The problem with skeletons is that you can know only so much out of it. You can maybe know the rough dimensions of an animal. But you don’t know just how the flesh would wrap itself around it. Paleontologists are now saying more dinosaurs were feathered than reptilian. Which could mean that a T-Rex, always depicted as a fearsome reptile with tiny arms and powerful legs, could have been something like a 6 foot tall fat chicken. Very fearsome. Because birds don’t feckin’ fear anything and chicken are easily converted to cannibalism. Yeesh.
The same with words. When people take everything too literally and start translating works word for word, the art dies. Something happens there that kills the soul of an art-piece when you fail to take in context. You will have a very direct translation but it no longer serves the purpose. Art is weird that way.
Take JF Laldailova, for instance. When he translated William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, there is a scene where Mad Hamlet goes: Words, only words. JF translated it as: Thu chauh, hla chauh. It is very poetic and it conveys what English-speaking Hamlet meant in Mizo context. Because Mizo literature has a different approach in Prose and Poetry. You’d notice sometimes a word in prose is inverted in poetry because there is a different grammar there. Mizo literature is not complete with just the Prose Word; you need its sister Poem Word. When Mizo-speaking Hamlet said, translated back to English, Only words and songs, it means nothing in English but everything in Mizo.
The trouble with people understanding translations recently is that we take everything at face value. While that could work well for Economics, maybe, it does not work for Art at all. The grammar and approach to English and Mizo are different, yes, but also the contexts and expressions are vastly much more so.
There is a famous joke comment that the Mizo for “the moon, the stars and me” is “a ngaihna ka va han hre lo em!” Which of course is nonsensical because a ngaihna ka va han hre lo em! directly and literally translates to: I have no idea at all. Both are song lyrics, the English one being Dolly Parton’s excellent The Moon, The Stars And Me, while the Mizo one is Min Hriatpui Ve Asin, sung by Zosangliani but I don’t know who composed it. The song is the Mizo version of the Dolly song but I appreciate this translation immensely because while the composer maintained the whole story and vibe of the song, it is put entirely in Mizo context. It could have been written by a Mizo, the way it is so elegantly translated! The Moon is my witness, the stars would agree/ They all heard you promise you’d always love me/ I know that it’s true but it’s hard to believe/ You lied to the moon, the stars and me became in Mizo Chung chhawrthlapui leh siar leng zawngte khian/ I tiamthu zawng kha min hriatpui ve asin/ Tunah then nan biahthu min hlan ta si/ A ngaihna ka va han hre lo em! It is the same song, the same story, the same sadness. But when arranged in Mizo, the lines were interchanged. And that was how “the moon, the stars and me” became “a ngaihna ka va han hre lo em!” in Mizo. But all jokes aside, whoever translated this song was goddamn talented and probably feckin’ fluent in both English and Mizo. It is so graceful!
You see it all the time these days. Take frost, for example. Some people now say we should not say ‘vur tla’ to describe frost but instead call a spade and spade and call it ‘dai khal’ (frozen dew) because it has not fallen from the sky to justify the word ‘tla’ (fall). But what is dai but condensed water vapour? And dai doesn’t fall from anywhere but we still use “tla" for it because it is in the language now because clearly the Old Mizo didn’t know about condensation to scientific accuracy and assumed dew fell from somewhere. If dai can fall, surely frozen dew i.e. vur (because we have only one word for frozen water in Mizo) can also fall? So call it vur tla. Translate it as frost. It is already perfect. You don’t have to adjust and change Mizo to suit English. It has its own grammar and its flow.
Mizo also has its own context, especially social. Like hotels and restaurants. People have a problem with roadside eateries being called hotels these days. It is true it might be confusing for the English speaker with no Mizo context, because hotels denote availability of beds while a restaurant is an eatery. But in Mizo, we use the two words very loosely and often call restaurants ‘hotels’. I suppose the Mizo customary way is to lodge with relatives/friends before contemplating an impersonal paid room. Counter to this, the modern Mizo often prefer paying for lodging to inconveniencing anyone. Perhaps a bit of this old custom had bled into the idea of the impersonal hotel/restaurant too. Anywhere that’s not owned by a familiar face that you have to pay for is the same. What difference does a hotel or a restaurant make? Perhaps. I am speculating wildly. But honestly, I do not think it a big offence if someone uses hotel as a Mizo word that’s been borrowed from English rather than as an English word and in this context, means a restaurant instead. I think when we borrow some words, we completely change their meanings. The Mizo word Hotel means an eatery which could have a bed too, even though in its original English, it would definitely refer to accommodation before and above all else, dining included. It is what it is.
Of course sometimes, we don’t do borrowing and just straight up describe things. Like bricks. You have to Google it to define it in English. In Mizo, it is called leirawhchan. The whole thing is in the name. Lei – Clay. Rawh – Fried/Roasted. Chan – Hardened. Hardened Fried Clay. I always find this word amusing. Everything is described in the name.
What’s in a name? For a brick in Mizo, apparently, everything.
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