'Translation is itself a kind of writing'

A chat with award-winning writer and translator Srinath Perur who tells him why translation is as much an art as it is a craft.

Bengaluru-based Srinath Perur is the acclaimed translator of Ghachar Ghochar, a Kannada novel by renowned writer Vivek Shanbhag. The book won the 2020 Sahitya Akademi award for English translation. He is also the translator of Girish Karnad’s memoirs, ‘This Life at Play’ published last year. As a travel and science writer who writes for various publications, Perur’s own work, If It’s Monday It Must Be Madurai, is a delightful travelogue about 10 conducted tours in India and abroad. DHoS spoke with him about the joys and perils of the difficult task of translation. Excerpts from an interview

A national award for your debut translation. What does it mean to you?

I was generally looking for a closer engagement with Kannada, and when Vivek Shanbhag, who had read some of my writing, asked if I wanted to try and translate Ghachar Ghochar into English, I thought I’d give it a shot. I was somewhat bemused by the award because Ghachar Ghochar came out in 2015, but it’s always nice when one’s work is appreciated. Since you need a good book to have a good translation, it’s also an acknowledgement of the Kannada original. And since good books emerge from literary cultures, it’s a useful reminder of the riches that exist in our languages.

What was the experience of translating Ghachar Ghochar and what were the challenges?

It was good fun. I wanted to produce an English text that was enjoyable to read, and Vivek was happy to give me the space to try and do that. My main challenge was finding a voice that would carry the book. I translated the first few pages repeatedly until I thought I had such a voice. After that, it was a smooth enough process.

You are also a writer. Is there a difference between the work of writing and translation?

Translation is itself a kind of writing. A lot of the craft and sensibility needed to write fiction applies to translating fiction too. In some ways, the simultaneous presence of two languages makes the mechanics of writing harder and it becomes easy to produce sentences that are warped by some sort of force field from the original. It takes effort, at least for me, to produce a translation that reads naturally, and I often struggle with this. But then, you (mostly) don’t have to make stuff up while translating, so it’s usually a more tractable activity.

Why hasn’t Kannada gained as much prominence as some Indian languages in translation circuits?

Translations into Indian languages other than English and between them have been happening for a long time and it’s a complex landscape that I can’t claim to understand well. Speaking of translations into English in India, maybe what gets published has to some extent been determined by where the people in publishing come from. And understandably so — how do you know what translations to commission without some sense of a book’s place in its culture? I think many things are changing now. People are buying more translations, authors are keen to have their books translated, new translators are emerging, and publishers are looking more widely. I think we’ll have a more even representation of Indian languages soon.

Is there any work in Kannada that you would like to see translated or like to translate?

I’ve recently been thinking of two of Poornachandra Tejaswi’s novels, Carvalho and Chidambara Rahasya. Written in the 1980s, they’ve been hugely popular in Kannada and seem particularly powerful now with the climate crisis properly upon us. Both novels have the natural world — beautiful, mysterious, deeply interconnected — as their backdrop as well as a kind of protagonist. People try to control this natural world but their attempts are short-sighted and blundering with occasionally tragic consequences. For all that, these are fast-paced and funny books. At least one of them has been translated into English, though it doesn’t seem to be easily available. I’d love to see them both read more widely.

Some say translations can never be faithful to the original. Certain dialects and idioms cannot be translated into English. Comment?

Even the original text is not faithful to the original text. As in, something can always be read in multiple ways. A translator’s way is just one of them. There’s no escaping the fact that a translation is the product of both the author’s and the translator’s sensibilities.

One of my favourite translators is Anthea Bell, who (along with Derek Hockridge) translated the Asterix comics from French to English. She had to deal with puns and cultural references that would make no sense in English, so she made up different ones that fit the panels. In many cases, her solutions to the problem of untranslatability produced something richer than the original. It’s never as simple as ‘lost in translation’. The target language has its own possibilities too.