A passage from Animal's People that I found to be interesting and that we discussed in class was when he was talking to the fetus in the jar. The reason I thought it was interesting was that I had just finished studying Paul's letters in the New Testament and there was a similar occasion.
Paul, if you are not familiar with The Bible, was a missionary for the Jesus movement in its very beginnings. He wrote letters to the very first Churches in the areas surrounding the Aegean Sea and those letters were collected and are now part of the New Testament. In one of his letters, 1st Corinthians, he described how Jesus appeared to the apostles after his death. Paul says, "Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me (15.8)." He says that he was "one untimely born" which is translated by some to read "aborted fetus."
The comparison would be better if it was Jesus who was the fetus because in the novel the wise one is Kha. But it was still significant to me that there was people writing about talking to a fetus even back 2000 years ago. What then does the fetus represent? There has to be something that the fetus represents that is significant enough to be mentioned at various points in time. A fetus is not pleasant to look at, but when it is fully formed it can be beautiful. In the same way that Paul was transformed from his fetus phase to a promoter of Jesus, Kha in the Jar has potential to get out and be great. In Kha's case it can be read to represent Animal because he too deals with being stuck in a body that is aesthetically difficult to look at. He is deformed and because of that he is unable to accomplish many things, the most important and most simple of which is identifying as a human. A fetus is also difficult to look at, but it represents the beginning of something special and perhaps if Animal was able to accept the help of people in his life, like Paul accepted the help of Jesus, he could become something better than an Animal.
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This is pretty wild to me. At the time of Paul's letters, was the translation of his wording into "aborted fetus" something that stood up under scrutiny when other translators looked the letter over? My question is whether or not the ambiguity in the wording was a reality, or if the people translating Paul's words were purposefully diluting the message he carried. Either way, I think the aborted fetus is a brilliant character in Sinha's novel. It is representative of the blurred reality that Animal perceives because of his mind's capacity to mix the reality he knows to be palpable with that other realm which seems to only exist within his thoughts. The fetus also brings up so many questions about the fortune involved in birth. Animal and the fetus are drastically different characters whose lives, or lack there of, are seen as ruptures from that of "normality." The fetus gives animal an even deeper perspective into the world of disability and grievance.
ReplyDeleteThe translation was never a hot debated issue (from what I know). I think the differences in translation are a matter of flow of the wording i.e. The King James Bible (Elizabethan English).
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