Listening to the Leaves 

First Draft is a monthly column in our features section, where we invite translators to give us a glimpse into their process. They share a first draft of a single paragraph – no more – from a translation they are currently working on, accompanied by a brief reflection on the decisions, challenges, and discoveries that shaped that particular version. 

The first draft occupies a unique place in the life of a translation: it is where intuition meets craft, where meaning begins to find its form, and where the translator’s voice first enters into conversation with the original text. It is provisional yet revealing, carrying within it the possibilities and tensions that later revisions may smooth over. We think of this column as a translator’s diary: a space where translators let readers into the negotiations, dilemmas, interpretations, and choices that shape the work of translation.

“Do plants say anything? Many will say – now, what kind of a question is this? Have plants ever spoken? Is it only humans from whose mouth words bloom? Can man express himself clearly? And what he cannot express, is it not language? We have a child – he cannot speak clearly; the few words that come out of him are so half-formed and even broken that it is impossible for anyone to understand their meaning. But we can understand everything that our child says. Not just that though. There are many things that our little boy does not say aloud in words; his eyes, the movements of his face and hands, the shaking of his head – he speaks through these gestures, we understand that language as well, but others don’t. One day a pigeon from a neighboring house came and sat on our house – it then began cooing and grunting at the top of its voice. Our little boy was thus introduced to the pigeon; he soon began imitating the pigeon’s doob doob. How does the pigeon call? As soon as we asked him this, he would imitate the bird’s call. From then on, whether in happiness or sadness, coming or going, at all times, he makes the pigeon sounds. Learning the new art has brought him boundless joy.”

An excerpt from the first draft of Sumana Roy’s translation of “The Man Who Made Plants Write” by Jagadish Chandra Bose. 

This is the first paragraph from Jagadish Chandra Bose that I translated. I had been pushed in this direction, like someone who finds themselves in the middle of a road. For I’m not a natural translator. I use the adjective with slight caution, perhaps even deprivation – natural. All human beings translate of course, they are forced to, between languages and habitats and relationships, moving as we do among a changing audience. I felt no urge to translate any piece of writing. The world was an onomatopoeia – we would somehow be able to make sense of it through its sound.

All this changed around March 2023. You might be surprised by my Virginia Woolf-like “On or around December 1910, human nature changed” kind of precision. Let me tell you why. Scientists in Tel Aviv had heard plants ‘cry’ when they were not watered for more than two days – this piece of research, published in CELL in March 2023, quickly attained some kind of mystical value; it went, as they say, viral on social media. I had suppressed my annoyance long enough – for the last few years I had seen scholars and researchers publish their findings on what was coming to be called ‘plant intelligence’ and ‘plant sentience’. I read many of these pieces, and I felt a mix of joy and disappointment – joy that the Western world was at last coming to terms with how unintelligent they had been to associate intelligence with humans alone, and disappointment in discovering that Jagadish Chandra Bose, who had designed experiments to prove this a hundred years ago, was never mentioned.

It was from anger, then, that I began to translate. 

“Gachher Katha” was the first essay I began to translate. I translated it at first as ‘the story of plants.’ I was, of course, relying on the literary meaning of ‘katha’ that derived from an oral storytelling tradition, say, as in the Ram Kathas. But this seemed insufficient, because of my awareness of what Bose was trying to do with his scientific experiments. It was obvious that he was trying to get the plants to write their own histories, so the ‘katha’ in the title was a genre closer to the memoir or autobiography. It was therefore as much the story of plants as it was the plant’s story. Ram Katha is a story about Ram, not Ram telling his story. ‘Gachher’, with the possessive case built into the word – whose equivalent in Hindi would, I think, be ‘pouddhon ke’ – made it imperative that I retain a sense of both the traditions of the ‘katha’ and ‘atmakatha’ in the translation. I felt compelled to keep both: ‘Plant’s Story; The Story of Plants’. 

I had read the opening paragraphs of the essay many times before. I remembered how I had reached them, sent in this direction by my own history – Bose, without biological children of his own, was writing about his little nephew, likening his language, incomprehensible to an adult human world, with its reliance on words and syntax, with the language of plants. How were we to understand both? The energy of Bose, the affectionate uncle, writing about the little boy’s sounds and gestures, with the cooing of pigeons. ‘Cooing’, for instance, would have seemed too flat, too generic for the boy who was yet to enter language. 

“Our little boy was thus introduced to the pigeon; he soon began imitating the pigeon’s doob doob. How does the pigeon call? As soon as we asked him this, he would imitate the bird’s call. From then on, whether in happiness or sadness, coming or going, at all times, he makes the pigeon sounds.”

As a translator, I too wanted to become the child imitating the bird’s call. And so, I chose onomatopoeia – that is how the pigeon’s ‘doob doob’ came to find a life in this paragraph. The second paragraph of the essay has these lines: “Often there is no need for words. If one observes from love, many qualities are revealed, one is able to hear many things.” Though Bose makes this part of his argument about choosing sound, gesture, arcs and lines over the comforting familiarity of words, I took them to be an instruction for the translator.