“His words only? ” Indra Sinha’s Pseudotranslation Animal’s People as Hallucinations of a Subaltern Voice Brigitte Rath Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007) is often read as an example for an authentic subaltern voice. It presents, within its fictional frame as pseudotranslation, the English version of the life story of a very poor, mentally unstable and physically deformed young Indian as told and recorded by himself in Hindi. This article traces the complex constellations of the many voices and languages in play in the novel and argues that the authentic subaltern voice is a hallucination that convincingly masks the absence of its speaker. “Sir, I am so sorry, this boy says that […] the book must contain only his story and nothing else. Plus it must be his words only.” Only his story? His words only? “Sir, he is a beastly boy, but it’s a good story.” Indra Sinha, Animal’s People 1 The “beastly boy” with the “good story” is Animal, the central character in Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People. Animal lives in the (fictitious) city of Khaufpur. He is one of the tens of thousands of poison victims whose lives are affected by a chemical disaster mirroring the 1984 Union Carbide catastrophe in Bhopal. In Animal’s case, the poison has twisted his spine in a way that forces him to walk on all fours - hence his name, Animal. In the dialogue quoted above, an Australian journalist who has come to Khaufpur to collect sources for a book on the disaster and one of Animal’s friends negotiate the terms under which Animal will agree to tell his story - Animal has just decided that he will only do so if his story remains his. They come to the following understanding: Animal 1 Indra Sinha (2009, originally 2007). Animal’s People. New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 9. Further page references in the main text to this edition. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 38 (2013) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Brigitte Rath 162 will record his story in his native Hindi on a series of tapes and it will be published as a book, translated into English but otherwise unchanged. Animal’s People is the result of this deal, at least within its fictional frame; it provides Animal with the space to tell his own story in his own words to a Western audience. By doing so, the novel participates in the ongoing debate on the question of whether the subaltern can speak to a dominant audience (cf. Spivak 2010 [1988]). Participating in this debate, or so I claim, is a central concern of the novel and its paratexts. This paper maps the constellation of voices in and around the novel including the supposed translation of the - fictitious - tapes from Hindi into English and shows the reasons and consequences of the novel’s ultimate decision to contain a potential cacophony of voices by presenting one single voice. The first part traces the multiplicity of voices in play, the second part reads the collapse of the novel’s pseudotranslation structure as emblematic for the collapse of a multiplicity of voices into one hallucinated authentic subaltern voice. 1. Animal’s voices Animal, as many reviewers agree, both has a strong and memorable ‘voice’, and is a voice for the poor, for the disenfranchised, for victims of corporate disasters: The star of the proceedings is Animal’s astounding voice. True and unapologetic, it is shot through with all the singsong cadences and cruel slang of cockney Hinglish. […] Sinha performs an act long overdue in the canon of Indian literature in English: giving the poor a voice that sounds like their own. (Mahajan 2008: online) From the arresting opening line of Indra Sinha’s vivid second novel […], the voice of Animal, the narrator, leaps out to grab you by the throat. Bawdy, irreverent and smart, Animal’s compelling vernacular, with its mangled, Yoda-like syntax, conjures up the colour, cruelty and camaraderie of life in the Indian city of Khaufpur. This is a place where people are compelled to sell their blood for food, but would give their last channa (chickpea) to feed those they love; where having nothing means having nothing to lose. (Beresford 2007: online) Through Animal - a terribly human and honest character - Sinha weaves a narrative […] which speaks for the thousands of disenfranchised individuals whose lives have been thrown upside down by similar catastrophes. (Sandhya 2008b: online) Animal, speaking his life story into the Jarnalis’s tape recorder, is all charismatic voice: his street level testimony does not start from the generalized hungers of the wretched of the earth, but from the devouring hunger in an individual belly. Animal, the cracked voiced soloist, […] breaks through the gilded imperial veneer of neoliberalism to announce himself “His words only? ” 163 in his disreputable vernacular. His is the anti-voice to the new, ornate, chivalric discourse of “development.” (Nixon 2009: 461-462) Read in this way, Animal’s People gives a straightforwardly affirmative answer to the question whether the subaltern can speak: yes, Animal, a subaltern (poor, non-Western, physically deformed and mentally ill) speaks successfully to us, his Western readers. Many aspects of the novel encourage such a reading: structurally, it is framed as a faithfully translated transcript of Animal’s tapes, including tape-numbers as chapter-headings. On a thematic level, Animal not only recounts how the agreement to this recording came about, but also discusses the pitfalls of disaster voyeurism 2 and of exoticising poverty 3 and the danger of a possible collusion by (even unwittingly) catering to these exploitative dynamics with his own story. Animal starts narrating his story only after “solid time has passed” (11) since the agreement, when he has his own reason for telling it; he does not do it “for truth or fifty rupees or Chunaram’s fucking kebabs” (11). Animal’s story can thus be read as being completely original because - as is explicitly stressed - it was neither edited or otherwise altered in the publishing process, nor was its telling implicitly nor explicitly influenced by the journalist’s or the audience’s expectations. Animal simply “open[s his] heart” (14) and “speak[s] from [his] heart” (12) - and hides nothing, neither details about his frequent masturbations, nor his voyeurism, nor his jealousy, nor his mental illness. The careful way in which Animal’s voice is established caters to an implicit concept of an authentic voice as one that comes unaltered from one untainted source. There are numerous potential influences that threaten to tamper with an authentic subaltern voice on its long way across the divide to a distant elite audience, such as an elite mediator representing the voice instead of letting it speak for itself, or the voice catering to the expectations of its audience instead of remaining purely its own. These problems can be overcome, it is suggested, in the way Animal deals with them: by telling his own story in his own words on his own terms and for his own reasons. This is one of the positions on the possibility of a subaltern voice that the novel provides. Animal insists that his story is radically individual, it is only his - “in all the world is none like me” (172, 366; see also 342), but, as the quote 2 “You [the Australian journalist] were like all the others, come to suck our stories from us, so strangers in far off countries can marvel there’s so much pain in the world. Like vultures are you jarnaliss. Somewhere a bad thing happens, tears like rain in the wind, and look, here you come, drawn by the smell of blood” (5). 3 “Such a look on your face when he brought you here, as you pushed aside the plastic sheet, bent your back through the gap in the wall. With what greed you looked about this place. I could feel your hunger. You’d devour everything. I watch you taking it in, the floor of earth, rough stone walls, dry dungcakes stacked near the hearth, smoke coiling in the air like a sardarji doing his hair” (4). Brigitte Rath 164 above shows, his idiosyncratic voice is sometimes read as speaking for a whole group: for the poor, for the disenfranchised, for victims of corporate disasters. The possibility of such a reading is suggested both within the novel and in its paratexts: Animal presents the stories of a widowed woman indebted to a loan shark and of a young girl forced into prostitution as paradigmatic for many similar stories: “the story of this one woman contains the tale of thousands” (84) - “Her story’s the same as so many you hear” (242). Indra Sinha corroborates these readings of Animal’s voice as a voice for a subaltern group when he states in an interview with Sepia Mutiny that “never in India’s history has there been such need of writers who tell the stories of the forgotten people, those for whom India is neither Incredible nor Shining” (Sandhya 2008a: online). He implies that he may be such a writer. This claim, though, introduces a different, second voice, the voice of the “writer”: Indra Sinha’s. Legally, Animal’s voice belongs to Sinha: Indra Sinha’s name is the one on the book cover, he holds the copyright, he was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007, and he won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Europe and South Asia in 2008. In contrast to Animal, however, Indra Sinha can hardly be called a subaltern. He read English Literature at Cambridge and was an “awardwinning copywriter for an elite advertising agency” (back cover of Animal’s People). He may be speaking about or for the subaltern, but not as a subaltern. This opens up all the potential problems of exploitation that Animal mentions when talking about the journalist’s interest in his story; and although Animal’s reflections on these problems clearly show that Sinha is aware of them, the solution that Animal chooses - ensuring that he can tell his own marginalized story in his own words - is simply not available to Sinha. As a novelist, however, Sinha can write his own work of fiction about a life that is not his own. Sinha has not experienced what Animal has; 4 as a novelist, he imagines how his subaltern character would talk. And this could end our deliberations on how Animal’s People contributes to the question of whether the subaltern can speak, leaving it to people from, for example, Khaufpur’s counterpart Bhopal to decide the - different - question of how believable the subaltern voice imagined by an elite writer sounds to them. The case is more complicated, though, as there is a third voice involved: in Bhopal, Indra Sinha met Sunil Kumar, a poison victim whose life and circumstances share some similarities with Animal’s. The novel is dedicated to him; Sinha mentions their friendship in interviews 5 and 4 “A Bhopali friend urged me to try writing from the perspective of the poorest people, the ones whose stories are never usually told. The problem was that I had never lived as they have to, in hutments with no sanitation, sky high rates of disease, I have never been hungry or lacked shelter” (Anon. 2007). 5 See, for example, Moss (2007). “His words only? ” 165 acknowledges that Sunil Kumar’s story has influenced Animal’s, although to which extent this is the case does not become clear. Sunil Kumar has no place in the text itself, he is banished to the margins of the paratext, and even there - in contrast to both Sinha’s and Animal’s vocal voices - he does not speak; 6 when he is spoken of, he serves as reminder or anecdotal evidence that Animal’s story is truthful and authentic because it could be real. Sinha states in an interview for the Booker prize website: “In 2004, I taped a very long interview with Sunil. The batteries ran low and when played back most of the tape was squeaky laughter” (Anon. 2007). Containing mostly laughter, Sunil Kumar’s tapes, as far as we know, are not transcribed. The “Editor’s Note” at the beginning of the novel, talking about Animal’s fictitious tapes, explicitly mentions “sustained and inexplicable laughter” - there is no trace of it left in the translated transcript of Animal’s tapes that we read. Sunil Kumar’s voice is twice lost. So there are three voices that could potentially be speaking: the voice of an elite author, the voice of a subaltern informant who tells his story to the elite author, and the voice of a subaltern character narrator that belongs to the elite author and that may be similar to or even borrowed from the subaltern informant. Sinha’s voice, speaking via his character Animal, could have its ‘true’ source in Sunil Kumar. This opens up a double-bind: if Sunil Kumar is the source of the voice, then the ultimate and quite remote source of the voice we read is a subaltern speaker - but presented by the author in a way that disenfranchises, exploits him (as Sinha gets all the credit) and thus raises an ethical issue; if Sinha is the main source (maybe somewhat ‘inspired’ by Sunil Kumar’s story), then it is not a subaltern speaking, and the very beginning of his own novel then raises the question why Sinha did not provide his informant with his own space, as the journalist in the novel does for Animal. In her article “Assessing the Limitations of Laughter,” Heather Snell points out some of the implications of this uneasy relationship: In response to a question about authorship […] Animal quips [in an interview]: “Sore point, bloody. I recorded so many tapes and the story is all my words but that bugger Sinha has got his name all over the book. I am not even mentioned on the cover as the real author” (“Katie”). […] Yet it also serves as a playful reminder of the very real material, and often exploitative, relations of production through which an oral account may be turned into a book without crediting the author of the original 6 With two exceptions: in one interview, Sinha mentions a telephone conversation in which Sunil reportedly said “Indra, I just drank rat poison. Guess what, it tasted sweet” (Anon. 2007); and in his tribute to Sunil, Sinha addresses - in the rhetorical figures of prosopopeia that, as we will see, shapes the novel - the dead Sunil and imagines him talking to his friends: “Were you there with us [at your funeral feast]? If not, who was it that in the darkness chuckled, ‘I am no longer afraid of being killed - I am already dead and fearless’” (Sinha 2007). Brigitte Rath 166 tale. Animal’s charge against Sinha conjures up a potentially guilt-ridden scene of reading as the novel’s consumers are alerted to the possibility that what they hold in their hands is, in fact, stolen goods. The irony is that there might be some truth to this given that Sinha’s fiction was largely inspired by Sunil Kumar, the now deceased Bhopal survivor to whom Animal’s People is dedicated. Although Sinha carefully points out that his novel is a work of fiction, he acknowledges his indebtedness to a series of recorded interviews with Sunil: “Some of the stories Sunil told me about his life found their way into the novel, however the character of Animal is entirely fictional, as are his antics” (“Animal”). In using Khaufpur’s website to humorously implicate himself in the series of exploitative acts Animal imagines to have occurred in the production of the book, Sinha at once highlights the need for authorial accountability and places in check the pleasure some readers might take in consuming, and subsequently exotifying, the tragic and ostensibly true account of a traumatized young man living in the so-called “Third World.” (Snell 2008: 2-3) The interview with Animal that Snell mentions at the beginning of this quote, as well as the (real) website of the (fictitious) city of Khaufpur, 7 point to a further twist in the relationship between the three voices that changes the constellation quite drastically. Sinha - somewhat playfully, but also insistently - ascribes independent will to his character: “Animal decided that he, not I, would write the book. And he did” (Sinha 2008). In an article for The Guardian Weekly, Sinha expands on this: I did toy with the idea of setting the novel in a Brazilian favela, or a contaminated city in West Africa, but opted to stay in India, mainly because by this time Animal was talking to me incessantly, and with a strong Khaufpuri accent. The first thing the wretched youth said was that I had no right to write about the poor. Had I ever been hungry, slept rough, or shat communally beside a railway track? You are rich, Animal said, the rich are condemned to shit alone. He threatened to denounce me to my agent and publisher. […] I was appalled by his language, was certain it would lose me readers, but one cannot censor one’s characters, one has a duty to allow them to be as they are. This was a kid from the gutter, his vile argot and foul tongue were not “unnecessary,” as some complain, they were necessary for no other reason than that is exactly how I heard him speak. […] Animal has also been to the Edinburgh Book Festival and the Booker shortlist party and doubtless will attend the big Booker Prize dinner. He has also given interviews. (Sinha 2007) The interviews Animal gives underline his independence from Sinha, both on a performative level and thematically, as he uses these interviews to 7 This website (http: / / www.khaufpur.com) is mentioned in the “Editor’s Note” at the beginning of the novel and in various online interviews with Indra Sinha. At the time of writing, it is defunct, but some automatically archived pages can be found through The Wayback Machine (see “References”). “His words only? ” 167 confirm the circumstances of his recording his story, to talk about his travels with Sinha to the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and to raise the question of authorship quoted by Snell that throws the relationship between Sinha’s and Kumar’s voices into sharp relief. As a result of Animal’s stated autonomy, the constellation between the three potential voices of the novel changes its direction: it is no longer Sinha speaking ‘through’ Animal, raising the question of the true source behind Sinha’s voice, but Animal speaking ‘through’ Sinha. This constellation is self-contained: Animal is an autonomous source. He is fictitious, and he is subaltern; there is neither a structural nor a strategic reason for another voice ‘behind’ his. Sinha recognizes the voice as decidedly not his own, but decides to voice it. Sunil Kumar’s voice, in contrast, is outside of this dyad, his voice provides just an example that parallels Animal’s voice, but not its source. The directly speaking, unaltered authentic subaltern voice; the author as the ultimate (and usually not subaltern) source of their character’s voice; the double-bind of a native informant - these are all common positions within the debate on the subaltern voice, though it may be rare that they are brought to the reader’s attention as clearly as they are in Animal’s People and its paratexts. A sovereign independent character narrator talking to and through the author, however, is quite an unusual addition to the debate, and as such warrants a closer look. Animal speaking to and then through Sinha, the dyadic constellation of the author hearing an alien voice that he makes public by lending it his own voice could be called prophetic: just as the divide between the immanent human world and a transcendent God can be overcome by a human prophet talking with God’s voice, Animal’s voice in Sinha’s mind leaps the divide between the subaltern and the elite. The voice of the prophet is authentic exactly because the source both is and is not within him or her. The prophets recognize the voice as not their own. This recognition as something alien lends it credence and importance, and they decide to give this other voice their voice. The prophets’ voice is authentic because it is and simultaneously is not theirs - it is a double voice. The voice of prophecy is doubled by crossing a divide. Sinha is Animal’s prophet, and Animal is the one ultimate source that guarantees the truth of Sinha’s words. This double voice shapes the novel. However, this fundamental duplicity, as I want to show, reduplicates itself within the novel, creating a multitude of alien voices with no clear origin. There are numerous instances of internal alien voices within the novel. For Animal, they are ubiquitous: Like rejoicing, the world’s unspoken languages are rushing into my head. Unusual meanings are making themselves known to me. Secrets are shouting themselves into my ear, seems there’s nothing I cannot know. Ssspsss, haaarrr, khekhekhe, mmms, this is how the voices are, often I’ll babble Brigitte Rath 168 aloud the things they tell me. “Tu dis toujours des absurdités,” Ma says, smiling, the rest just shrug, “Fucking boy, crazy as fishguts. Sees things, hears voices that aren’t there.” Well, I do see them, I do hear. (11-12) Animal talks, for example, with a two-headed fetus conserved in a jar; the following quote is from the second time he encounters it: His two heads glug at each other, then he’s back to me. “It’s up to you now, Kh-. You’re our only hope. Get us out of here. Break the jar, with fire destroy us.” These are the same words he speaks to me in dreams. Now I’m confused. This little bugger is real, I can tap his glass jar and he’ll curse me, but is he also real in my dreams? […] “You’re an unusual fellow,” says I. “Never before have I met a one like you.” At this the contents of his jar churn, little gunky bits that must have come off the Kh- are swept by currents of laughter into mazy dances. “Brother Animal,” says he, “You and I are not so different. Doublers both, we’re. Two of me there’s, two also of you.” “What do you mean? ” I ask, not best pleased by this comparison. “My two heads rise from one neck. From your hips, at the point where your back bends, rises a second you who’s straight, stands upright and tall. This second you’s there all the time, has been there all along, thinks, speaks and acts, but it’s invisible -” (138-139) Animal hears the unborn fetus in a jar talking to him as an internal external voice, and repeating this dialogue, he gives voice to him. This double voice talks of the doubleness of Animal: just as Animal hears internal voices that he perceives as independent from him, there is, according to one of these voices, also a second person within him who “thinks, speaks and acts” independently. Animal, the voice that speaks to Sinha and is doubled by him, is already double, and it is through him/ them that the double fetus speaks. The novel’s most obvious case for the parallel drawn between the doubleness of the prophet’s voice and the doubleness of the internal alien voice is provided by Ma Franci. Ma Franci, French nun, repeatedly quotes from “Sanjo” - the Book of Revelation, ascribed to Saint Jean/ Saint John. These quotes introduce a (paradigmatic) prophetic text into the text of the novel: Ma brings out a small black book, it’s the one written by Sanjo that tells about the end of the world, she holds it up close to her nose. “Jusques à quand, Maître saint et vrai, tarderas-tu à faire justice? à tirer vengeance de notre sang? ” “His words only? ” 169 Eyes, in case you don’t understand Ma’s language, this is Sanjo talking to him, he’s saying fuck’s sake how much longer will you make us wait for justice? And in case you still don’t know who he is, well it’s god. [...] Sanjo reckons that the world is full of wickedness and is going to be wiped out, this will happen in various appalling ways and is called the Apokalis. [...] “Listen, injustice will triumph, thousands will die in horrible ways. Well, what else happened on that night? Nous sommes le peuple de l’Apokalis.” We are the people of the Apokalis. (63) The quotes from the Book of Revelation are given in French, which makes the prophetic voice sound doubly foreign to the English-speaking reader, and this foreignness is further enhanced by Animal’s unusual English translation, which does not conform to any canonical version of the Bible. Ma Franci herself is a prophet for the prophet; she explains that the apocalypse as described by “Sanjo” is imminent and foretells (correctly) a second fire in the abandoned industrial complex - a fire in which she dies as a martyr, helping other people escape. Animal translates the prophet’s voice from the French version that Ma Franci reads out, apparently unaware that the text from which Ma Franci from is already a translation. He also frames the quote he translates by ascribing it a clear origin: “Eyes, [...] this is Sanjo talking to him.” Both of these assumed origins - French as the original language, and Sanjo/ Saint John as the source of the outcry for justice - can be further deferred, as both the French text quoted by Ma Franci as well as the King James version quoted below are translations from the Greek - which may or may not be the language in which the “great voice, as of a trumpet” spoke to John while he was “in the Spirit” (Revelation 1: 10) - and the full context of the quote (in the King James version) reads: And when he had opened the fifth seal, I [John] saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? (Revelation 6: 9-10) It is thus not Sanjo/ Saint John who is speaking: he is merely recording the martyrs’ cry. The quote from the Book of Revelation, a paradigmatic example of the prophetic voice, multiplies voices and origins within the novel. Following Derrida’s reading in “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy,” it does so paradigmatically: But it would be necessary, perhaps beyond or before a narratology, to unfold a detailed analysis of the narrative voice in the Apocalypse. I use the expression “narrative voice” in order to distinguish it, as Blanchot does, from the narrating voice, that of the identifiable subject, of the narrator or Brigitte Rath 170 determinable sender in a narrative, a récit. […] Jesus is the one who says, “‘“Stay awake. … I shall come upon you.”’” But John is the one speaking citing Jesus, or rather writing, appearing to transcribe what he says in recounting that he cites Jesus the moment Jesus dictates to him to write - which he does presently and which we read to the seven communities […]. (Derrida 1992 [1981]: 55) So John is the one who already receives mail [courier] through the further intermediary of a bearer who is an angel, a pure messenger. And John transmits a message already transmitted, testifies to a testimony that will again be that of another testimony, that of Jesus; so many sendings, envois, so many voices, and this puts many people on the line. (Derrida 1992 [1981]: 56) If, in a very insufficient and scarcely even preliminary way, I draw your attention to the narrative sending [envoi] in the dictated or addressed writing, I do so because, in the hypothesis or the program of an intractable demystification of the apocalyptic tone, in the style of the Lumières or of an Aufklärung of the twentieth century, and if one wanted to unmask the ruses, traps, trickeries, seductions, machines of war and pleasure, in short all the interests of the apocalyptic tone today, it would be necessary to begin by respecting this differential multiplication [démultiplication] of voices and tones that perhaps divides them beyond a distinct and calculable plurality. (Derrida 1992 [1981]: 57) Tracing the relationship of Animal’s voice, Sinha’s voice, and Kumar’s voice has led us to an “incalculable plurality” of voices and origins. Animal’s voice as heard by Sinha has turned delirious. “Rendering delirious that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us.” - Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak cites this phrase from Derrida’s “Of an Apocalyptic Tone” (Derrida 1992 [1981]: 36) twice in “Can the Subaltern Speak” (Spivak 2010 [1988]: 265, 283). The second of her two citations reads in context: Derrida marks radical critique with the danger of appropriating the other by assimilation. He reads catachresis at the origin. He calls for a rewriting of the utopian structural impulse as “rendering delirious that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us.” I must here acknowledge a longterm usefulness in Jacques Derrida which I seem no longer to find in the authors of The History of Sexuality and Mille Plateaux. The subaltern cannot speak. (Spivak 2010 [1988]: 283). This is where one possible reading of Animal’s People thus leads us: to Spivak’s much-debated claim that “the subaltern cannot speak.” This is not, however, how the novel is usually read. 8 In the second part of this paper, I want to show why many readers do not see Animal’s People as a testament to the impossibility of subaltern speech, but rather hear “the 8 Compare the reviews quoted here and hundreds of online reviews on goodreads.com and various bookseller websites. “His words only? ” 171 voice of Animal” that “conjures up the colour, cruelty and camaraderie of life in the Indian city of Khaufpur,” “where people [...] would give their last channa (chickpea) to feed those they love” (Beresford 2007: online). I will focus on an aspect of the novel’s framing that I call pseudotranslation, and argue that the introduction and silencing of a fictitious translator is emblematic for the way the novel contains - in both senses of the word - an incalculable plurality of voices. 2. The face of the reader, the shape of Animal “Well, she tells her own story, doesn’t she? ” “I know, but she tells it to you.” (E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, 1998 [1924]: 151) The first page of Animal’s People is an “Editor’s Note” that reads in full: This story was recorded in Hindi on a series of tapes by a nineteen-yearold boy in the Indian city of Khaufpur. True to the agreement between the boy and the journalist who befriended him, the story is told entirely in the boy’s words as recorded on the tapes. Apart from translating to English, nothing has been changed. Difficult expressions which turned out to be French are rendered in correct spelling for ease of comprehension. Places where a recording was stopped and later recommenced on the same tape are indicated by gaps. The recordings are of various lengths, and the tapes are presented in the order of numbering. Some tapes contain long sections in which there is no speech, only sounds such as bicycle bells, birds, snatches of music and in one case several minutes of sustained and inexplicable laughter. A glossary has been provided. Information about the city of Khaufpur can be found at www.khaufpur. com. (“Editor’s Note,” n.p.) This note talks about two acts of translation as generating the text that we read: the lingual translation from Hindi into English, and a media translation from oral to written language. The “Editor’s Note” gives some insight into guidelines used for the media translation of speech into writing and thus into a visual code: only speech is presented, Hindi in English and French in French; each tape is given its own chapter, and stops within a tape are transcribed as blank lines between paragraphs that create the novel’s sections. This results in a text that follows all typographic conventions of a mainstream contemporary novel. The “Editor’s Note” also establishes a different second - or: preceding - text, a recording of Animal’s oral storytelling that is shot through with situational detail, with background sounds and noises. It hints at a cacophony of noises and voices that has been excluded by the double act of translation. Brigitte Rath 172 The “Editor’s Note” characterizes the text of the novel as a translation; neither the title page nor the copyright note, however, give any indication that the novel was not written in English. The novel can thus be called - borrowing a term from translation studies established by Gideon Toury - a ‘pseudotranslation’: It is texts which have been presented as translations with no corresponding source text in other languages ever having existed […] that go under the name of pseudotranslations. (Toury 1995: 40) Adapting the concept, I suggest that pseudotranslation is a mode of reading one utterance as the translation of a preceding original utterance in a different language which is only accessible through an act of imagination based on the seemingly derivative utterance. 9 Following the “Editor’s Note,” Animal’s People can be read as the English translation of an original, preceding recording in Hindi and at the same time as an original English text that provides the only access to and the only basis for the - imagined - Hindi recording. It can thus be read as pseudotranslation. Pseudotranslation shows a structure similar to that of the prophet’s voice. The source of the prophet’s voice both lies within and beyond the prophet, and the voice is regarded as authentic because it is perceived as originating elsewhere. A text that is read as pseudotranslation points away from itself to another, authentic source that both lies within the text and somewhere else, that is both occluded and made visible by the ‘translation’. The text is authenticated through a source from beyond a divide of languages - and in this case also media. Within the frame of the pseudotranslation, the (fictitious) translator takes the role of the prophet. The translator voices Animal’s Hindi in English. A reader can choose to hear both the translator’s and Animal’s voice, as the English text of the novel is characterized by an unusual, often grammatically non-standard style. Verbs, for example, are sometimes placed at the end of sentences: “silent then I’m.” (4) Animal himself remarks that he uses bawdy language, but there is no reason to assume that his use of Hindi is grammatically markedly non-standard. The non-standard English syntax is thus often read as an imitation of a standard Hindi syntax, and so the decision to imitate the word order of the ‘original’ sentence structure can be ascribed to the (fictitious) translator. The English sentences we read thus have a double origin, and the ‘translator’s’ decision to “foreignize” 10 both 9 For more detail on this adapted concept of ‘pseudotranslation’ and for further examples, see my articles (Rath 2012, 2013). 10 For an in-depth discussion of the distinction introduced by Schleiermacher between “foreignizing” and “domesticating” methods of translation - “Schleiermacher allowed the translator to choose between a domesticating method, an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language cultural values, bringing the author back home, and a foreignizing method, an ethnodeviant pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad” - see Venuti (1995: 20). “His words only? ” 173 draws attention to the involvement of a translator, and allows readers to see the text as being ‘closer’ to what Animal actually said. A pseudotranslation frame thus establishes a succession of two superimposed voices. In Animal’s People, however, the fictitious line of authentication created by the pseudotranslation does not work. It is incongruent even within the frame of novel. These internal inconsistencies are - analogous to the two acts of translation evoked - of two kinds: they question whether Animal could have spoken the original version of the text, and whether he could have spoken it in Hindi. In the following passage, Animal explains a joke, but it is unclear in which language he does so: “Only one joke has Pandit Somraj. Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni, Sa, these are the notes which all recognize. Somraj says that for him the octave now runs Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Kh-, Si, Kh-, Si.” Eyes [this is how Animal addresses his readers], this is the pandit’s joke, he tells it against himself. […] Of course this joke is wasted on you, dear Eyes, first because no one has ever mangled you, but chiefly because you don’t speak our language. Kh- and Si are not really notes in the scale, if you join them they make khaañsi, which means “cough.” What Somraj is saying is, every time I start to sing I begin coughing and can’t stop. No need to explain this to Elli, so good’s her Hindi. (155-156) Animal here explains a Hindi pun to his non-Hindi speaking readers; it seems, though, that he is talking about Hindi, but not in Hindi. Indeed, imagining that Animal narrates this episode completely in Hindi leads to a contradiction: When Animal says that the Hindi word “khaañsi” “means” “cough”, does he give a Hindi synonym for khaañsi? Or was the whole phrase “which means ‘cough’” inserted by the translator? Wouldn’t an insert, in turn, violate the rule stated in the “Editor’s Note” that “nothing has been changed”? In a section in which Animal narrates how he learned to write, inconsistencies of both types arise: It was hard at first, reading. Take two letters like क and ल , they look almost the same, but the sounds they make, ka and la, are different. Slowly the letters began to make sense. ज , a shape like a begging hand, was ja. ह , a shape that reminded me of an elephant’s head with trunk and tusks, like Ganesh in front of a beedi packet, this was ha for haathi, elephant. Signs in the street gradually came to life. कोका कोला , I already knew it meant Coca-Cola, which I had never tasted. I learned to spell my own name, जानवर , Jaanvar, meaning Animal. Nisha said that it was my name and I should be proud of it. Jaan means “life.” Jaanvar means “one who lives.” (35) What does Animal say in those places where we read letters in Devanāgarī script? If he just pronounces the letters, the second sentence would be: “Take two letters like ka and la, they look almost the same, but the sounds they make, ka and la, are different,” which is obviously re- Brigitte Rath 174 dundant and implausible, as would be “ja, a shape like a begging hand, was ja.” A plausible oral sentence would have to be substantially different, such as: “A letter in the shape of a begging hand was ja.” 11 And in which language does Animal offer his translations of Hindi words, such as “haathi, elephant” or “Jaanvar, meaning Animal? ” As with the explanation of the Hindi pun, there does not seem to be a plausible answer to this question. Quite unexpectedly, the questions of both Hindi vs English and spoken vs written language also arise in a passage in which Animal narrates his listening to a woman who came to the city from a rural area and who speaks in an unusual Hindi dialect: Says this granny, “We have loked upon the milke and it semeth to muche thinne and watry. Plus it enclyneth to reddenesse, which is unnaturall and euill. Likewyse, it tasteth bitter, ye may well perceyue it is unwholesome.” […] “The infant yeaxeth incessantly,” says the granny […] “out of measure he yeaxeth.” The laughter’s dancing about in me so much it makes me want to jig, these village types, their outlandish accents and rustic way of talking. (107-108) Within the frame of the novel, the “granny” speaks Hindi with an “outlandish accent,” and her “rustic way of talking” is rendered by the fictitious translator in Tudor English. The translator, readers may assume, decided to imitate a conspicuous variant of Hindi by using an equally conspicuous variant of English. It is plausible that Animal mimics the “granny’s” speech pattern in his own spoken Hindi when he records his story. The “granny’s” speech, however, also is a collage of excerpts taken nearly verbatim from the first paediatric book in English, Thomas Phaire’s The Boke of Chyldren (1545/ 1553), where the section on selecting a wet-nurse reads: These thynges ought to be cōsidered of euery wise person, that wyll set their children out to nource. Moreouer, it is good to loke vpon the milke, and to se whether it be thicke & grosse, or to muche thinne and watry, blackysshe or blewe, or enclinynge to reddenesse or yelowe, for all suche are vnnaturall and euill. Likewyse when ye taste it in your mouthe, yf it be eyther bitter, salte, or soure, ye may well perceyue it is vnholsome. (Phaire 1955 [1545]: 5-6) And in a section entitled “Of Yeaxing or Hicket”: “It chaunceth oftentimes that a child yeaxeth out of measure” (Phaire 1955 [1545]: 31). 11 Another - quite different - passage in the text that cannot be imagined as having been spoken gives the shop sign “Laxmi Talkies” as a vertical line of individual letters that are each inverted, imitating the layout of a vertical transparent sign that is seen from behind (see 238). “His words only? ” 175 The origin of the “granny’s” outlandish speech can thus also - without suspending the imagination of the spoken Hindi dialect - be described as both written and English, or even as having already been written in English. Tudor English words are ascribed to a contemporary Indian subaltern character, an old woman, thus gaining the exotic sheen of ‘native’ wisdom and lore and attributing to the “granny” a way of thinking that is 500 years ‘behind’ European ‘standards’. It also makes it impossible to point to the one plausible original version, the ‘true’ source of the “granny’s” voice as reported by Animal. These examples show that even within the frame of the pseudotranslation, the imagined origin of the text can neither be ‘purely’ Hindi nor ‘purely’ oral. There is not one origin, one source of a voice that is duly transmitted via a mediating second voice. Reading a text as pseudotranslation means oscillating between two different ‘originals’ - the text one reads and the text one imagines - and two different ‘sources’ for the text. In Macpherson’s Ossian, for instance, the ‘original’ text in Gaelic is Ossian’s, and is translated into a ‘derived’ English text by Macpherson which is identical with the ‘original’ text in English that was written by Macpherson. In the case of Animal’s People, however, both the ‘original’ Hindi and the ‘original’ English text can be ascribed to Animal. While it is established within the frame of the novel that Animal tells his story to the tapes in Hindi, there is no indication for a similar act of translation in the way Sinha characterizes the interior voice he hears. And neither in Animal’s interviews 12 nor in the short prose pieces that Sinha published in the magazine Himāl (Sinha 2009a) is there any mention of or hint at translation. Animal can thus also talk in the idiosyncratic non-standard English (mixed with traces of Hindi/ Khaufpuri and French) that could be attributed in the novel to the fictitious translator’s decision. These two versions compete with each other: Animal telling his story to the tapes in Hindi adds the authentic flavour of a ‘native Indian’ language; Animal using a highly idiosyncratic English style and dictating (to Sinha) word-for-word exactly what we read adds the authenticity of “his words only.” The pseudotranslation’s oscillation between a Hindi original and an English original is in this case thus centred by one common source, Animal. Animal talks at once in Hindi and in English - which is both impossible and convincing, as it ‘explains’ the passages quoted above. This works because Animal is styled as an extraordinary translator: Animal translates both for characters within the novel 13 and for his imagined readers. 14 Animal’s voice is the voice 12 See ‘Animal’s’ interviews with Sepia Mutiny (Sandhya 2008) and with the Khaufpur Gazette (Animal 2009a, b). 13 There are two long scenes in which Animal translates Ma Franci’s French for other characters: a picnic scene, where he is explicitly asked to translate by a group of people: “‘Animal! ’ there’s a shout. ‘Come here and translate what Ma’s saying’” (199) and an episode where Ma Franci takes Animal to the hospital and tries to Brigitte Rath 176 of a translator. And so the voice of the fictitious translator can blend into, can be swallowed and contained by the voice of Animal-as-translator. Animal translates himself - and there are no traces of the fictitious act of translation or the fictitious translator (such as a name, a preface, footnotes, or explanations as to why certain Hindi words remain untranslated in the English text) that would subvert this impression. The fictitious translator vanishes, and a text with a paradoxically doubled, but doubly authenticated voice remains. In this specific collapse of pseudotranslation, the doubly authenticated and therefore strong double voice is that of one character. It thus offers one face (and mouth) to the figure of undecidability between the Hindi and the English original. And it is this rhetorical figure of prosopopeia, 15 literally “giving a mask,” of giving a voice to concrete things, to dead or absent people, or to abstract concepts - or so I claim - that allows readers to hear a/ the subaltern voice. You don’t answer. I keep forgetting you do not hear me. The things I say, by the time they reach you they’ll have been changed out of Hindi, made into Inglis et français pourquoi pas pareille quelques autres langues? For you they’re just words written on a page. Never can you hear my voice, nor can I ever know what pictures you see. (21) This is, apart from the “Editor’s Note,” the only passage within the novel that expressly underlines that Animal talks in Hindi, not in English. It also stresses the dividing gap between Animal and ‘his Western readers’ - and is, at the same time, forcefully addressed to this absent audience. From the very start of the novel, Animal is talking to an imagined Western audience; first to the (absent) Australian journalist, then explicitly to ‘the readers of his story’. I’m remembering the eyes that hide inside your eyes, you said I should ignore you and talk straight to those who’ll read these words, if I speak from my heart they’ll listen. So from this moment I am no longer speaking to my friend the Kakadu Jarnalis, name’s Phuoc, I am talking to the eyes that are reading these words. Now I am talking to you. (12) communicate with the doctor, while Animal uses his position as a translator to ask his own questions (see 55-59). 14 Some examples have already been mentioned above: Animal translates Ma Franci’s French for the readers when she is quoting from the Book of Revelation, and also some Hindi words and puns. There are numerous further examples. 15 “The question ‘Who speaks? ’ concerns the process of reading itself […]. For it configures and gives a face to what is read, and reads it as ‘voice.’ The process of reading is thus figured out by the prosopopeia” (Menke 1997: 226; my translation). - “Prosopopeia is also the rhetorical term for the interest in the source of an utterance and in the author who is responsible for it that guides hermeneutical readings. To read a text as ‘voice’ is prosopon-poein […]” (Menke 1997: 227; my translation). “His words only? ” 177 This pervasive “you” that Animal addresses - the apostrophe “Eyes” - is the novel’s central prosopopeia. Bettine Menke analyses the intricate connection of prosopopeia and apostrophe: In so far as the prosopopeia lends a voice to concrete objects or abstract concepts, to mute, dead or absent people, and has them appear as speaking characters, it fully realizes what the apostrophe, the addressing of the dead and absent, implies but omits; it institutes them as speaking entities with mouth and face. Conversely, prosopopeia itself implicitly functions as an apostrophe towards that which the figure itself will have staged as a speaking entity. “It is the figure of prosopopeia, the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which points the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech,” as de Man writes. Prosopopeia is the figure for the (fiction of) addressing. In addressing what is absent, dead, and mute in the text, the addressed is presupposed as present, alive, and anthropomorphic. [...] [An apostrophe] turns away (from a primary scene of speech, from the audience) in order to address ‘something’ ‘other’, ‘something’ absent. (Menke 1997: 165-166; my translation) The “Eyes,” the (explicitly) absent reading audience that Animal addresses, are indeed turned into an anthropomorphic shape by his address. The “Eyes” gain ears, hands, arms, and ultimately a mouth: Eyes, I don’t know if you are a man or a woman. I’m thinking the things I am telling are not suited to a woman’s ears, but if a person leaves things unsaid so as to avoid looking bad, it’s a lie. I have sworn not to lie to you. If you feel embarrassed throw down the book in which these words are printed. Carry on reading it’s your lookout, there’s worse to come, don’t go crying later, “Animal’s a horrible person, full of filth,” think I don’t know it already? (79) And by giving shape, face and a mouth to his readers, Animal gives shape, face and a mouth to himself: The gesture of apostrophe, the speech act of addressing engenders a (fictitious) presence, the presence of the event that it is - and renders a face, a presence for the addressed. Through the apostrophe, the speaker, the “I” of the text, provides the addressed with voice and face, life and a human form, in a mutually reciprocal way precisely in so far as in this language gesture an “I” of the text is assumed, that is: constituted. (Menke 2000: 166-167; my translation) Constituting his readers, Animal constitutes himself. He becomes ‘audible’ and ‘visible’ as he talks to the “Eyes.” The “Eyes” are his only audience. There is, in contrast to many other pseudotranslations, 16 no ‘primary’ 16 See, for example, Tobias Döring’s (2007) lucid discussion of Macpherson’s Ossian that shows that the European readers of the English ‘translation’ did indeed imagine a primary audience of the Gaelic ‘original,’ namely “the Celts”: “Through [Macpherson’s] ingenious fabrications and their reception by Herder, Goethe, Brigitte Rath 178 audience, no audience for the ‘original’ Hindi text, apart from Animal himself - or rather, as we shall see, apart from Animal’s image of a future self. Animal “turns away” from ‘himself’ as his audience every time he turns to the absent “Eyes” when explaining something of which he is already fully aware, when he ‘translates’ Hindi. Because he is his only primary (and often neglected) audience, there is no detailed “primary scene of speech” with a clearly envisioned Hindi audience, and this is supported by the common lack of an audience in the generic situation of talking to a tape recorder. Animal is not talking to a present audience, he is talking to an absent, voiceless “‘something’ ‘other’” as if it had eyes, as if it had a voice, as if it were a subject that heard what he says. And thus, a double confusion easily takes place: The real readers may confuse the “Eyes” Animal addresses with themselves, and they may think themselves present while he speaks. But at the same time, that which is assumed and produced by the (fictitious) speech act is claimed as the presence of the addressing and the addressed, and confused with the datum of a subject that has supposedly spoken, and as whose metaphor the text is read. (Menke 2000: 168; my translation) This face and voice of the “Eyes” cover an absence: The prosopopeia, the face awarded by reading, ‘says’ that there was no mask or face there before - even as (and precisely in so far as) it occludes this lack. The prosopopeia is a catachresis of the face. For catachresis is the name for that ‘trope’ in which a word stands in for that which has not been named (before), for that for which no word is used in a literal sense. A catachresis is also called and is, according to rhetorical tradition, an abusio, abuse. (Menke 1997: 229; my translation) There is a lack of a single voice on ‘both’ sides that is occluded and stated by the prosopopeia: the absence of the reader is occluded/ stated by the figure of the “Eyes,” and the incalculable plurality of voices in the text is - and this will be the last part of my argument - awarded ‘Animal’s’ unified “mangled” 17 voice and shape. ‘Animal’ persistently addresses the ‘reader’, and in doing so, as we have seen, he talks in both Hindi and English, he translates himself. In addressing of the “Eyes,” ‘Animal’ is also the mediator for the many alien voices. ‘Animal’ mentions and describes the alien voices he hears as being sometimes distracting or unhelpful, but they never disrupt ‘Animal’s’ addressing the “Eyes.” They are discourse objects contained within a perfectly understandable and controlled discourse: Yeats and others [...], ‘the Celts’ have become an identifiable presence and active agent in the emergent construct of world literature” (Döring 2007: 114 and passim). 17 See Beresford 2008: online and Banks 2008: online. “His words only? ” 179 Like rejoicing, the world’s unspoken languages are rushing into my head. Unusual meanings are making themselves known to me. Secrets are shouting themselves into my ear, seems there’s nothing I cannot know. Ssspsss, haaarrr, khekhekhe, mmms, this is how the voices are, often I’ll babble aloud the things they tell me. (11) These voices also infuse the discourse with truth. They provide helpful and true information to Animal that he could otherwise not come by - “taking full help of my voices” (200) - and give authoritative interpretations: I flew through clouds of voices, must have been millions of them, only one comment do I remember. You got angry because when you looked at her you thought sex, when she looked at you she thought cripple. (72; italics in original) ‘Animal’s’ “astounding voice” is “true and unapologetic” (Mahajan 2008: online). And it is in looking for this truth that ‘Animal’ addresses also ‘himself’ - or rather, he addresses a future ‘Animal’ who already knows which choice ‘Animal’ should make: I’ve a choice to make, let’s say it’s between heaven and hell, my problem is knowing which is which. (11) Thought and thought I’ve, asked aloud for advice, my voices had none to offer, but began their crazy hissing, khekhe fishguts noises. It’s then that I’ve remembered the tape mashin in the wall. I will tell this story, I thought, and that way I’ll find out what the end should be. I’ll know what to do. (365) I’ve just rewound the tape like Chunaram did that time, heard my own voice. Sounds so queer. Do I speak that rough-tongue way? (21) That ‘Animal’ is surprised by the sound of his own recorded voice is not surprising; nearly everyone has had the same experience. But in this case, it also ties in with ‘Animal’s’ reason to finally record his story: he wants to find out who he ‘truly’ is, whether he should use the opportunity to get an operation that could allow him to walk upright, or decline the operation and remain walking on all fours. He is searching for the logic of his own story that he can only see when he externalizes it. ‘Animal’ talks via the tape recorder to a future ‘Animal’ who understands the logic of the then-past ‘Animal’s’ story and who therefore knows which decision is the right one. The alien voice of the double-headed fetus called ‘Animal’ a “doubler”: From your hips, at the point where your back bends, rises a second you who’s straight, stands upright and tall. This second you’s there all the time, has been there all along, thinks, speaks and acts, but it’s invisible - (139) Agreeing to or declining the operation, ‘Animal’ decides his shape: he has to make a de-cision and cut away one part, creating a unified shape. ‘An- Brigitte Rath 180 imal’ cuts away the upright shape, he identifies with the “mangled” body. Addressing this future ‘Animal’ who has made this decision, he addresses and constitutes a unified shape: the unique mangled body is fused to the unique mangled voice - as a reviewer puts it, “the English is as mangled as his spinal cord” (Banks 2008: online) - that, because it is mangled, can contain original Hindi and original English, it can contain a multitude of voices. This unique and unified shape is the mask for ‘Animal’. The prosopopeia is that figure which occludes its figurative quality, as well as the fact that face and shape are (‘only’) rendered in the act of awarding, specifically in the prosopopeia of the face, in which a grammatical function turns rhetorical, and a figure anthropomorphic. ‘Persons’ are constituted via the ‘metaphor’ of the voice, and their figuration is forgotten in a hallucination. (Menke 1997: 234; my translation) ‘Animal’s’ mangled mask is a catachresis that can easily be taken literally, producing the hallucination of a subaltern voice. And this mask can be taken as a catachresis not only for one subaltern voice, but also for “the voice of the poor.” It masks their incalculable plurality, the “irretrievably heterogeneous” (Spivak 2010 [1988]: 253) subaltern subject. There is, as Spivak says referring to Derrida, a “catachresis at the origin” (283). “Masterwords like ‘the worker’, or ‘the woman’,” as Spivak points out, “masterwords are catachreses” because “there are no literal referents, there are no ‘true’ examples of the ‘true worker’” (Spivak/ Harasym 1990 [1988]: 104) - nor, one might add, of the “true poor.” ‘Animal’s’ unique and unified mask doubles as catachresis for “the poor” (or “the disenfranchised,” “the victims of corporate disaster”), and this catachresis is taken literally in an act of hallucination: It is the language that is the real hero of this Man Booker-shortlisted novel. The polyglot Animal communicates in an exhilarating torrent of words, a riddling rush of English, French, Hindi, poems, puns, scatologically inflected taunts and curses. His own uncanny ability to hear the thoughts of all creatures gives speech to insects, unborn fetuses and the dead. The effect is glorious. If the status of our humanity depends on our ability to communicate, then Animal’s tongue belies the name he bears. At once playful, pitiless and moving, Animal’s People stands as a testament to the courage and resilience of India’s poor. (Laing 2007: 21) This does not answer the question whether the subaltern can speak. It does show, though, that we are very good at hallucinating the voice of a subaltern and the voice of the subaltern. The last sentences of Derrida’s “Of an Apocalyptic Tone” read: Of this volume [the book mentioned in the Book of Revelation] written, you remember, “on the inside and out,” it is said at the very end: do not seal this; “Do not seal the words of the inspiration of this volume...” Do not seal, that is to say, do not close, but also do not sign. “His words only? ” 181 The end approaches, now it’s too late to tell the truth about the apocalypse. But what are you doing, all of you will still insist, to what ends do you want to come when you come to tell us, here now, let’s go, come, the apocalypse, it’s finished, I tell you this, that’s what’s happening. (Derrida 1992 [1981]: 67) Animal’s People closes with: Is life so bad? If I’m an upright human, I would be one of millions, not even a healthy one at that. Stay four-foot, I’m the one and only Animal. [...] I am Animal fierce and free in all the world is none like me Eyes, I’m done. [...] Go well. Remember me. All things pass, but the poor remain. We are the people of the Apokalis. Tomorrow there will be more of us. (366) The words are sealed. The volume is signed. The voices are contained. There is an end. Nothing has happened. References Animal [Indra Sinha] (2009a). “Katie Price vs Animal Spice.” The Khaufpur Gazette. 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A History of Translation. London: Routledge. Brigitte Rath Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft - Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen Universität Innsbruck, Österreich