Nathalie Pavec & Suhasini Vincent

Rethinking Fables: Suniti Namjoshi and the Art of Translation
Nathalie and Suhasini are preparing the first-ever French translation of Suniti Namjoshi’s Feminist Fables (1981), due to be published by Les PUR (Presses Universitaires de Rennes). We invited them to comment on their experience and importance of translating this book.

The cover of the first edition (Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1981)
Across centuries and civilizations, fables of beast lore have shaped the imagination of its fabulists in different cultures. Carried by trade winds and merchant caravans, fables from the East made their way to the West, transcending both time and space. Fables from the West were recited and voiced differently in the caravanserais of the Silk Road (150 BC to 16th century). The fable’s terrain was one that was always re-tilled by the new teller who included new nuances to the original fable according to the setting. The Roman fabulist, Phaedrus, translated the works of Aesop from Greek. Aesop’s world of talking animals finds its figuration in different historic settings and eras, their contexts overlap, and their stereotypes linger through the ages in the works of fabulists. Emerging from oral storytelling, these fables were transmitted across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Indian fables from the Panchatantra and the Jataka Tales travelled west across Afghanistan, Turkey and the Bosphorus to Europe in caravans of Eastern traders. The Brahmin mentor of the Panchatantra was Vishnu Sharma who considered fables as sound expressions of statecraft and diplomacy to educate Vasu, Ugra and Ananta, royal princes of the imaginary city of Maiden’s Delight in the art of governance. Trade routes between Greece and India during the times of Alexander the Great suggest the further blending of Greek and Indian fables, and traces of similar patterns of narrative structure exist in Indian and Greek fabulist traditions. The fables merged, blended, metamorphosed in cross-cultural zones of trade on the Mediterranean coast, socialized via the bazaars and the caravanserai of the Middle East and travelled through diplomatic channels to other civilizations.
Suniti Namjoshi’s Feminist Fables: A Cross-Cultural Legacy
Feminist Fables (1981) by Suniti Namjoshi, a contemporary transnational fabulist from the Indian diaspora, has hybrid retellings and reconfigurations of fables from Eastern and Western fabulist traditions. It highlights the lesbian-feminist experience in a white heterosexual paradigm. Unlike the patriarchal cast of traditional fables, Namjoshi’s Feminist Fables recast age-old tales, fables and myths with the intent of proposing an alternate reality. The contradictions and paradoxes surrounding issues of race, sexuality and gender find a new reconfiguration in Namjoshi’s world of talking creatures. The genre of the feminist fable lends itself to the creation of new possibilities and the transformation of old realities. They offer a way of imagining alternative realities, chart new possibilities, convey ideas about feminist-lesbian perspectives, and enact processes that move and structure imagination.
Unlike the patriarchal cast of traditional fables, Namjoshi’s fabulistic sleight of hand deconstructs the authority of canonical tales, be it Indian, Greek, or European traditions. She reconstructs them through a feminist lens and the retelling is both humorous and revelatory. For instance, in the feminist fable “The Incredible Woman”, the wonderwoman engages in saving the world before breakfast, lassoes a spaceship and even pencils in a visit to her psychiatrist during the day as she has a simple craving for a ‘normal life’. The Feminist Fables are short, pithy, ironic, witty and often whimsical with feminist inflections: in the fable “From the Panchatantra”, the Brahmin’s daughter pleads for ‘human status’; in “A Quiet Life”, a woman wishes to be a rabbit or a mythical beast to escape the burdens of being ‘female’; in “Rescued”, Rapunzel dreams not of rescue, but of a fortress of her own. The subversions are gentle, yet insistent in their new moulds. Namjoshi, the fabulist rethinks and reworks the fabulist terrain. She rethreads the fable’s fabric by unsettling patriarchal patterns and spinning a web of feminist re-imaginings.
Ancient Indian fabulists like Vishnu Sharma used beast tales in the Panchatantra to instruct princes in statecraft. Greek and Roman fable weavers such as Aesop and Phaedrus spun fables with the dual purpose of amusing and enlightening their listeners. Jean de La Fontaine later described the genre as a ‘rich field’ where readers and listeners could continue to glean new meanings. Namjoshi retells these fables by blending these traditions with the postmodern, the postcolonial, and the queer. Her animal characters speak with the voices of the marginalized and bear the markers of hybrid identities. As a transnational writer who has lived in Mumbai, Toronto, Devon, her literary cosmos is one that explores feminist themes and issues that are relevant to multiple countries and cultures. The fabulist terrain is one that offers immense scope for conjuring up witty and wise fables that differ from those usually approved by Western humanism. Namjoshi re-spins old yarns, myths and fables into fresh feminist fables, thus offering new food for thought. The fables offer new morals for the changing times, foreground the need to question, rethink and articulate new radical ideas.
Translating and Retelling Feminist Fables in French
Namjoshi’s Feminist Fables have been translated into several languages over the years – including Dutch, Italian, Korean, and Spanish – yet French is notably absent from the list. While translating the work into French (scheduled for publication by Presses Universitaires de Rennes in 2026), we found ourselves reengaging with the fables to adapt them for a new cultural and linguistic audience. Owing to the rich intertext it is grounded in, Namjoshi’s book hums with other languages: Greek, Latin, French, Sanskrit, Danish, if we think of the most obvious references, but also the variety of languages through which readers have discovered translations or rewritings of these tales and myths – as is the case of francophone readers – in their so-called ‘original’ language or in translation. The translation process thus inscribes itself within a constellation of texts and languages that predates the endeavour and expands its horizons well beyond a simple ‘trans-lation’, a mere transfer from one language to another, from one culture to another. To translate Namjoshi’s fables is to immerse oneself in this network that nourishes them, and to attempt to navigate these forking paths, to forge one’s own voice within it. Within this intermediary space of the ‘trans-’, there dwells a multiplicity of voices that challenge the very notion of an ‘original’ or ‘source’ text. For instance, the francophone reader would find it impossible to read Namjoshi’s “The Hare and the Turtle” or “The Fox and the Stork” without hearing the subtle musical tones of Jean de La Fontaine in the background, or recalling fragments, words, rhythm of the French fable they had read or recited at school. But for those who have read or studied Aesop, Plutarch, or other versions of the same, fables in other languages, other words and cadences may echo just as powerfully. The same holds true for Andersen, Indian fables, Chaucer, Shakespeare, whether encountered in their so-called ‘original’ language or in translation. To translate Namjoshi’s fables is therefore to immerse oneself in this network that nourishes them, and to attempt to navigate these forking paths, to forge one’s own voice within it.
However, in this polyphonic chamber of echoes, the music that prevails, and to whose steps and notes the translators had to dance to while translating, was that of Namjoshi. It is a musical score that is powerful in its sonic effects and is also modulated with a certain precise economy of words and form. Each text is short, uses simple words, borrows the stylistic device of repetition from the genre of the fable or the fairy-tale, displays the author’s art of ellipsis and minimalism. Namjoshi’s doctoral thesis was on Ezra Pound and the alert reader may identify the palpable affinity with this modernist poet and some of the guiding principles of the Imagist movement, among which concision and cadence: in the Preface to Some Imagist Poets published in 1915, “concentration” is mentioned as “of the very essence of poetry”. In that sense, Namjoshi’s fables are highly poetic, in tune with the intensity and formal liberty of Pound’s verse. They are like meticulously carved gems, crafted with what the 1915 Imagist manifesto called “the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word”. To us, the translators, this was the challenging line along which we had to walk: aiming at the exact, shunning the decorative. On several occasions when we resorted to the translation technique of ‘amplification’ or the use of paraphrasing and explanatory additions to make implicit information in the source text explicit in the target text, Namjoshi steered us back toward that disciplined concision which lends her prose its distinctive intensity. More often than not, however, the tightrope on which we had to dance, like an acrobat balancing on a wire, concerned less lexical accuracy than rhythmic precision. While the French language may tend to be more wordy and florid, the English language offered us an economy of words as well as placed us at crossroads: vaisseau spatial may translate spaceship, but it does not capture its flight into space. The title Whore, Bitch, Slut, Sow has a verbal punch that French would lose with a string of polysyllabic terms. Likewise, the simplicity of The Moon Shone On evokes poetry that a literal rendering such as La lune continuait de briller could never convey. The act of translation is a matter of compromise, a constant negotiation between ‘loss’ and ‘gain’. In the first case, vaisseau spatial was retained, but an effort was made to inject momentum into the sentence, interspersed with a succession of punchy clauses with monosyllabic or disyllabic words, and consonances in [s], [f], and [p]. In the second example, the cadence of syllables and the play of sounds prompted the choice among a range of sexist slurs (Putain, Pouffe, Salope, Truie). In the third one, the suspense effect created by the English preposition at the end was transposed into French through the use of a conjunction at the beginning: Et la lune brillait. These choices related to form and rhythm are far from trivial. There is no discontinuity between form and content: the point in translating is not to wrap up some ‘original’ content into other garments. Form is meaning, and translating involves engaging with the source text in a creative way – rethinking not just what the author has conveyed but how meaning was shaped and infused into the source text.
Dialectics of Grammatical Gender

We faced another challenge while translating the animal fables, that of choosing gender as both French and English differ significantly in their grammatical treatment of gender. In English, nouns do not have lexical gender: the author is therefore free to assign masculine or feminine sex to animals (via the pronouns he or she), or to use the neutral pronoun it. In French, however, the pronoun is grammatically bound to the gender of the noun. A tortue (turtle) must be referred to as elle, a lièvre (hare) as il. Yet this is precisely the opposite of the gender attributed by the author to her characters in “The Hare and the Turtle”: the turtle is he, the hare she. The translation of this fable thus presented a real difficulty, requiring a choice between very different translation strategies. The most daring one would have been to accompany Namjoshi’s feminist defamiliarisation of well-known tales with a defamiliarisation of the French language by bending grammatical gender to fictional sex (e.g., LA lièvre and LE tortue). But such a choice would make little sense in the context of the volume as a whole, since only a few fables actually raise this question of distinction between biological sex and grammatical gender. Moreover, it would introduce a jarring note and disrupt the reading experience, whereas the original fable is unique in its formal and linguistic simplicity. In other fables in the collection, we have drawn on marginal zones of the French language by using rare feminine forms such as hérisonnes, monstresse, or crapaude, but we have refrained from inventing neologisms. Another possible solution for “The Hare and the Turtle” would have been to establish each animal’s sex at the outset by expanding the noun phrase (e.g., through a descriptive epithet like mâle/femelle, or a more anthropomorphic term such as Monsieur/Madame); but unless this expansion is repeated each time, the noun lièvre or tortue still appears, entailing the use of a pronoun of the “wrong” gender, which would disorient the reader. And if one seeks to adhere to the principles of concision and rhythmic effect outlined earlier, this repeated emphasis on biological sex throughout the fable is hardly feasible as the fable must not stand out from the rest of the volume by taking on the tone of either a zoological treatise or a children’s story.
Another possible approach would have been to modify the name of the animal by choosing a noun whose grammatical gender corresponds to the English pronouns. This is the solution we adopted in other fables. For instance, in “The Hedgehogs’ Progress”, a butterfly (which is grammatically masculine in French whereas the animal is she in Namjoshi’s fable) was translated, or rather replaced, by a firefly ( une libellule). Otherwise, the moral lesson at the end of the tale would have been delivered to the three female hedgehogs by a masculine creature, which would have significantly altered the resonance of the moment. More critically still, the bird chosen by Namjoshi in “The Example” is a wren, a masculine noun in French (un roitelet), which is incompatible with the story: the bird is abruptly thrown out by her employers when they discover that she is a lesbian and a feminist. Here, grammatical gender takes precedence over zoological accuracy, and a tit (une mésange, feminine in French) was substituted for the English wren. In contrast, when it comes to the hare and the turtle, such a substitution (e.g., replacing tortue with escargot/snail, for instance) would sever the intertextual link and is therefore not a viable option.
Faced with this quandary, we engaged in a dialogue with Namjoshi on the question of gender in the animal fables and the narrative and political implications of translation choices. While we assumed that her primary concern would be the preservation of the animals’ sexes as she had originally conceived them, she was on the contrary consciously attentive to the rhythmic fluidity of the text, even if that meant the animals’ sexes were reversed in translation. When we pointed out that if the turtle was rendered as a female character, it would be she who cheats and accuses her competitor of being a ‘sore loser’, she replied: “‘Women’ do play foul sometimes. Have to in an ‘unfair’ race”. This response reveals the issues Namjoshi associates with the fable, and more broadly, her conception of feminism: it is not about systematising a binary opposition between male and female, but about raising questions that cut across our societies. Here, the inquiry concerns notions of merit, equal opportunity, justice and injustice, and the absurdity of pitting beings as dissimilar as a tortoise and a hare against one another. By feminising canonical texts, Namjoshi counters the erasure of women’s destinies in our phallocentric cultures. Yet this political aim is pursued within the poetic framework of a literary genre, the fable, which she retells and revitalises by reinvigorating our reading of the classics.
Re-thinking the Text through Translation
Finally, for “The Hare and the Turtle”, yet another translation strategy was chosen: the use of the nouns lièvre and tortue was limited to the first two sentences, where the sex of each animal was introduced; thereafter, only personal pronouns were used, referring to the characters’ sex rather than to the grammatical gender of the nouns. In this way, the author’s fictional choice was respected without compromising the readability or fluidity of the text. However, this constellation of possible solutions highlights the interpretive dimension inherent in translation: to translate is to ‘re-think’ the text in another language. In this sense, it also means participating in the revitalising movement to which every rewriting belongs. A movement that invites us to see what is familiar from a new perspective, from within a different language, culture, or historical moment, or from within a different country (pays in French). Each rewriting is, to take up a French word, a form of dépaysement as defined by French writer Jean-Christophe Bailly. Bailly’s dépaysement arises either when one is transported to an unfamiliar elsewhere, or conversely, when what one knows or believed to know has migrated into an indiscernible but present elsewhere. One then wonders, Bailly says, what is this ‘elsewhere’ that is here. It seems it is this effect of dépaysement that one experiences when reading Namjoshi’s fables—that sense of an ‘elsewhere’, of something familiar (the canonical tales) carried beyond itself by unforeseen divergences that open it to new possibilities. And this dépaysement emerges as much from the imaginative realm as from the language through which it is conveyed.
In this notion of displacement between ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’, several distinct issues intersect: the rewriting of an ancient intertext, the act of translation, and the experience of diasporic migration. In his essay Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie weaves together translation and migration by recalling the etymology of the word ‘translation’ and linking it to his identity as a diasporic writer. He stresses on the fact that the word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across’ and he adds : “Having been borne across the world, we are translated men.” For diasporic authors, writing is a way of exploring modes of self-translation. It is the act of writing oneself from the standpoint of another country, another language, another culture. It is the exploration of dépaysement as a constitutive element of both identity and authorship. In this sense, through her fabulistic writing and through the literary path she has pursued in various forms over the past five decades, Suniti Namjoshi is a ‘translated woman’. Our translation of Feminist Fables thus merely extends and reactivates the dépaysement by proposing one of the many possible becomings of the text or, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s term from The Task of the Translator, one of the ‘afterlives’ of Namjoshi’s work.
To rethink fables today is to participate in a deeper, longer conversation, one that spans cultures and centuries, and asks not just ‘What is the moral of the story?’ but one that muses on ‘Whose morality does this serve?’ and ‘Whose voice is absent?’. Suniti Namjoshi’s fables answer these questions not with finality, but with courage, humour, and infinite possibility of interpretations. In her fables, animals speak, women rebel, myths crumble, and language bends, until, at last, the reader sees not what is, but what could be.
Suniti Namjoshi was born in Mumbai in 1941. She worked in the Indian Administrative Service from which she later resigned to do her doctorate at McGill University, Canada on the Cantos of Ezra Pound (1885-1972). Pound’s early modernist poetry revelled in taking liberty with form and metre. Namjoshi’s sleight of hand is also fashioned in this same experimental style. She was an associate professor in the English Department of the University of Toronto and later a fellow at Exeter University. She lives in Devon in South-west England. Her poetry, fables, articles and reviews have been featured in various anthologies and journals in India, Canada, the US, Australia and the UK. Her corpus includes collections of poems and fables as well as children’s books: Feminist Fables (1981), The Conversations of Cow (1985), Aditi and the One-eyed Monkey (1986), The Blue Donkey Fables (1988), Because of India: Selected Poems and Fables (1989), Saint Suniti and The Dragon (1993), Building Babel (1996), Goja: An Autobiographical Myth (2000), Sycorax: New Fables and Poems 2006), The Fabulous Feminist: A Suniti Namjoshi Reader (2012), Suki (2013, Foxy Aesop: On the Edge (2018), Dangerous Pursuits (2022), The Good-Hearted Gardeners (2024), O Sister Swallow (2024) and Matriarchs, Cows and Epic Villains (2025).
Nathalie Pavec has been an Associate Professor at the University of Franche-Comté/Marie et Louis Pasteur since 2007. She defended her doctoral thesis on Virginia Woolf’s novels (‘Dynamiques du jeu dans l’œuvre romanesque de Virginia Woolf’) at the University of Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2005 and has since published articles on Woolf, as well as translated into French a selection of essays by Woolf (Rire ou ne pas rire, La Différence, 2014). She has also co-translated a collection of short stories by Patrick White (Les Cacatoès, Gallimard, 2021).
Suhasini Vincent defended her doctoral thesis on ‘Experimental Writing within the Postcolonial Framework of Indian Writing in English’ through a joint-supervision programme between the University of Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle and the University of Madras in 2006. She defended her HDR (Habilitation à diriger des recherches) in 2024. She has interviewed Suniti Namjoshi a couple of times and her research focusses on Gender and Ecocriticism. She has compiled press reports on Indian Women’s Rights for the UNO and has published an article entitled « Beyond a battle of ‘props’ and ‘costumes’ – NGOization in India », The Time Is Now. Feminist Leadership for a New Era, a UNESCO publication. She has been an Associate Professor at the University of Paris-Panthéon-Assas since 2007. She is the author of Earth Polyphony: Law, Ecocriticism and Eco-Activism in Postcolonial India, published by Lexington Books in 2024.