Translating Elena Ferrante

Some readers focus on a single author for an indefinite period of time; so was Ann Goldstein (a versatile translator and former editor at New Yorker) when she started translating Elena Ferrante, and so was I when I started reading her. I came across The Lost Daughter in a small town bookshop near my house and without knowing anything about the author or the background I took the book in my hands. I shivered imperceptibly feeling an unexpected sense of connection that was not easy to understand.

Sometimes you experience an unquestionable link, a kind of bondage when you leaf through the pages of a certain book. The book need not be the best one you have read or the best one you may read in the future. The book that you find so compelling once may even cease to inspire you after a particular point in time. But the moment you experience the connection is what it is all about. And thus, one book followed the other. I remember being so focused. I feared my life would be impoverished once I run out of her pages.

I was conscious not to read her last book that was out in print then. It was during that time, a small-scale publisher contacted me over the phone. When he asked whether I was interested in translating ‘The days of abandonment’ I felt the old shiver returning to me. I was greedy, that’s all I can tell you now. I didn’t wait for a second to think about an answer. A friend had once gifted me a bottle of Amarone della Valpolicella. I have studied Dante and read Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Natalia Ginzdurg, and I love the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Roberto Rossellini…. to name a few. My favourite Indian author Jhumpa Lahiri loves Italy. What more do you need!

I said ‘yes’ despite the fact that my knowledge of Italian culture and history was limited. I knew the burden I was going to take upon me was heavier than I thought. Even though the very prospect of translating Elena Ferrante and the oddities and cultural references that I was likely to encounter during the process of translation excited me, I knew it was no child’s play. I knew I was going to deal with a kind of emotional intensity that was forceful, dense and violent. And that there would be no escape from the density or the vacuum it offered.

When I started translating I was fully aware that there were no previous translations of her book in any of the Indian languages and mine was going to be the first Indian Ferrante. Even though translation is the closest form of reading, reading a book does not mean translating a book. That was the time I had just completed translating my own book ‘Acid’ into English. Translating your own book is rather easy, there you are the master, you create, you destroy, you recreate. You kill your darlings, and give birth to something new.

But in translating a different author you have to strictly follow the servile path so that you can remain a genuine translator. I don’t think an extra stroke in an original Rembrandt, Monet or Munch would be welcoming; or an extra note added to Beethoven or Mozart. There would be covers, modifications, interpretations but the original work stands as a menhir, a monolithic that is not malleable. The density of her prose is impenetrable. Thus the task assigned to me or rather the task I craved was not a piece of cake.

Translation demands a lot from you, especially when the structure of a sentence that is free-flowing in the original language becomes rigid and unbending in the target language. Though there was something relatable in the foreignness of her books, it was not easy to navigate the ponderous tone of Ferrante. And I didn’t want to crawl after her run on sentences dragging my heavy ‘Sanskrit stricken Malayalam’ words.

As there were no equivalent words in Malayalam the sex scene ended up pathic at first. I felt my own language is very formal in many aspects and that was the reason for my discomfort with the sex scene. But then I dared to use the words that were not so welcoming or conventional in a culture obscured by false modesties and principles. I knew I was to invest great trust in my translation, no matter what, no matter how shocked or upset the reading community would be.

Translating the oddly touching, conflicted, feral eroticism of Ferrante was a real challenge. I have to say I put all my energies into writing this Malayalam translation, for it was my responsibility to establish my reading of the writer who remains incognito. While translating I LOVE DICK (Chris Kraus) or BUDHINI (Sarah Joseph) I used to enjoy the frequent conversations with the authors. But in this case, somehow, the author’s anonymity added to the many pleasures or joys of translating.

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Sangeetha Sreenivasan is a bilingual author of several works of fiction and children’s literature, including Acid, published by Penguin Random House India in 2018 (U.S. Release January 3, 2023). In addition to her original works, Sreenivasan has translated Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment into Malayalam. Her translation of one of George Simenon’s Maigret novels is forthcoming from Mathrubhumi Books. She is currently working on a translation of Chris Kraus’s cult feminist classic I Love Dick.

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