Passage IV

A Translator's Two Worlds

I was born in India, which is halfway around the world from rural Minnesota, where I now live and work as a translator. Once a year I go back to my "old country." After about twenty hours of travel, I find myself in a completely different zone, not only in terms of time, also in terms of climate, culture, people, and other dimensions of the familiar.

If I leave Minnesota in the evening, I expect it to be midday when I arrive in India. So, because of the change in time zones, it is midnight, and I immediately have to adapt to a new schedule. Then there's the change in temperature, I leave the cold December of Minnesota for the mild, pleasant winter of Delhi—a welcome change from a bulky parka to a thin sweater or shawl.

Delhi is a huge, noisy city full of concrete and construction, dense traffic, and hundreds of people on any street. That's certainly a contrast from the quiet of rural Minnesota's landscape—miles of farmland occasionally populated beside a herd of cattle. There are other differences. The faces of Delhi are a hundred shades of brown. The clothes are loose and flowing. The languages are different, which are the ways of interacting with people. Delhi and rural Minnesota are two different worlds.

It is the differences that makes my work as a translator so challenging—and so fulfilling. (54) I'm at ease in both places. Since there is a fundamental cultural change when I cross from one continent to the other, it's not an uncomfortable change. This sense of well-being in two cultures enables me to translate Bengali poems or stories into English. Later, when I'm translating, I feel as though I inhabit both cultures, simultaneously as though I live in two worlds at once. And this is a rich, rewarding feeling.

I know I'm fortunate to belong to two places I can consider my own. Every time I return to India, and every time I come back to the United States, I realize afresh the distance between the two cultures, but it's always a wonderful homecoming either way.