Darkness and Beauty: On Translating Ananda Devi
In this essay by Devi’s principal English-language translator, he asks: When will we stop reducing Devi to the labels of Mauritian writer, Indian Ocean writer, African writer, francophone writer, feminist writer, woman writer?
It’s the strangest feeling. I sit down at my desk with a blank screen and my copy of a novel by Ananda Devi. I look at the first sentence, think over her shrewdly calibrated rhythms—and, somehow, I have a strong intuition of exactly how it should go in English. It shouldn’t be this easy, I tell myself. I must be missing some small yet essential detail. But I come to the end of my first draft and look over the first page again—and the feeling is still there. That these words should be these words, that this order should be this order.
Ananda Devi’s Eve Out of Her Ruins (2016) was my very first published book translation, and every author since has taken me some time and mental gymnastics to approximate in English: a tightrope act I struggle to sustain for more than a few weeks (see WLT, Nov. 2016, 75). But Ananda is different. I look at her words, and there I am, writing them again, just in a different language. The blank screen disappears, my anxiety about replicating her singular voice disappears, I myself disappear.
And what comes to the fore are the tempest-tossed souls that inhabit all her fictions. It has been ten years since I first typed the names Ève and Saad and Savita and Clélio, but I can still remember the chapters and scenes of Ève de ses décombres (2005) with startling clarity: Ève calmly describing how men look at her and how she uses her body for her own ends; Savita walking Ève home in shock; Clélio talking to himself in a prison cell; Saad describing all the souls around him with a love and a tenderness that redeems them all. Every one of them spoke with a poetry that belied their rashness; they conveyed, in their words, a world full of darkness and beauty in equal measure.
Darkness and beauty in equal measure: if I could sum up Devi’s work in two words, it would be those.
Darkness and beauty in equal measure: if I could sum up Ananda Devi’s work in two words, it would be those. Darkness and beauty. Her first novel, Rue la Poudrière (1988)—the name of a street in Port-Louis, Mauritius’s capital city—is narrated by a prostitute (see WLT, Summer 1990, 515); subsequent novels have taken as their narrators a cleft-lipped child cast out by her family, an old spinster whose kin have fallen away, a morbidly obese girl whose size becomes her defining aspect, a misogynistic grandfather. These are people who would be shunned by society, relegated to its margins and willfully ignored—yet with the ink of Ananda’s pen, they are fleshed out with a poetry that illuminates their humanity and their fundamental capacity to see the world differently. In the very first interview I did with Ananda, I asked her about this poetry, and her answer was clear-sighted: “I retained the poetry of their voices, which was the voice of their thoughts, the voice that no one ever hears from them because there is no one to listen.”
Ananda is the sort of writer who makes us listen. Not that I have any choice as a translator: inherent in my job is the obligation to re-create every single sentence and image in another language. And so the scenes that she conjures up come alive again in my head as I find the right English for her phrases. It is a landscape of dreams and reality; I myself had not been to Mauritius before I began working with her, but her words alone were still enough to give flesh to her images. And yet the sense of recognition was overwhelming as I sat in the back of a car winding along switchbacks on the side of Long Mountain. I looked to my left and saw the entirety of Port-Louis down below and, in the distance, Signal Mountain: in between, I knew, was the space that Ananda had given the fictional name of Troumaron in Eve Out of Her Ruins. A name that, I would come to learn, harked back to Maroons, the descendants of Africans in the Indian Ocean islands who escaped from slavery—a perfect allusion for this space where refugees holed up.
The deeper I delve into her work, and the more I learn of Mauritius’s third major language, Mauritian Creole, the more fully her cultural contexts come into focus. This can even happen on the level of words, such as in this especially memorable passage, in which a school principal admonishes Ève:
La directrice du collège m’a dit: Vous vous devez de réussir. Puis elle a ajouté en anglais: You owe it to yourself. Et enfin, en créole: Pa gaspiy u lavi. En trois langues, elle m’a dit la même chose. Que je suis responsable.
The school principal told me: Vous vous devez de réussir. Then she said it again in English: You owe it to yourself. And, finally, in Kreol: Pa gaspiy u lavi. In three languages, she told me the same thing. That I’m responsible.
“The same thing” is in fact slightly different in each of these languages. The French phrase literally translates to “You owe it to yourself to succeed.” The English drops the “to succeed.” And the Mauritian Creole—the common language of the island, a language that cuts past all formality—literally means “Don’t waste your life.” The scope shifts with each tongue.
With such shifts all but impossible for Ananda to ignore, it always surprises me that she would let anyone else translate her own prose. I’ve wondered what I could possibly bring to her work as a devotee who, superficially, has so little in common with her. We are not of the same nationality, or the same gender, or the same religion, or the same cultural context, or even the same generation; by all objective measures, I’m in no position to do right by her words. All I have is my keenly felt sense of English’s music, and my willingness to keep looking at a text until what I have in English fully reflects what I see in the original French. I have to accept that this patience must be enough.
A patience that Ananda herself has cultivated. When I translated Ève de ses décombres all those years ago, I hadn’t read any of her other works; from that starting point, I moved backward into her earliest writing and forward into the novels she kept releasing. And what struck me was her unwavering vision. Her later writing is sparer than her earlier writing but no less poetic: the beauty has simply been transmuted into a more refined style in which it takes fewer words to achieve the same brilliance that had been there even in her earliest stories.
In the years since she began writing, the world seems to have become a darker one, with fascism making inroads where it had once been firmly beaten back and capitalism laying waste to landscapes and ecosystems that had once been pristine. The pessimism that finds its expression in the violence of Ananda’s stories seems to have seeped into the real world; it is hard to feel certain that the future is a promising one. Ananda, to her great credit, does not ever shy away from this hard truth; when she ends her stories, it is not with a fairy-tale ending but with the hard experience of dreams colliding with reality.
Her saving grace, increasingly, is her unwavering belief that humans, even the most unquestionably diabolical ones, are fundamentally creatures of ambiguity. If they are violent or cruel, they are driven by particular desires that are deeply human; great kindness and tenderness, in her writing, spring from similarly unclear impulses. The longer we look at a person, she is telling us, the more they seem no different from us—and the more we should understand that we ourselves are capable of the same good or the same evil. What matters, each of her books seems to be saying, has to be the choices we make, for ourselves and for everyone else. Do we see each other as different, as Other, as beings we turn away from? Or do we see each other as cut from the same cloth, as open to one another, as equal humans with whom we might well share every part of our lives?
This question is not an abstract one. Over the years that I’ve known her, I’ve seen Ananda lauded, variously, as a Mauritian writer, an Indian Ocean writer, an African writer, a francophone writer, a feminist writer, a woman writer. Those labels have always bothered me: I would always think, “Can’t she just, very simply, be a great writer? A writer of great patience, a writer who shifts from language to language, a writer of darkness and beauty? Can’t she simply be Ananda Devi?”
And now, with the Neustadt Prize, she is. And I couldn’t be happier for her: the one who refuses to look away from the darkness of the world—and just as equally refuses to look away from its beauty.
New York City
