[Reader-list] Chitra Venkataramani's Hygiene and the City: resolving language

[Aman Sethi]

Dear Chitra,

I realise that this is a rather late response to a post you almost six
months ago - but i  read your latest post (on your blog) and decided
to go through your previous postings.  Needless to say, the project is
brilliant.

What i wanted to ask you was whether you had resolved the "language
problem" you faced in sxn two of your book.  I too have been
struggling with the notion of language of late- particularly in the
translation from hindi (or marathi or any other language) into
english.  I have been working and writing about construction labour
for a while now - but am yet to figure out how to render their richly
textured dialects into english.

I did try reading a number of travel books to see how travel writers
deal with non-english language speakers in their books.  What i
realised was that very few travel writers (who write in english) speak
the language of the places they visit - and so the only people they
speak to are "natives" who speak some sort of broken english.  This
broken english is then faithfully reproduced by the travel writer and
provides comic relief.

However, in my interactions with labourers, we do not converse in
english at all!  Translating edgy yet poetic hindi into edgy yet
poetic english (in the off chance where this is possible) makes the
labourers sound rather strange and alien, and my narrative seems fails
the essential "Who talks like this in real world" test.

Would be interested in learning about your experiences with the same.
Best
a.

On 4/29/07, Chitra Venkataramani <clinicalexam at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hygiene and the City.
> Second post.
>
> I have spent the past month figuring out the stories that constitute
> the book and collecting data.
>
> The book has three parts. The first part is a compilation of parts of
> interviews that looks at individual notions of cleanliness and order,
> mostly in domestic set up. It also goes through Advertisements for
> cleaning products, objects catalogued as being harmful (taken from old
> newspaper articles).
>
> The second and the third parts of the books both chronicle traveling
> through the city in trains. But while the second part looks at the
> journey as a series of maps, the third is the journey of a medical
> student in a crowded compartment, looking at the idea of paranoia and
> contagious diseases.
>
>  The second part of the book is narrated by a woman who imagines clean
> and unclean as ideas that exist simultaneously. Her story maps objects
> in a busy market place, the difference between private and public
> gardens, and lastly the naala that run along the Central Railway line-
> where is it the deepest, where is it murky and where is it clear; what
> vegetation grows around it (strips along the railway lines are given
> away for farming vegetables like spinach and coriander) and where do
> these vegetables go?
>
>
> The third part narrated by a medical student looks at the idea of
> proximity and disease. If we go in a crowded train, what diseases do
> we catch? How clean are crowds? Of course, it moves from the
> surroundings in the train itself to how he imagines the disease will
> enter our bodies. It also looks at ads put inside trains for curing
> infections like ringworm to ads for faith healers and the ergonomic
> data based on which spaces are designed.
>
>
> Another part that had to be resolved was the language of each of the
> three stories. The fist was pretty clear as each image could change
> with the excerpt from the interview. The third borrows its language
> from medical posters and from the ads, where figure are drawn out as
> stenciled lines or as figures in screen printed pamphlets. I am still
> working on a language for the second story.
>
> I will be posting a few images from the book by next week and upload
> them onto a blog. Will post that link later next week.
>
> My primary sources of data have been newspaper ads (articles taken
> from CED), Books documenting ads from the 40's (especially post war
> advertising), books on anatomy, ads posted around the city on
> telephone boxes and inside trains, and product design projects like
> domestic scrubbers, road cleaning devices and a few medical posters
> (hard to get- hospitals do not encourage people taking pictures or
> even borrowing the posters)
> --
> Chitra Venkataramani
> 7B, Orchard Avenue,
> Powai Mumbai 400076
> 9819 474375
> www.flipsearch.blogspot.com
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