I write in English probably because of ease of the qwerty keyboard and also I read in English most of the times. But for long I wanted to change that. So my friends this is a request for all people who read “even today” to read Indian in Indian languages as well. This is not really just for Indian people to read in their local languages but for all across the world, but many places like China, Japan and many European countries this is not really a problem. I do feel translators do a lot fantastic job making lot of work accessible to larger audience, I don’t think it is possible to read in all Indian languages, it is humanely impossible to do that, but may one or two more languages is definitely possible.

Now the only other script or language that I can read or write is Hindi. I am not fortunate enough like many in India who are multilingual. I have known people knowing 4-5 languages across the many languages and dialects that we have in India. It is not very unique in India to have people with multi-lingual skills. 

I would like to keep this about India only and not discuss any other language and countries. Now the whole idea of reading Indian authors in Indian languages is not because of nationalism or some logic of supporting the local cause, but it is to enrich the experience for the readers. 

Translations can be read and it can provide a similar experience but if you can read the original source it gives the direct point of view of the writer which I believe is better. Sometimes things do get lost in translation. Every language has its own constructs, idioms and phrases which may or may not be translated.

Currently I am trying to revive my Hindi skills both in reading and writing. I have started to collect set of books to get started. Here is the TBR pile that I have. Please suggest anymore or any other writer that I should pick up. I would also attempt to write in Hindi in future.

 

Recently I picked up to read “Godan” by Premchand and I would like to highlight few excerpts from the book just to give a flavor of what kind of things can be found then. Please see the writing and relevance.

The Title “Godan” is translated to “The Gift of a Cow” which is the true literal meaning but the cultural connotations things that are meant by Godan gets lost in this translation. If you are not a native Hindi speaker than having a translation opens this story to you but if you are native speaker, there is no reason to read the translation when you can read the original. Now this is not true for Hindi specially but if you know any native language and you want to read something in that read the original.

 

 

 

Now you can see that the translation is done to reflect the original in best possible way but there are some essence that would get lost which probably a the original Hindi wordings can have. This is nothing to do with the quality of translation but more to do with one’s ability to read in original. I feel if we have the ability to read in the original language which is your native language, we should try to do that

Let me know what do you think and if you reading something in its original form please let me know.