5 Questions with Sanya Rushdi and Arunava Sinha
Sanya Rushdi was born in Bangladesh and studied the biological sciences and psychology at Monash University, the University of Sydney and Deakin University. Hospital is her first novel. She currently lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction from Bangladesh and India into English. He also translates fiction from English into Bengali. Over 70 of his translations have been published so far in India, the UK and the USA. He teaches at Ashoka University, where he is also the co-director of the Ashoka Centre for Translation, and is the Books Editor at Scroll.in.
(L: Sanya Rushdi; R: Arunava Sinha)
No.1
Run us through how this book was conceived through to publication. Sanya, as it was first written and published in Bengali in 2019, how did you begin to put this book together? And later, what resulted in the collaboration between you and Arunava to translate the book into English?
It was a story and experience that was waiting to be told. It was just looking for the right medium, whether it be a journal article, film or novel.
A couple of months after returning home from the hospital, I became very eager to share my story with a caring ear. So, I gave a few pages of writing to a friend of mine, Bratya Raisu, who is a publisher and editor for a couple of online magazines (and also a renowned poet, writer and artist). Raisu asked me to develop my story into a novel, because he thought it had all the material for a good novel. I was hesitant to start writing a novel so he asked me to give him some chapter headings—just one to two lines of what can be expected in each chapter. I did that, and upon writing the first chapter, it was published in shahitya.com, and subsequently chapter by chapter there. Although I didn’t end up sticking to the chapter headings, it was a rough guide to start with. Each chapter just flowed from the last spontaneously and naturally afterwards.
Later, after the book was published in Bengali, my elder sister Luna sent a copy of the book to Arunava Sinha, who is a friend of hers. Arunava read the book and expressed interest in translating it into English. And that’s how we came to collaborate.
No.2
Arunava, you are a well-known translator of books in Bengali to English in India, the UK and the US, with seventy-six translations under your belt spanning from classic to contemporary Bengali fiction and nonfiction. Were there any challenges or surprises while you were working with Hospital’s original text?
The original text of Hospital is superbly spare, without giving in to any excesses of language or expression at any point. And yet it is rich in terms of what it conveys, forcing the attentive reader to pause and think often. The translation had to maintain both these qualities. What made it easier was that the text is [already] beautifully constructed in Bangla, and I only had to follow it closely.
No.3
On this note, what do you think are some responsibilities that translators should bear in mind?
As a translator, my allegiance is to the text, to the language, to what I’m reading and seeing (and hearing). This is what I am taking into another language—not the author, not myself, not my thoughts about or responses to the text, nothing but the text itself. The translated text must allow itself to be read in all the different ways that the original can, and since the translator can never know what all these ways might be, the only choice is to adhere to the text and the text alone. Add nothing, take away nothing—that’s my principle.
No.4
Sanya, in your author’s note, you state that for the novel, ‘I especially wanted to touch on the role of language and interaction […]’. This comes across particularly strongly as one reads Hospital. Will you share with us a little bit of that distillation process? How do we (especially those with mental health conditions) continue to write about our thoughts and experiences in a manner that is simultaneously non-didactic and provocative? Further, what does language do to and for us?
I come from an academic and psychology background, which I suppose generally encourages didactic writing in that one must be objective, impersonal, unemotional, etc. However, there is a branch of psychology that focuses on the qualia—which encourages subjectivity along with objectivity, and tries to discover what makes us human and not just statistics. I was fortunate enough to have a PhD project and a supervisor from that discipline.
A lot of what I have poured into my novel actually comes from my PhD learning (which I did not complete due to illness). So I was not afraid of being honest, personal and emotional, if that would show my point to the reader instead of telling them to just read and understand without feeling it. I think language has the power of making things up-close and personal, and also objective and impersonal. In Hospital, I aimed to draw a balance between the two.
No.5
Who did you have in mind while you were writing Hospital? What buoyed you while you were writing it?
Writing Hospital to me was more therapeutic than anything else. I was hospitalised in 2015, and upon my release, I was unable to think much about anything. I was quite confused about what just happened, and what was still happening around me.
So I started writing to make sense of things. Writing Hospital was a very emotional journey. As I kept writing, I remembered things that I would not remember otherwise. Going back to the previous question, I think that’s also what language can do. It can open up and spread out our memories and events, so that we can see it happening in front of our very eyes; we can see what was wrong, what was right and what can make things better.
As the writing [for the novel] progressed, I had more and more people from different paths of life in my mind. I had people like myself in my mind, i.e. people diagnosed with mental illness and those who feel that they have nowhere to go. I also had their carers in mind: nurses, doctors, family, social workers, teachers, students, peers and friends. Lastly, I had the government in mind, if they want to consider some of the issues I raised in my book and implement some changes.
A daring literary account of a young woman’s experience of psychosis by Bengali-Australian writer Sanya Rushdi.
In Melbourne a one-time research student with interests in philosophy and psychology is diagnosed with her third episode of psychosis. As she is moved from her family home to a community house and then to hospital, she questions the diagnosis of her sanity or insanity, as determined and defined by a medical model which seems less than convincing to her. Indeed questioning seems to be at the heart of her psychosis, in her over-active interpretations of signs and gestures, thoughts and emotions—and one understands these to be an expression of her intelligence, even if they seem illusory. She tells her story in a calm, rational voice, with an acute sense of detail and an objective air, as she wonders when the next psychotic episode will materialise, or if it hasn’t arrived already.
Based on real-life events, translated from Bengali by the award-winning Indian translator Arunava Sinha, Hospital is an extraordinary novel that portrays the experience of psychosis and its treatments in an unflinching and understated way, while struggling more broadly with the definition of sanity in our society.
Get it from Giramondo Publishing here or at all good bookstores.