N. Kalyan Raman interview: ‘Devibharathi’s fiction engages with politics and culture’

The Solitude of a Shadow is a chillingly intimate portrait of vengeance and the corrosiveness of caste in rural India that challenges us to confront our own demons and to question the systems that perpetuate inequality and suffering. It opens with an ominous reunion. Karunakaran, a moneylender and a member of the dominant Kavundar (Gounder) caste from the unnamed narrator’s distant past, reappears after three decades. Belonging to the lower Nasuvan caste, the narrator, now a school clerk, is consumed by a long-dormant thirst for revenge for a childhood trauma inflicted by Karunakaran: the sexual assault on his sister, Sharada. The narrator’s obsession with revenge metastasizes, warping his perceptions and alienating him from those he holds dear.

Raman’s translation is a triumph. It captures the stark beauty of Devibharathi’s prose while maintaining its emotional rawness. In his hands, the novel truly becomes a work of transcreation. The language is sparse yet evocative, and the simmering tension and unspoken horrors are conveyed through subtle gestures and silences, leaving a lingering sense of unease. Devibharathi’s approach to narrative language, Raman writes in the Translator’s Note, “eschews special emphasis on the anthropological-ethnographic dimension because he feels that it accentuates the existing differences between communities and reifies them in a way.” He adds: “His diction, even in dialogue, is simple, formal and direct. His portrayal of the material circumstances as well as the interiority of the characters is stark and clear-eyed, without recourse to the conventional tropes of Tamil fiction or the grammar of role-play that is so pervasive in our culture.”

“His grasp of atmosphere, both natural and man-made, is never less than sharp and edgy. His incisive yet nuanced portrayal of the relentless dynamic of power relations between human beings can be overwhelming at times. He uses the novel format to spring surprises at every turn, switching seamlessly between rural and urban settings, between the present and the past, and between reality and fantasy. Always keeping his narrative taut, he presents the unfolding destinies of his characters as essentially mysterious, something the reader must make sense of on their own. As a translator, it has been my attempt to make these distinctive qualities come alive in a new language,” he writes. In this interview, he talks about the process of translation, and how Devibharathi ‘foregrounds the individual as the site of aspirations and appetites in the true spirit of modernity.’ Excerpts:

What drew you to The Solitude of a Shadow?

My engagement with Devibharathi’s work began during 2010-11, when I translated, at his request, two long short stories. He needed the translations for making presentations at two writers’ residencies overseas where he was slated to participate. Those two stories led to the commissioning of a collection of his short stories, published eventually as Farewell, Mahatma. This editor was so impressed with the collection that she lost no time in commissioning the translation of another work, which was Nizhalin Thanimai. I went with the flow, so to speak. That said, I have always enjoyed reading and translating Devibharathi’s work.

You mention in Translator’s Note how Devibharathi was an early adopter of the secular prose style of Tamil modernists when he started writing in the early 1980s. How does his work compare or contrast with other Tamil modernist writers, especially someone like Perumal Murugan, whose works you’ve translated?

A writer’s language and prose style emerge from their themes and concerns, and from how they see the world. Practitioners of sub-regional literature, when writing of subaltern lives, tend to foreground the family and community, including customs, habits and beliefs, and the wider network of social relations that are invariably caste-based. This naturalist mode illuminates how individuals navigate the social structures they are born into. In a way, it also reifies those structures and dictates the language and style of the narrative.

In contrast, Devibharathi foregrounds, in the true spirit of modernity, the individual as the site of aspirations and appetites, struggling to live and survive in a maze of power relations; his characters belong to themselves before they belong to the world. How people treat one another, the play of power in relationships, and the ethics of living in such a world are his primary concerns. Though he may be writing about the same sub-region and the same subaltern lives, his fiction remains deeply engaged with the evolving politics and culture of the modern age. His narrative strategy as well as language is inevitably secular and modern. This is what sets him apart from the naturalist writers. For example, it is hard to imagine Devibharathi writing a whole novel about a childless couple being tormented by the expectations of the world around them because not having children may not strike him as an ethical problem!

What specific linguistic choices or stylistic elements in the original Tamil text challenged you the most in translating it into English? Can you also talk about specific moments or passages in the book that were particularly rewarding or enjoyable to translate?

Devibharathi writes crisp and elegantly structured sentences whose meaning is always clear. However, something oblique is being conveyed by each sentence. As a translator, I had to make sure that my sentences carried the same evocative power and narrative heft.

It was particularly rewarding to translate the passage describing the rabbit hunt in Veeramalai, the segment on his childhood, including the hunting of birds on the bank of the canal, and the account of his misadventures when he goes looking for the library and post office during his third visit to the town of his childhood, because they are imbued with the same narrative heft in the way they are crafted. It was a challenge to get them right.

How do you see The Solitude of a Shadow fitting into the broader landscape of contemporary Tamil fiction? Does it represent a particular trend or break new ground in any way?

Nizhalin Thanimai, the original of The Solitude of a Shadow, was a landmark work in terms of theme and craft. In this country, our ethical imagination has remained embalmed for ages in the abstract paradigms of our epics. Given the extent of corruption, violence and cruelty in contemporary society, there is a crying need for our ethical imagination to address the complexities of the present through the medium of art. I see Devibharathi as one of the pioneers on that frontier. Aram (2011), B. Jeyamohan’s iconic collection of short stories, is another work that concerns itself with the same theme. In terms of craft, as the novelist Tanuj Solanki has remarked, ‘[the novel’s] deep focus on the mind of the revenge-seeker… makes one think of Dostoyevsky’, which is something new in the Indian literary landscape. Devibharathi has written three other novels in the last decade, which have also been well-received. I hope his work, both in the original Tamil and in translation, will inspire others towards new explorations and discoveries.

Did you collaborate with Devibharathi during the translation process? If so, how did this collaboration influence your choices and interpretations of the text? As a translator, you inevitably bring your own interpretations to the text. Were there any instances where your understanding of the novel differed from Devibharathi’s original intent; if yes, how did you reconcile these differences?

No. Normally, I take up fully realized texts of prose fiction and translate them. So far, none of them has required the author’s intervention or ‘collaboration’. The text contains all its possibilities within itself, including the author’s intention, my reading of it, and what meanings any reader may bring to it. I find it best to confine myself to the text.

In my experience, collaboration between the author and translator happens when the translator is not as deeply conversant as the author with the language and/or its literary tradition. Having engaged with Tamil and its modern literature over a lifetime, I haven’t felt the need for such collaboration. Of course, whenever I am puzzled by a sentence or passage, I might ask the author for a clarification, but nothing beyond that.

There’s often a tension between creating a translation that is literary and faithful to the original versus one that is more commercially appealing. How do you navigate this balance, especially with a novel like The Solitude of a Shadow, which is both literary and potentially engaging for a wider audience?

What makes a text both literary and appealing to a wider audience is a combination of two factors: literary quality of the original text and quality of the translation. Working with a given text, the translator can do nothing more than strive to produce a good translation. He cannot try to make a subpar text more appealing through his translation. By choosing the ‘right’ texts for translation, I try to make sure that both essential qualities are present in the completed work.

Are there any other Tamil authors or works that you are particularly excited about translating in the future? Is there a particular Tamil writer that you feel deserves more international recognition?

There are many, but I will restrict myself to two: Poomani, a writer of fiction, and Perundevi, a brilliant poet who also works in the genres micro-fiction and non-fiction (chiefly, essays on politics and culture). I would like to translate a collection of short stories by Poomani and his retelling of the Mahabharatham (in subaltern language) from the vantage of its women characters.

Perundevi is a poet of rare brilliance, whose poetry and fiction are imbued with the immediacy and fluidity of our age. My translation of a collection of her poems will be published next year. I look forward to translating more of her poetry and at least one collection of her micro-fiction.

I have no doubt that these works will be worthy additions to the corpus of literature translated from Indian languages. And yes, in my view, along with Devibharathi, both Poomani and Perundevi deserve national and international recognition.

Since you’ve also translated a lot of Tamil poetry into English, how is the process of translating a prose work different in terms of language, flow and craft?

Indeed, it is. Translating prose involves writing words and sentences, as in the original text. Construction of meaning happens in the same way. But with a poem, which involves a distillation of language, not only must one translate the lines but also condense the translated text in a poetic form, ensuring that it works as a poem in the target language. It involves all kinds of skills, including deep familiarity with a wide range of poetic voices in the target language. If the translation does not read like a poem, with the ineffable folded into its diction, rhythm and cadence, it’s not worth doing at all. As John Felstiner has said in Translating Neruda, ‘…Verse translation at its best generates a wholly new utterance in the second language — new, yet equivalent, of equal value.’

In recent years, we have seen a lot of translations from Indian languages into English. What do you think has led to the growing interest in works in Indian languages?

I have seen this genre grow from 5-6 titles every year to over a hundred now, year after year. I think of literature in Indian languages as emerging from real and coherent communities: their histories, aspirations and predicaments. It is perhaps one of the best ways for contemporary Indians across various language communities to get to know one another, to build solidarities and foster a sense of mutual accommodation. I can only guess that, somewhere, somehow, this genre must be addressing that need, and hence the growing interest.