The following is a translation of one of the chapters called ‘I Raise a Cheetah’ from a Marathi book called,‘Turning the Pages of Memory’ which was written by my great-grandfather, Martand Parshuram Jog, and published by Shyalaja Publishers, Nagpur in 1978.
On April 1932, I had gone hunting in the jungle that was on the banks of the Wainganga river, which lay in the district of Bhandara. Here, the Cheetahs were known for their destructive nature. With help from the tribals, I made arrangements to stay hidden along the banks of the Wienganga river. I was informed that just 50 feet away from me, there were traps in the form of nets that had been spread. These were set in order to trap rabbits. After awhile, a few rabbits, hopping and skipping, pranced towards my direction in order to drink water. In the blazing afternoon sun, there was no shade to be found anywhere. The tribals with me attempted to imitate the sounds of the sambar deer, Chital deer and the wild boar in order to draw out these animals from the top layer of the jungle. This ritual was carried out so that the mentioned animals would come towards my direction. After a while, a couple of Cheetah cubs, who looked like cats came towards me. They began to chase the rabbits. These Cheetah cubs got caught in the net. Running towards the nets, I and a few tribal’s endeavoured to rescue the cubs from the clutches of death. With great difficulty, I put one of the cubs into a sack, however, in the confusion; the second cub slipped through our fingers and disappeared into the undergrowth of the jungle. It was dangerous to remain there. So I went home.
The Cheetah cub remained within the sack for a whole day. The next day, I chained him, cut his nails and fed him milk. Until then, he had been lying there morosely. The life came back to him after a bit of water and milk had gone into his belly. He took fifteen days to get accustomed to humans. I began to go outside with him in my arms. I tried giving him rice and chappati, but he did not even let a bit enter his stomach. Everyday, however, he would have a sher of milk. We had to start increasing this by two, two and a half shers. Even then, he was always hungry. When he was four months old, we began to add a bit of cooked meat into his milk. He became a year old. Then, he needed to eat 1 to 1 and a half shers of meat. He would roam around like a tame dog. He enjoyed sitting in the motor car with me. Sometimes, I would roam the roads with him in my arms. The dogs would see him and run away quickly. An atmosphere of fear settled in my neighbourhood.
I was a member of the Rifle Club in Nagpur. When I was heading to the shooting range, he would sit in the backseat of my car. In the club, there was a British sergeant, who was the instructor. He was very scared of this Cheetah. This was probably because during target practice he used a red flag. My Cheetah, Shankar, was angered by the sight of red. When the sergeant showed him the red flag, he would roar from the car, even jump off the backseat and glare at him. Restrained by his chain, he would remain, growling at the sergeant. I began to give Shankar a few lessons on hunting. I must have taken him several times to hunt in the Chaori Ghat jungle, near Umraid. Blindfolded, I took Shankar into the jungles, and, chancing up on plants and animals of interest, I would lift the blindfold and point at them, repeating their names for his benefit. When I saw that his attention was focused on the plant or animal, I would unfasten his chain. At once, he would leap from the car and, before one could say ‘ha-ha’, would attack the specimen. Catching the specimen by the neck, he would endeavour to extract the maximum amount of blood from it. I would have to wrestle the prey from his grip. I had to keep him under my control with a cane. He was very afraid of me. He would shudder when I said his name, ‘Shankar’ loudly.
One day, I was sitting in the inner chambers, with Shankar sitting behind me. At this time, my friend, Mr. Gunvant Rao Wakekar, arrived along with a harmonium, he sat next to me. After a while, I got up to retrieve my own harmonium box, as he began to play his own. Suddenly, Shankar got up and began to roar. The man got a fright, and stopped singing, and froze. His fingers began to shake. Once I realized this, I yelled, “Shankar,” in an authoritative manner, and made him sit again at the back. Ever since, then, Wakekar has not visited me.
Shankar had become a hot topic of discussion. To satiate his hunger, every Wednesday, I would go up on the roofs of my factory, catch eagles, and put them into his cage. He would get from three to four eagles that day. For many days, he remained at home. However, Leela, my daughter, would continuously trouble him. As he began to grow, it began to become dangerous to keep him around children. Therefore, I placed him into a cage in my factory. He was now 3 feet high, 9-10 feet long.
One day, I got a message from the Queen’s palace, which said, ‘The Queen wishes to see your Cheetah.’ As I had work, I instructed my nephew to take the Cheetah. Until that day, my nephew had never had the opportunity to take the Cheetah out. However, he bravely took up this responsibility and headed towards the palace. There, several children clustered around them. The Cheetah was annoyed by this. Within this crowd of children, one child accidentally stepped on the Cheetah’s tail. The Cheetah pulled at his chain, and pawed one of the children. Dropping him to the ground, he held him by the neck with his paw. He snapped, and the child’s thick coat came within his teeth. That and his well-manicured nails prevented more damage. Seeing the attack on the boy, my nephew ran away, following the rest of the children in the crowd. However, the Queen could not escape, as the Cheetah was blocking her. Presently, using his presence of mind, a child entered from the other door, and yanked at the Cheetah’s tail. The Cheetah, leaving the captured boy, advanced to attack the other boy. The boy on the ground stood up and ran away, heart in his mouth. The other boy fled, too, closing the door behind him, and thus tricking the Cheetah. Now, the Queen and the Cheetah were the only ones left in that room. The Queen was standing with her heart in her mouth, behind a big pillar. The Cheetah was attempting to pounce on her. Meanwhile, I began to become a bit uncomfortable about sending my nephew alone with the animal. Thus, I took up my cycle and headed towards the direction of the palace. As I reached the palace and parked my cycle, I heard the voices of children. ‘The big cat got Shyam!’ saying this, they were running helter-skelter. Hearing of this, my heart skipped a beat, and taking the stairs two at a time, I ran up. This was when the two previously mentioned incidents took place. As I reached the door where the Cheetah and the Queen lay, the animal had just begun to advance towards the Queen. From the door, I yelled Shankar’s name, and he came towards me and stood beside me, obediently. At once I restrained him with a chain. The Queen was beside me then and in a frightened voice thanked me, and proclaimed, “You saved me .If you hadn’t, he would have attacked me. I don’t know with what mind I had him brought here and why. Thanks to God, that boy’s life was saved today, otherwise our reputations would have been blackened by this event.” After this event I never let Shankar out of his cage.
Incidents like these, (and others) reflected Shankar’s growing disobedience. Raj Bhadur Bhonsle was a zoo outside the city. Finally, I had to deposit him under their care. I would visit him twice a week on horseback. I would see him and pat him. Once, on an appointed day, I skipped this visit due to urgent work in my factory .I went straight home. Hereafter, I received an urgent message from the Zoo officials, requesting that I go there at once, as my cheetah was creating a fuss. I arrived at the zoo and petted Shankar, who was finally satisfied.
As I translated this article from my mother tongue, Marathi to English, I encountered a few problems. However, these problems could easily be avoided, had I been a professional translator, or had a bit more experience with translation. Personally, it is my view that translating a text from one to another is hardly a problem, and should be strongly encouraged, as it allows for a cultural exchange of ideas and leads to expansion in literature.
The first problem I encountered was the difference in the formation of sentences. Even a person, who knows both the languages equally well, would not be able to translate a text perfectly. This is because if only words are translated, the sentence would not make any sense to the reader. Therefore, one needs to read the whole sentence, sometimes the whole paragraph, in order to be able to do justice to the translation.
Another problem I faced were difficult words. Although my knowledge of Marathi is moderately fair, a few words that I read were unknown to me. Therefore, I used my discursion and depending on the context, I translated that word into what I thought it meant.
Conjunctions were another problem. Marathi does not really use conjunctions that much, therefore, there can be sentences that make no sense until the next one is read. For example, with reference to the line about the British sergeant being afraid of the Cheetah, the unedited translation would be as follows:
‘‘At the club, there was a British Sergeant, who was the instructor. He was very afraid of the Cheetah. This is was because, at the firing range, he used to use a red flag for target practice. My cheetah’s name was Shankar. He used to get angry when he saw red, and when the sergeant showed that red flag, he would roar loudly from the motor”. (Pg. 104, Line 5)
Another difficulty I faced was punctuation marks and capitalisation. In some contexts, unknown words might seem like names, and since there is no indication that a word is a name except for common sense and general knowledge, this task might prove to be difficult for an outsider. For example, the name’ ‘Shyam’ is mentioned when the children are screaming. They are screaming, “The big cat has Shyam!” For me, it was common sense that Shyam was the unknown boy who had been pinned down by the Cheetah. However, to anyone unfamiliar with Indian names, ‘Shyam’ could logically mean just about anything.
Another problem were phrases and other untranslatable words. Here, the translator faces a choice—should he substitute a word or write it down, as he sees it, in the English script? Or should he translate it to the best of his abilities, into the word closest to the concerned word? He also could rewrite the entire sentence, so that it gives the general gist. I have used options one and two in my translation of this work. For example, the word (vaagh) has no literal translation in English, but the closest meaning in English which I could think about was ‘big cat’. Another example could be seen in the phrase (take their lives in their hands), which is a phrase that occurs more than once in this text. As it might not make much sense to an outsider, I substituted this phrase with ‘hearts in their mouths’, which conveys the same meaning and emotion, though with different words.
Synonyms are another problem. I have often observed that Indian languages, at least in the north, have limited amounts of synonyms. Therefore, the translator is sometimes at a loss for which meaning to choose, that would exactly tell us what the author meant. For example, the words essentially mean ‘jumped. However, the translator could just as easily use the synonyms of ‘jumped’, that are ‘leapt’, or ‘sprang’.
How would the author have liked you to translate his work? This question, posed by the translator to himself, is a difficult one. It would require the author, first of all, to be alive. Secondly, the author should know the language of translation considerably well, and thirdly, should be interested in answering any doubts you have in mind, and therefore should also be easily accessible. However, the paradox is that if these criteria were actually true, the author might as well translate the book by himself. Therefore, the translator will just have to leave all his doubts aside and translate the text according to his own discretion.
The last two problems I faced were the paragraphs and pronouns. We have been taught that every new paragraph should contain one or two strong points, and we generally change a paragraph every time we change an idea. However, this writer has not written this text with the same logic, and there appears to be simply a random change of paragraphs throughout the text. What does the translator do, then? Does he make his own paragraphs, according to his own discretion, or does he respect the author’s random paragraph changes and stick to the same format? As a translator, I chose the second option. This, as well as my second difficulty, could occur in any translation, even if the translation was only from ‘old’ English to ‘new’ English.
Pronouns are seldom used in this text. The word ‘Cheetah’ is rampant, rather than easy substitutions like ‘his’, or ‘the big cat’ or, even his name, Shankar. Was this move a premeditated one, on the part of the author, to indicate a distance in the relationship he had with the animal? Or did he simply write it down, unconsciously? In that case, should the Cheetah be called a Cheetah in the translation, as well? Weighing my options, I decided to use ‘him’, ‘the animal, and ‘Shankar’ to replace ‘cheetah’. I made this decision because I rationalized that the repetition would annoy and bore readers.
To conclude, I would say that translation is a great art, and can also be a lot of fun, if taken in the right spirit. It could be a tool to bridge the gap between different cultures and people of different languages, and allow the literature of that particular language to expand and grow. Furthermore, it allows for creativity and individuality, along with keeping the meaning still grounded in what the author has written (in successful translations). The most important question a translator must ask himself is—“Should he focus on delivering the words as far as possible, in the words of the author, or does he translate the text, and tweak it a little here and there, so that it becomes that much more interesting, and can be suitable to outsiders? The perfect translation would try to keep these two questions in mind and take the middle path.
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