The green campus of Jadavpur University, dotted with palm, mahogany, and ponds filled with lotus, was unusually blue that afternoon, owing to an incessant monsoon rain. It was the day I first read, during a break from my classes, An Oresteia, Anne Carson’s electrifying translation of Aeschylus’s play. The text struck me like lightning. Aeschylus, an ancient Greek tragedian believed to have lived roughly between 525/524 and 456/455 BCE, wrote a trilogy of tragedies. The Oresteia won first prize at the Dionysia festival back in 458 BCE, a time so long ago that it’s almost unfathomable; however, in Carson’s register, these thousand-year-old characters spoke to each other the way my friends text: “Where I come from, they say bad shit happening when they mean death. Another quaint barbarian idiom is real bad shit happening.” Or, “So you got good news? You’re optimistic? Tell me, unless you don’t want to.”

It’s not just the register that is distinguishably modern but also the entirety of the collection, which, in Carson’s translation, doesn’t contain the trilogy of Aeschylus but plays by three different playwrights separated by at least decades: Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Sophocles’s Electra, and Euripides’s Orestes. As in Giorgio Morandi’s painting of both winter and summer flowers, Carson’s is an unlikely bouquet. It is, thus, no longer the Oresteia but An Oresteia, one of many, not an authoritative edition but the latest in a series of interpretations. Carson has no desire to create an authoritative edition. In her translation, she is not preoccupied by authenticity but is instead interested in exploring the limits of language and asking how far one can go in translation without writing something completely new. This, indeed, is not a radical question but one that traverses the idea of translation as being something of its own thing, resembling a form of writing. Translation, in the modern humanities, is not just the act of translating the meaning of a text word by word but rather an art form in its own right, and the translator, who in earlier times was an anonymous entity bordering on the fabulistic, is no longer such. A quick perusal of the critical responses to Carson’s translation reveals that not everyone is enthused by the idea of modernizing Greek epics to this extent, but even so, Carson is accorded nuanced critical examination, and her artistic ways have rightfully been taken into account. This is perhaps where things get muddled in the question of translation, and where the idea of identity, even if faintly, emerges.

In anglophone Western literary spheres, there is a growing interest in commissioning translations from non-Western languages, languages like Hindi, an interest particularly evident after two Hindi writers, Geetanjali Shree and Vinod Kumar Shukla, were awarded major international literary awards recently. The interest, as is often the case, is guided more by business than literary considerations, but even so, Hindi literature has perhaps benefited from the increased attention. Daisy Rockwell, the celebrated translator who has also translated Shree’s International Booker–winning novel Tomb of Sand, wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “This may seem an unsurprising fact to many but it’s taken nearly thirty years to get one of my translations published in the US.” The translation was published in the US only after it had won the Booker Prize in the UK. As Alexandra Alter wrote in The New York Times, “It’s not that the translation of Indian literature into English isn’t happening. It’s just largely happening within India. Rockwell has been translating from Hindi and Urdu for thirty years, and has published ten translations, including works by acclaimed writers like Krishna Sobti and Upendranath Ashk, but she never had a translation released outside of India before Tomb of Sand.”

This is, indeed, hardly surprising when one considers that publishers as well as literary agents choose to publish non-Western literature mostly to incorporate the label of diversity into their catalogs. In these cases, they often privilege a certain kind of narrative and adherence to form, ignoring experimental and unusual literary works from non-Western writers. In a milieu that already marginalizes experimental non-Western writing, experimental non-Western translation is maybe a step too far. In her review of Tomb of Sand for America magazine, Diane Scharper wrote, “The narrative contains numerous allusions to the tenets of Hinduism and to the history and geography of the Indian subcontinent, foreign vocabulary, and references to South Asian writers, as well as to political and religious leaders generally unknown in the West. American readers might also struggle with the story’s digressions, wordplay, and several unreliable narrators, including one who says ‘every entry I make here is false’ on the book’s final page. The text is packed with figures of speech and sound in the Hindi version—and Rockwell includes these in her translation. The original story came in at about half the length of the English version. According to Rockwell, the additional pages were necessary to convey the story’s metaphorical quality. She makes a good point, but there are a few too many verbal hijinks here for my taste.”

 In The Guardian, Ankita Chakraborty wrote of the English translation: “Without Rockwell, there would be no Booker for Shree, but I find the translation to be excessively loyal to the Hindi version. For instance: ‘No eating, no drinking, not even touching tea to mouth’ is a commonly spoken sentence in Hindi, but its literal translation into English doesn’t work. The novel is strewn with such phrases, where you can hear the Hindi and the English is broken. It is confusing and can make it appear as if the writer is ridiculing the Hindi characters.”

When we compare critical responses like the above to reviews of “classical” translations, a chasm appears. In her New York Times review of Lydia Davis’s translation of Proust, Mary Bloom writes, “Should a good translation read like a translation? Probably yes (surely this is part of the pleasure of Michael Hulse’s W. G. Sebald or the Pevear and Volokhonsky Russian classics).” “I think it’s inevitable and not bad that a certain foreignness should linger about the text,” Davis says. “People have said about this one that it’s like reading French in English and I don’t mind that.” Conversely, she and others maintain that Moncrieff’s “free” and flowery translation of Proust is a classic in English in its own right. Adam Gopnik’s short commentary on the Moncrieff translation in The New Yorker is titled “Why an Imperfect Version of Proust Is a Classic in English.”

Daisy Rockwell, in one of her interviews, talks about her own approach to translating Tomb of Sand, “I think of it as translating Ulysses by James Joyce, or something like that, where this person has created their own language so you have to create your own language to translate it.” She continues, “Take for example my translation of Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard (2018), which some reviewers felt I overtranslated. This is partly because, in the South Asian linguistic environment, no one is ever speaking just one language. In this particular case, many readers disliked that I translated all the kinship terms into English. But then you get criticism on the other side: this reviewer [referring to the Deccan Chronicle review] thought I left too much Hindi in Tomb of Sand.”

Already, critical responses to and reviews of non-Western translated texts are rare, and wherever we do find them (whether in anglophone publications or in publications from “native” countries like India), the criticism seems to grapple only with the authenticity question and how fluid and mellifluous the text is in English, how easy it might be for the average English reader to comprehend. The average English reader test is one that all non-Western translations must pass, even though no such test exists for other translations. In India Today’s review of Gillian Wright’s translation of Raag Durbari by Shrilal Shukla, the anonymous critic writes that “One misses the robust Awadhi dialect. Whereas the Khari Boli dialogues read well in English, the attempt to translate Awadhi in archaic English sticks out […] Fortunately there are few such attempts. Wright seems to be in two minds when translating proverbs. Some are literal like ‘he beat all my ribs and bones to chaff’: others English substitutes.” Some may agree or disagree with the review, but the complete absence of the translator’s viewpoint and consideration of her approach is jarring. Arunava Sinha, a celebrated and prolific translator from the Bangla, talks about critics and criticism in one of his interviews: “What I have found is that very often the criticism of translation comes from this notion that, ‘This is such a good book in Bangla (or any other language) that it could never be translated. Therefore, the translation must be bad.’ This is the kind of response I’ve faced from people who haven’t even read the translation. They’re criticizing on principle.” He goes on to add, “There is a big lack of discourse.”

Katrina Dodson, an American translator of Clarice Lispector’s short stories into English, describes her approach to translation as an act of channeling the spirit of the author. She mentions in an interview how the unusual placement of commas and colons changes the tone and meaning of Lispector’s stories—details that are important in keeping her spirit and language alive but that were removed by previous translators because they interrupted the fluidity of the text. We might also consider Chantal Wright’s experimental approach to translating a German-language text, Porträt einer Zunge, by Japanese writer Yoko Tawada. Wright, the co-director of the Institute for Translation and Interpreting at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland, intentionally makes the translator’s presence visible by blending Tawada’s text with her own dialogue, resulting in a work that combines literary criticism, translation, and academic commentary. The translator here is present not just on the cover but within the text itself, not letting the reader obliterate the act of translation even momentarily. Wright explains in her introduction to the book, “The reader sees two columns: on the left, an English translation of Tawada’s text in the classic sense; on the right, a commentary that is designed to be read interstitially, so that the reader weaves from left to right and back to left.”

In certain instances, she changes things up and retains the original and offers a tentative translation in place of her commentary:

In one of her notes, Wright mentions in the right column, “In Tawada’s novella Ein Gast (a guest) the narrator has earache and goes to see a German doctor. He looks into her ears and sees a performance of Madame Butterfly taking place.” In a review of the translation, M. A. Orthofer’s writes, “Wright’s commentary-as-reading, commenting on and asking questions about what Tawada has written, as well as offering her own anecdotes to complement what Tawada presents are also interesting, and this form of running commentary that is more-than-exegesis seems a particularly useful way of dealing with ‘foreign’ texts. Obviously, Tawada’s work lends itself to such an exercise particularly well, but this is something that it would be great to see more of—and, indeed, among the regrets here is that Wright did not choose to comment more expansively (as is, the ratio is about 1:1 with the text itself).”

These works that may seem just experiments are in fact ways to expand both language and the practice of translation as art. They take us further than the average reader probably wishes to go, but unless such journeys are embarked upon, even if singularly or in small numbers, the borders of language will not change, and we might find ourselves standing where we were, say, a hundred years ago. However, these experiments in translation that broaden the very idea of language and its workings must not remain limited to translators and writers working in more developed economies. Both publishers and readers of non-Western texts seem caught up in the idea of fluidity and ease of understanding for the average English reader, a test that any true literary work will, and should, fail. Yet, for the moment, these books’ artistic merits are generally viewed as secondary, if considered at all; an adequate translation is seen as more than enough, and any experiment as a completely unnecessary complication not worthy of considered examination.

When reading criticism of non-Western texts, a somewhat muted but inevitable curiosity enters the mind about why, for specific texts, any deviation from standard English or any experiment in form is looked upon as error rather than informed artistic choice, especially when there seems to be space, even if limited, for unconventionality elsewhere. It is from this that we arrive at a simple but fundamental question: Whose deviation from the standard is art, and whose is error?