The cattle get sick. A new bridge opens up a nearby town, and its population migrates, hoping for a better future.The village dries up, but the rivers stay polluted. There is death and abandonment, but even if one life ends, the other has to move forward. The title is apt, there is no other place to feel blue and desolate than in the Karnali.“The back-and-forth style of storytelling in Karnali Blues came from those hospital nights with my father,” Buddhisagar says, this time holding a freshly-lit cigarette between his fingers. “You start by reading about an unknown person, sick and on his deathbed,  and slowly, you walk along the story with him. Eventually, the readers get to know him and so when the end comes, it creates an emotional response.”Read also: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/taking-nepali-literature-to-the-world/">Taking Nepali literature to the world</a>, Ashish DhakalBecause we spend 400 pages with Harsha Bahadur, we know that he is a constantly caring patriarch whose love for blue waistcoats is immeasurable. We also know that Brisha Bahadur’s nameless mother is constantly forgiving. Despite being a troublemaker, we still adore Brisha Bahadur’s predilection for an expensive bicycle, or a leather jacket. His love for tea makes him the most relatable Nepali on earth. And thus we come to care for all of them.“Since I spent many years writing the novel, it opened a whole new world for me,” Buddhisagar says, blowing out blue smoke through his nostrils.It has been 12 years since he came out, and readers have come to love the world he created as well. It has now found new visitors with <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/taking-nepali-literature-to-the-world/">Michael Hutt’s English translation</a> (see above).<figure><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221114101124/637209fb9c7e80680e0b5575jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1080" height="792"><figcaption> </figcaption></figure>Language bridges distance, and so when asked whether he wishes to change the way he had written Karnali Blues, especially now that he has become a father himself, he shakes his head.“I don’t have any regrets about my past work. Whatever I had felt while writing the book has dissipated. If I read it now, I will do it as a reader,” says Buddisagar. “We are fathers of a different era. I don’t feel the need to change the way I have written about fatherhood in this novel.”Perhaps it is not Buddhisagar we should be looking for in our narrator, rather it is us readers that find ourselves in his characters. The way we were as children, the kind of parents we want to become.Maybe Buddhisagar has expertly hidden himself somewhere within lines like these in Hutt’s translation: “Once Father set out, he never looked back. He used to say, ‘If you turn to look back, your attachments will trap you and you won’t be able to go.’”Buddhisagar is working on his third novel. The English translation of Karnali Blues translated Michael Hutt is available in Kathmandu bookshops. Read also: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/here-now/the-story-of-books-in-nepal/">The story of books in Nepal</a>, Ashish Dhakal

The Man from Karnali

<img width="640" height="640" src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221114091156/637202dd9c7e80680e0b27d8jpeg.jpg" alt=""/>With 1,084,170 words, 198 chapters, seven books, one play and <a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/news.php?id=13770#.Yc-5xi2B3-Y" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">a billion-dollar franchise</a>, the Harry Potter series revived the reading habit of millennials everywhere. Twenty-five years after the first book came out, it is still the bestselling book series in history, translated into 80 languages – including Nepali.  Few know that in 2008 Sunbird Publishing House in Kathmandu secured the copyright from J K Rowling to officially translate Philosopher’s Stone into Nepali. This was part of Sunbird’s aim to publish more books in Nepali for rural children at a time when the Maoist insurgency had destroyed schools, disrupting education. The book was released as ह्यारी पोटर र पारसमणि  (Harry Potter ra Parasmani) translated by Shlesha Thapaliya and Bijaya Adhikari, and edited by <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/here-now/exploring-nepals-culinary-diversity/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Kedar Sharma</a>. Having grown up reading Harry Potter books, Thapaliya remembers being thrilled when Helen Sherpa of Sunbird reached out to ask if she would be interested in translating it. “Helen asked if I could translate the first chapter as a sample, and they were happy with my work,” she recalls. It took Thapaliya a year to complete the draft, during which time Bijaya Adhikari also joined. Adhikari first read the books in 1998 when Chamber of Secrets had just come out, and only the <a href="https://www.britishcouncil.org.np/digital-library-nepal" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">British Council Library</a> had copies. He was also familiar with Nepali Unicode, which came in handy during the translation process. It was also the <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/here-now/how-they-kept-nepal-in-the-dark-ages/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">time of loadshedding in Nepal</a>. “I used to sit with the book and translate by the candlelight,” Adhikari remembers. Power cuts were only part of the challenge. The real Forbidden Forest, so to speak, was to correctly translate many specific terminologies, such as muggles or quidditch. “We weren’t sure at first how Nepali children reading it, especially in the rural areas, without exposure to the British context would relate to the story,” says Thapaliya. Spells, Adhikari adds, posed a particular challenge. Rowling uses a modified version of Latin to create incantations in the original series, often a play on their desired effect: levicorpus, for example, to hoist the victim by their ankles, has roots in levare ‘to lift’ and corpus ‘body’. The same reasoning and effects were difficult to contextualise for Nepali audience. Even the words ‘witch’ and ‘wizard’ had to be reconsidered, as बोक्सी (boksi) and बोक्सा (boksa), which carry a negative connotation in Nepali society. So, the translators used जादूगर्नी (jadugarni) and जादूगर (jadugar) which more closely mean 'magician'. Proper names had diphthongs with no Nepali equivalent (for instance the vowel sound in ‘Harry’ – not quite the strong ह्या, nor the long हा. Food items were uniquely European, as were the festivals and holidays. “We decided that we couldn’t obviously change the context of the book by Nepalifying everything,” Thapaliya says, “as reading is supposed to strike one’s imagination and teach new things.” So, instead of a literal, direct translation, Adhikari came up with the formula to rather try and translate the meaning and the feelings. The editing process was equally rigorous, as he sat with his cousin, Aditi Adhikari, and her father Kedar Sharma to go through the text from cover to cover. “As the cultures of Nepal and the UK do not align exactly, we would often end up adding two or three words to explain the terms that were confusing or unfamiliar,” he says, “We were constantly asking ourselves if the translation was making sense to the children in Ilam or <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/first-drought-then-downpour/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Rukum</a> who are not familiar with western folklore.” The translation did not get much hype upon release, even as Helen Sherpa wanted to take the book to different parts of the country and share with children there, and its distribution was limited among a handful of Potterheads. Adhikari adds, “The cultural relevance of Harry Potter is significant to people who have been exposed to Western media and literature.” Consequently, the planned translation of the second book did not pan out. Even ह्यारी पोटर र पारसमणि is now difficult to find. <figure><img width="1320" height="951" src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221114091156/637202e09c7e80680e0b27d9jpeg.jpg" alt=""><figcaption> </figcaption></figure>Its rarity is comparable to the first edition of Philosopher’s Stone of which only 500 copies were printed. One was <a href="https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/harry-potter-first-edition-sells-smashing-471000-2021-12-09/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">sold for a smashing $471,000</a> in the United States on 9 December, setting the record price for a 2Oth century work of fiction. The global cultural impact of Harry Potter is a result of its universal themes of love, friendship and discovering oneself, while combatting the dangers of authoritarianism and propaganda. And J K Rowling managed to make school fun and thrilling, where one can expect adventure and room for growth in every corridor, instead of only homework and punishment. But will the series sustain its relevance as attitudes change owing to Rowling’s controversial politics? Many fans, organisations, and even the cast of the film adaptations have distanced themselves from Rowling because of her trans-exclusionary feminism. “We should have seen it coming,” adds Soph Levinas, a 22-year-old non binary Nepali: “Growing up, we never saw the problematic aspects of the books because we didn't have the context for it. Now, it is difficult for me to gloss over the stereotypical portrayals of many characters.” <a href="https://www.amazon.in/Harry-Potter-Philosophers-Stone-Rowling/dp/1408855658" target="_blank" style="font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: 0.01em;" rel="noopener noreferrer">Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone</a> first came out in 1997 at a time when Nepali children would be playing cricket, tag or hide-and-seek in the streets. The internet and mobile phones were a novelty. Whatever time remained, children did homework or read the Nagraj comics. Harry Potter took his sweet time aboard the Hogwarts Express to find his way to Nepal. It was not until the mid-2000s that Pottermania finally caught on, and even then it was a such a different world and culture that it did not have much of a readership. English folklore, tales of vampires, werewolves and dragons were not so familiar to Nepali youngsters. But at a time when there were not enough books either in Nepali or English targeted especially for young adults, Harry Potter appealed to a niche readership. Anjan Shrestha of Educational Book House in Jamal, one of the first bookstores in Kathmandu to introduce the series, recalls that Harry Potter was slow to pick up momentum here. “We brought the books in 2001, but it took another two years before there was a decent fanbase,” he says. But by the time <a href="https://www.amazon.in/Harry-Potter-Half-Blood-Prince/dp/1408855704/ref=sr_1_1?crid=11OS11VIUYFPG&amp;keywords=half+blood+prince&amp;qid=1641003890&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=half+blood+princ%2Cstripbooks%2C204&amp;sr=1-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Half-Blood Prince</a>, the sixth in the seven-book series, was published in 2005, self-proclaimed Potterheads were sharing the bulky hardbacks among friends, discussing plot lines and theories, turning twigs into wands, and re-reading while they waited for the next book. In subsequent years, the appetite for the wizarding world only grew. It is a different world today, of course, and whether Harry Potter remains popular among children born today is a question to ask in another 25 years – half a century after Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published.

nepali-translation

A novelist talks to his translator

The Man from Karnali

The lost Nepali translation of Harry Potter