A Riveting Rendezvous with
Dr. Hepzhibah Israel
Interviewing Dr. Hepzhibah Israel | University of Edinburgh
I MA Students | 31st July 2024
I’ve never been interviewed by six people. This is the first time in my life. So why do you want to interview me. I’m not even teaching you. Why do you want to interview me?
To travel with your world, replied Shobhana, a reply that impressed Dr. Hepzhibah greatly!
Well, indeed, it was a very highly engaging, mind-blowing interview by our I MA English students – Nikita, Shobana, Pooja, Ranjitha, Divya and a student from MA Pol. Science, from 12 noon to 1 pm today in the Office of the Dean of International Programmes.
Stay glued from here-on, to enjoy the various facets of this riveting and spirited interview with Dr. Hepzhibah Israel –
Just excerpts for us all -
‘You are interested in travelling with me. That’s a good reason for an interview’.
Nikita added,
‘Well, I love meeting with people, learn from people and get inspired from their achievements’.
Students: Starting on a casual note… How do you find the weather in Chennai…
Dr. Hephzibah: Well, it’s hot and sweaty. I just returned from Thekkady which was quite cool.
What inspired you to visit Chennai, and what are your expectations about this trip?
I had two reasons for coming to Chennai. One was personal. One was to teach in MCC. I wanted to see how the response of MA students in MCC was to translation.
Do you have any favourite experiences or moments in your trip so far?
That’s a very broad question. Just to narrow it down, within MCC, it’s been quite good to interact with students, who ask really interesting questions. Yesterday especially we had a very interesting Panel Discussion for four hours on Translation Studies.
Actually the session yesterday was for three hours. But then, we ended up interacting for four hours, and people were asking such interesting, thought-provoking questions.
What made you take to English Literature? How was your life at Miranda House? And your career as a Professor with Delhi University?
I was always with a book in my hand all through my childhood and teenage years. And I was always doing well at school and my highest marks were always in English. So it’s a Catch 22 situation.
When you do it well, you always want to do it more! I was always passionate about it. I wanted to write! And my dream was to become a novelist. I haven’t done that yet.
But I did like the idea of writing and literature and what role it plays. And I knew what I didn’t want to become. I didn’t want to become a doctor, engineer, business management person in an MNC, cos that I knew was not for me.
The only other thing I’d have wanted to become was to be a geographer, because I’d have loved going to Antarctica, or to one of these exotic places, studying land forms and stuff, and my father had a role to play, saying, ‘That’s a ridiculous idea’.
I just went ahead with English – when you’re young you’re not sure what to do. When you like something so much you just go with the flow of it. So that’s one of the things I did.
About Miranda House – I’d say it really had a very important role to play – even now that has a key role in my life.
It is a women’s college, and at that point, when I was there, it had the most dynamic English department, in the whole of Delhi University, much more than St. Stephen’s or Lady Shriram College, which are the other competitors to Miranda House.
In fact I was first disappointed that I didn’t get into St. Stephen’s, and then I was very relieved that I didn’t get into it, because it was politically very conservative.
Whereas all the women who were teaching me in Miranda House tended to be Feminists, Marxists, and ideologically they shaped the way I thought about literature, and so they shaped the way I thought about literature as a part of wider cultural politics.
So it’s not just saying,
I like this novel because it’s so beautiful and it made me cry, or,
‘This poem is so beautiful’.
That’s what I would have said at school before I went to university, whereas the way they made me think about issues to do with gender, with feminism, patriarchy, issues to do with class, especially class in the UK with respect to British Novels, Caste, (especially Caste in India), nationalism colonialism, postcolonialism - all of those ideas I found really exciting.
Quite a few of them tended to be Marxists-feminists and therefore their teaching helped me grow intellectually. And so a lot of what I do now, the way I read etc, sometimes people prescribe texts in their MA, and even PhD in Edinburgh, and I say happily that, ‘I’d read that as an Undergrad student in India’, and that was in the early 90s.
Cos my teachers were really up-to-date with all the theories and the criticism that was being published. They really had a fundamental role to play in shaping my career and future as an academic and as a researcher.
Do you think young literary scholars look at literature in a far more different way compared to scholars of your generation? Why?
Then, I need to know how you look at literature?
Students: We look at literature as a reflection of ourselves, as a slice of our lives, the texts were never just texts, they were gateways to ideas and ideologies, I think literature itself plays a very major role in shaping your ideology and who you are as a person.
In my case literature it’s more than just a text! When you read Chaucer, sometimes Sylvia Plath you can actually feel – who are you as a human – what does it mean to be a human –
Literature made me understand that imagination and reality are not binaries. Reality itself is not real. It’s constructed. There’s a need for us to bridge the gap between imagination and reality.
Dr. Hepzhibah: I think it’s not very useful to think about generational gap in a broad sense. I’d rather answer on my behalf.
Most of what you said would echo with what I think about literature then and now!
The only thing I’d differ is the idea of ‘Literature being a reflection of reality’.
If we really think critically about that, literature doesn’t reflect reality, but reconstructs reality for a political purpose. It could be for a political purpose.
There’s a politics behind writing that poetry. You could kill yourself. But when you choose to write about your thoughts to suffering, it’s not just reflecting that reality, but trying to shape that reality.
That part is important for me. How does literature derive from reality? How it reconstructs reality for people. In the context of people who are oppressed, literature has been used to suppress people – you cook for the man, or thoughts of sexual desire, repression, these are constructs that literature promotes.
So literatures are ideological battlefields, where different writers are trying to shape reality in different ways.
In their texts they try to imagine a different future. The relationship between what is happening in the text, and what is happening outside!
Students: How does a translated piece of work shape societal ideas? Or how does a translated version contribute to shaping societal ideas?
Translations shape realities, and even cultures.
Obviously the source text or the original text would have shaped reality in the source language and in the source culture.
But when it is translated, the translator then has a role to play in reshaping the text to a new culture. So you could have a feminist translation of a patriarchal text – that changes the text in such a way that it challenges certain patriarchal norms in the target language or target culture.
But it’s better if you read articles. Because there’s a lot in Translation Studies. If you’re interested, you can look up journals on JSTOR titled, ‘translation studies’.
There’s a lot on cultural translations or politics of translation or ‘translation and politics’, and you will have hundreds of articles that come up.
Students: How do you ensure that the authenticity of a text is preserved in translation?
Within translation studies, the idea of authenticity has been challenged. So there is nothing like an essence or an authentic meaning. Because all texts are interpreted by readers. And a translator is like another reader. So every translation is a re-interpretation. It’s not an exact equivalent of the source text.
Students: What inspired you to be the creator of creator through your research and teaching? Which work nurtured that literary spark?
My mother was a teacher. And all my life the one thing I didn’t want to be was a teacher. I hate the idea of being a teacher. During my MA too I was very scared of facing people, and I was very shy of walking into a room full of students, who all stared at me. The thought of it was very scary.
However, just after my MA, one of the English teachers in my school, fell badly ill, and couldn’t teach for a few months, and the principal knew that I’d finished my MA, and so she asked me to come and teach.
You can’t say ‘No’ to a Principal, and so I said, ‘Yes’.
But I spent the next one week being completely terrified at the idea of going to class. I couldn’t sleep. Then on the day I was about to teach, I went to school, to tell the Principal that I cant’ do this!
In those days there were no mobile phones. So I took a bus and went and told her, that I don’t want to teach.
But she refused my explanations, and said, ‘Of course, you are teaching’, and she took me straight to class.
I had prepared for the class to teach a poem. I still remember, it was a 11th standard class. I don’t know what happened, but something clicked when I started speaking. I introduced myself.
I realised that, in the first five or ten minutes, I thought o myself that, I know so much more than they do! They’re just 11th Standard, and I had known so much about Blake than they knew, and I didn’t even have to prepare, because I had just finished my MA. And that gave me confidence to speak in class.
Just the knowledge that I had knowledge gave me the confidence to speak. And I taught, and I found that the entire class was silent, and they listened to me. That gives you a kick. It’s a bit like being on stage, (if you’re interested in standing on stage). So every teacher is actually a performer of a certain kind.
So you walk into the classroom, and you perform on that day. You entertain your students. You teach them. You do all kinds of things to keep them engrossed. If you don’t do that, and if you’ve lost their interest in the first five to ten minutes, or in that first one hour, you’ve lost your audience.
How do you capture the imagination of your young audience? That was very intriguing for me. I found that I could do it. I didn’t know I could do it, until I did it. Which was something that my mother had said.
You won’t enjoy it until you try it. The same tactics we use with food.
I tried and I found that I actually enjoyed teaching it. So the next day I actually enjoyed going forward to school. I ended up teaching there for three to four months. And I realised that, I could actually do it.
Then I went on to teach at University. For me teaching adults is something I like doing. I’m not very good with very young people. You need different sets of talents for that. I can’t go and talk about politics and ideology to young children. But I want to talk about feminist politics, and so I need young people of about 16 and above to teach. That’s how I ended up in University teaching.
Sometimes the damage is done at school, and the University is too late to correct certain assumptions.
First year undergraduate teaching is one of the most exciting actually, since the student is fresh out of school, rigid and very formal, and can’t ask questions, very strict environment where you’re boxed in.
Then you come into this new world, where everything is new and you shape them, and you challenge assumptions, and that person is forced to think about why they assume certain things, and then you keep challenging those students, and you build ways of thinking in students.
So I think for me, critical thinking is very important in young people. Because if you have the tools for critical thinking, you can apply them to anything – not just literature! You can apply to historical texts, political texts, religious texts, you can apply it to various other contexts as well.
So it doesn’t have to be just literary texts that you are critical with.
I’m sure you would realise that you are critical now, when you watch the news, when you watch a film. It becomes a part of your training and you can’t get it out of your bloodstream. And that’s good. Don’t be embarrassed! Don’t be defensive about it. I’m sure your family will tell you that you are being critical.
But one of the things you probably enjoy [and I certainly do], is the enjoyment of critical analysis.
What’s actually entertaining is the critical engagement! Why does the text work in this way, and what is the message, and how is it being conveyed! And how is it being received. So carry on by using the tools in other contexts as well.
Students: What’s your take on literary festivals, book clubs that promote literary content and literary engagement?
The question is about, who is organizing it, who is funding it, etc.
I guess you are aware of the Shell company environmental debate – they will put money into environmental issues, and say that they promote environmental research. They also give literary prizes for eco-friendly, novels and novels on literatures that challenge the Anthropocene. They present themselves as if they are the saviours of the world. But in practice they’re destroying literature.
But they’re actually getting the money out of oppressing someone. Someone’s health, someone’s illiteracy.
Students: How do you see Digital Humanities and technology transform the field of literary studies.
At the moment, AI and digital tools are really challenging translation studies and translators in a big way much more than literary studies. There’s a worldwide acceptance that literatures are so creative that machines cant quite copy that. It’s still a consensus all over that humans are still more creative.
As for Translation, there’s more and more reliance on machines, and there will be a time in the world when human translations are no more necessary.
We know the pressure of global English over Indian languages.
Machines pretend that there’s no language politics. More and more people need to speak about this, and need to be aware which languages people speak where.
When do you speak Tamil. Who do we speak to in Tamil? I’m sure you’ve experienced this. They’ll get offended when we talk in Tamil for them. But I know English, and I’m not going to be pushed down by you. It’s a class conflict here. And actually, the more AI takes over the translation world, the more negative the effects will be in the future.
I’m interested in Digital humanities. AI technology is vey useful. I travelled in China. I don’t know a single word in Chinese. But the only way I found my way back was because of Google translations.
A lot of IT people are gung ho about machine translations. They need to come to your MA classes and study something about ideology and politics.
They depend upon human intellect! Where’s originality in that case?
It also makes me feel that, there’s operation of binary everywhere. The moment there’s creation there’s destruction.
Students: Can you tell us about your journey into translation studies?
I did my BA, MA and MPhil in English.
MPhil in Delhi University is different.
It enabled me to have a relationship with Tamil in the classroom. For me growing up in Delhi, Tamil was a domestic language. I was aware that most people around me were Hindi. One out of 20 were Tamil in Delhi.
And we spoke in English and Hindi. So studying Literature was only English.
Harish Trivedi was interested in translation. Those were the reasons I got interested in that.
That brought the three together.
Students: What’s so unique about your Translation?
Well, it’s hard to say. What’s interesting for me was mainly a commitment to certain ideological issues. Particularly a certain text. What kind of text. I wouldn’t claim that my translation is unique.
But I’d say that every translator has a particular perspective to approach a text! I’d be an Indian woman, a Tamil speaker, all of these factors, growing up in Delhi, so the idea of dislocation, displacement, and negotiating what it means to be Tamil in Delhi, plays a unique part in my translation.
All translations would bring what is unique to their translation process.
Students: When you translate a text, how to you resolve the author-translator conflict?
Well, that’s a million-dollar question.
Yes, there’s something compromised at some point.
Lawrence Venuti defines translation as an act of violence!
It is akin to committing an act of ethnocentric violence by uprooting the text from the language and culture that gave it life! It is the forcible replacement of the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text with a text that will be intelligible to the target-language culture! He says that, translations are acts of violence.
So you can’t find this utopia! You can just say, if this is more feminist, or this is more conscious of Dalit politics than another. So every translation will change the source text!
Students: Your research spans English literary studies, what are the significant challenges you’ve explored!
I started looking into the history of translation of Bible into Tamil. I was interested in the debates around translation. I wasn’t interested in ‘which word was there in Tamil or not, as an equivalent. My interest was on looking at how perceptions or debates on language, debates on translation, debates on identity shaped the way the Bible was translated.
And how the translated Bible shaped the way of Tamil literary culture or politics for at least the Protestant community. And, in that context, I was looking at the Bible as a literary or a cultural text.
My concern was not theological! It was not to look at the Bible as a religious text! It was to look at the Bible as a literary text that was playing a part in the literary scenario in Tamil and I released that it had changed.
So, in the 18th century, there were particular challenges or debates, which changes in the 19th century, which changed again in the 20th century, when Protestant Tamils and Catholics started translating the Bible for themselves, rather than relying on missionaries. So that kind of relationship with language and literature was central to my PhD project.
I’ve also translated stories. Katha in Delhi, that publish Prize Stories. They’ve got a whole series of books written by academics on translation.
Get the library to order these books, so you can apply to the Indian context much more rather than thinking of translation in the abstract. They’ve several anthologies on ‘translating caste’ and ‘translating gender’. They’ve a whole series of books written by academics from various universities across India, also reflecting on the process of translation.
Students: Imagination is a world in itself to unravel the hidden. Could you please share your experiences and insights.
There’s a different way of thinking about imagination than the prescriptive classic 19th century fiction. Imaginary worlds are always linked to reality in some way. That link is interesting. So what’s fantastical cannot be understood without taking into account what is real.
Most recently I had the opportunity to write poetry for the Edinburgh art gallery. In that poetry I was trying to imagine a world without borders.
So imagination was central to that writing project. In a world where borders were policed all the time. So can we imagine a world without borders, where we need no police?
So that’s something that I imagined in my own writing.
Students: What role does translation play in facilitating cross-cultural understanding?
It plays a role, but it’s a double-edged sword. Texts were used to subjugate people.
One last burning question –
Students: In what way do Postcolonial studies intersect with Translation Studies in your research?
Well, you need to read my book on that. All your questions will be answered there.
What are the intrinsic aspects to creative insights through your research?
I’d call it central to that – a commitment to research. A commitment to research properly. Research in a proper way - not just two articles.
Research fully, in a committed way. Do the hard work. I’ve been told that, in the last 10 or 15 years, many academics give money for their articles to be published. So this is a new problem that’s come up. Cos promotions are linked to the articles.
20 articles are required to be promoted from lecturer to senior lecturer. So they give money and get the articles.
As a researcher, I’d put all my money to research and not to such unethical publishing. Do it to the best of one’s knowledge. Start early. Redraft your article multiple times. It’s the commitment to writing well.
To write well!
Write not just a literary text but an academic text! It attracts people to your writing.
The creativity angle comes in when you write better. Give yourself time!
Students: How do you rate your experience with us, interviewing you today, ma’am?
It was wonderful. Some questions were very insightful, some show class. Some from a very different direction. Some very challenging. So thank you for your questions.
Students: Thank you so much ma’am.
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