Srinath Perur interview: Translation is my way to get closer to Kannada

“I thought it would be interesting to try translation. It was my way to get closer to Kannada,” he says. Perur had not read much of Kannada literature until then, having spent his younger days diving into PG Wodehouse, learning about the “pleasure that words can give”, getting a glimpse that life can be complex from Graham Greene novels, and that “literature and writing are ways of engaging with that complexity”. Perur read RK Narayan, too, who made it clear to him that the world around him can be written about in English.

It helped that Perur had published his own works by then — a travelogue, If it’s Monday, it Must be Madurai: A Conducted Tour of India (2013), and even his own fiction in the form of a short story (‘Accidents of Fate,’ about a road encounter in Bengaluru). For, Perur says, to come up with a translation that reads more like an original novel, it all boils down to the craft of writing. “The sentences or words in Kannada will not be mirrored directly, I have to convey meaning, mood, feeling and tone. It’s a matter of technique and putting in time and a lot of effort,” he says. There’s the matter of “sensibility” as well that one acquires through years of reading and writing.

It’s like how Angela Rodel, whose translation of Time Shelter won the 2023 International Booker Prize, describes it: ‘Translators don’t play second fiddle to authors, it’s more like a duet.’ Perur had to “internalise” Vivek’s typical style of writing, which is extremely “spare”. In his writing, the masterful storyteller gives few details to convey something, even as he is communicating other things going on at a parallel level.

Ghachar Ghochar’s huge commercial success made it a game-changer when it hit book-shelves in 2015 by opening readers to the delight of translated works of regional writers. It is not that translations of Indian writers were not happening already. To give an example, back in 2007, the success of Arunava Sinha’s translation of Bengali writer Sankar’s Chowringhee set in a hotel in Calcutta of the 50s, and Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman in 2010, had created ripples. Though, much before that, organisations such as Sahitya Akademi, Katha Trust and individual translators, moved solely by passion, had been publishing a steady stream of translations from different regions of the country.

Sakina’s Kiss

In 2021, Shanbhag published his Kannada novel, Sakinala Muttu, centred on a middle-aged male narrator, who receives a few ‘knocks’ in a span of four days, involving his wife and daughter, even as old skeletons tumble out of closets. Perur, who liked the way Shanbhag had tackled the ‘gender’ situation in the book — ‘most naturally’ — was the most natural choice to translate the book. Unlike some translators who tend to read the original a couple of times, Perur re-read it once more as he translated. It helped that Shanbag was part of the process, after Perur had completed the first draft in six months. And, the voice of the protagonist Venkat slowly took on a firmer shape during their discussions.

“It took another two years of editing it in association with our agents and editor at Penguin,” points out Srinath. Did Perur face any particular challenge while translating the book? Did he ever feel at any point that he was ‘taking a stroll near a dormant volcano?’ (a line from Sakina’s Kiss).

Since the issue of gender played a big role in the novel, Perur admits that he tussled with the Kannada word — gandasu, which means man. But it is not just a mere man but an intensely masculine one, like the Hindi word mard. “English does not have an equivalent word and I tried hard for a while to translate the word and then gave up,” shares Perur, who then tried to bring in that context somehow.

The high point of writing Sakina’s Kiss was a funny scene in Chapter 8. But Perur is loathe to give away the plot and is willing to only say that he had to enact the entire scene in his head before writing it and had great fun translating that portion.

The world of translations: In a state of flux

The world of translation in India seems to be in a state of flux. There’s a lot going on, which is difficult to unpack. It’s not just contemporary Indian writers who get translated, protest poems in Punjabi, compilations of best of Kashmiri stories, Tamil pulp fiction, Telugu thrillers in English and translations of classics like Dharamvir Bharati’s 1949 Gunahon Ka Devta in English jostle for space on the shelves in bookstores. 

Readers are rummaging not just for translated English versions of international writers like Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan books or Japanese crime fiction but for works by desi writers too. Perur agrees that it's an interesting time. “But it is too early to say where this is headed,” he says. But what he finds more exciting is the translations between regional languages.

“We’ve always had a long history of people skilled in multiple languages doing literary translations of great works. Particularly interesting to me are excellent Kannada translations of Tagore books in Bengali. No doubt translations in English have increased in the past 10 to 15 years. At Sakina’s Kiss public events, I’ve had many people introducing themselves as translators to me, which was not the case when even Ghachar Ghochar came out in 2015,” he says.

People drawn to translations

Besides filling up that “acute feeling” of the absence of rootedness that Perur talks about, replying to why readers are drawn to translations, he says, “Different languages have a different way of looking at the world — a good translation can help us occupy that slightly altered world for some time and makes the experience worthwhile.”

On whether they can help to bridge gaps in a divisive society, he says: “There are two factors at play here — there is recognition of sameness in one part of the country a reader sees something in common with them, while it also gives an understanding of the difference between them. Both these factors help in making us accessible to each other.”

Translating non-fiction

Perur has translated three books so far. It is one of the things he does (his last article for National Geographic was interviewing researchers working on Asian Elephants). “Who knows if I will do more translations or not,” he says, unwilling to be pigeonholed only as a translator.

His second translation, This Life at Play: Memoirs (HarperCollins, 2021) was the autobiography of the late legendary playwright, author, actor Girish Karnad. That too fell on his lap when an ailing Karnad called him to help him translate his autobiography in Kannada. But Karnad died soon after and the project came to him.

Translating non-fiction is a different kettle of fish. “We are writing about real people and the real world. There is always some amount of ambiguity when you use one word in Kannada for it can map to several words in English,” he points out. Citing an example, he says, Girish, who played a big role in cult film Samskara, extensively describes the shooting location in his memoir.

“I could not get the accurate words in English. So, I ended up watching the film, the documentary on the making of the film, besides reading the novel Samskara and Kannada text of the autobiography to be able to describe the location accurately,” he explains.

This is not a problem in fiction. Some amount of slippage is allowed while making up a world as long as the sense is conveyed, says Perur. “I have no idea what the author had in his mind when he describes architectural details like a room in a story. I can imagine and provide a slightly different room but it will still work. You cannot do that in non-fiction,” says Perur.

Like most of us, Perur read books like Russian literature and Asterix comics during his childhood without being conscious that they were translations. “In the last ten to 20 years, I have become conscious of translated works. My friend N. Kalyan Raman, a prolific translator of books from Tamil to English, gave me the confidence to get into translation,” says Perur. Raman has been translating Tamil fiction and poetry into English for the last two decades. One that made it to the shortlist of the JCB Prize of literature was Perumal Murugan’s Poonachi: Or The Story Of A Black Goat (Context, 2016).

Incidentally, Perur is the chair of the jury of this year’s JCB Prize for Literature. According to him, the JCB is among the few in India that read translations, alongside books written originally in English, and the prize rules also encourage publishers to submit translations. “And there’s a wealth of material in our language that’s still relatively fresh in English. It’s hardly surprising that translations have done well — this year, four of the 10 books on the JCB longlist are translations,” he says. For three years in a row, translated books have been winning the coveted ₹25 lakh prize, bringing translated works under the radar of readers. This is just the beginning, it seems.