When I was a boy back in my pre-teens going to school in my hometown two of my friends had a Gameboy Advance. This was just before the iPhone, back in 2007. They brought it to a camp we all attended. I was fascinated by these devices to death but would never borrow them to have a go at a game. I wanted to possess one of these baddies so bad even seeing another, not mine, would coil a part of me in smothering jealousy. Unfortunately, you never got these devices easily in India. At-least in the places, I had practical access to or knew about. And even if I did I was pretty sure these would be expensive as hell. So I was pretty much destined to not have them at all.

Enter emulation. This is an entire internet culture around emulating these old retro-computing devices and bringing their ghosts back on modern machines. This guy spent over a month building a Gameboy/Color emulator in Java for example. The thing that fascinates me about emulation is the process of learning everything about every aspect of these devices: CPU, graphics, timing, memory, I/O, how the cartridges work and the like. My Gameboy love long dead now resurrected as a digital ghost. But emulation is never satisfying. You see, these devices still fascinate me as they do hundreds of thousands of others precisely because of their physical form. Touch devices like phones, as amazing as they are cannot replace the feeling of hitting a hard button while gaming.

In other things, there is another kind of emulation I have had my mind on for some time now. It is to translate Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot to Gujarati. While searching for the link to a performance on YouTube I did come across many videos with Indian lecturers in them giving a well-rehearsed explanation of the play with comments usually explaining how the lecturer pronounced Godot or Estragon incorrectly and other basic facts as to when the play was first conducted or who first coined the term Theatre of the Absurd. I had no idea this was a play common in Indian B.A. syllabuses for English literature. I am sure there is a Hindi translation floating around somewhere. A Gujarati translation, however, fascinates me for some specific reasons. Of the many, I think the most important would be that I believe the absurdity of the characters, their mannerisms, their way of speaking, their dread, their humor and the atmosphere of the play in general, would translate very well in a Gujarati context. So the agenda would not be to merely translate the sentences to another language but also to imagine all these characters as rural Gujaratis. Rural because the play takes place in the middle of nowhere and a rural setting best captures that. It would require imagining what they wear, how they speak, how they behave, their accents in a way becomes highly local. A translation that does not capture a whole Gujarat but a very narrow, very specific part of it in the middle of nowhere in particular and something most Gujaratis seeing the play would identify as not their language exactly.

See you tomorrow,
Avi.