Translator’s Diary: How To Translate Time?

It is now 12 years and counting—though sometimes one forgets. The morning telephone calls are a forgotten memory—any call at 7 am signals family emergencies, not a script crisis. Rituparno and I had been comrades and colleagues ever since we met over a potato chip campaign. Well, it was his campaign and my translation of it, a tongue-twisting rendition of the Bengali he had conjured.

I didn’t realise then that that was how the relationship was going to go—his Bengali and my English side by side. Rituparno was in Response at that time: star Bengali writer, Ram Ray’s favourite and monarch of all he surveyed from silver betel boxes to books. He wrote the Boroline pujo advertisements and after a while I started turning them into English, following him to Kumartuli since he felt that I needed to be inducted into Bengali culture.

Running parallel to this was my work for his feature film scripts—I would sit at a spare computer in Response translating from his scrawls with great difficulty since I did not read Bengali handwriting easily. It wasn’t subtitles then—those came later—it was script translations to be sent to Bombay producers.

The seasons changed faster than one could imagine—films followed films—Hirer Angti, Chokher Bali, Dahan, Dosar and suddenly, Rituparno was the ‘maverick director’, a brand in his own right. And my phone rang twice, thrice or four times every morning as the scripts and the subtitles followed.

Subtitles, regardless of YouTube, remain a confusing issue to many people. “Who writes them?” someone asked. “Do you?”

Ram Ray told me that subtitles were rather infra dig where I was concerned. However, minus articles, with Rituparno scolding me for my overly memsahib English that was certain to fox foreign film festival organisers, the subtitles I translated from his Bengali were fitted frame to frame and I would sit in the edit suite whenever it was necessary. From scrawls, the screenplays started reaching me in typed form, and I treated them casually thinking that there would be more to come.

The End Came Too Soon

Rituparno had got to the phase where he felt he needed a Marie Seton though he wasn’t exactly sure whether I would fit the bill. I had never been to a shoot after all, barring popping in for a single scene of Hirer Angti with Moon Moon Sen in it. I was threatened with Amitabh Bachchan at one point when The Last Lear was in progress, but crowds made the situation impossible and Bachchan was filmed at a spot the media termed an ‘unknown location’, which I knew was somewhere behind Navina Cinema. I suggested putting together a book of all the translation work that I had been doing for him and he sniffed—“There’s more to my work than translation!” Which was true but I felt that it needed to be out there, failing that definitive biography which someone would have to write and I would have to rewrite knowing the way things went.

In the end of course it was something else altogether. A phone call in the middle of a bout of viral fever sent me running to Rituparno’s home in Indrani Park, streaming sweat, to find him lying still and more peaceful than I had ever seen him. That he had been ill I knew—pancreatitis, bad film shoot food and the fallout of hormone tinkering—but this went beyond expectations. The scripts, the phone calls and the clash of ideas were all over and there was no one to answer any questions I might have on shoots to cobble together a biography.

Immortalised in Print

I collated the scripts and subtitles that I had, along with translations of poems and abandoned work like a screenplay for the Princely Imposter, and sent feverish proposals to the University presses abroad that I knew specialised in film studies. The only problem was that Rituparno had not given himself time to become Satyajit Ray and that was exactly the reply I received. However, the work needed to be preserved before the files were lost—Madhuchhanda Karlekar who had translated enough of his scripts for another volume—had her hard disc crash effectively, obliterating all her work. With that as a cautionary tale, I turned closer home to Jadavpur University Press—Jadavpur had been his alma mater after all. Translating for Rituparno, all 1.5 kilos of it, came out last year on his birthday in August, three years after I had sent it in.

As for my subtitles in actual form, I met them recently, watching Chokher Bali at a film club and found them almost unrecognisable. AI combined with the Hoichoi app had struck.

Anjana Basu is a Kolkata-based advertising consultant and author. Her recent works include the Jim Corbett children’s series and Translating for Rituparno

This article is part of 해외카지노 Magazine's June 11, 2025 issue, 'Living on the Edge', which explores India’s fragile borderlands and the human cost of conflict. It appeared in print as 'Translators diary.'