Indian writer and translator Meena Kandasamy has always been interested in intimate human relations and historical lesions caused by caste, gender, and ethnic oppressions. She explores these topics in her poetry and prose with equal power and precision, most notably in her books of poems such as Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010), as well as her three novels, The Gypsy Goddess (2014), When I Hit You (2017), and Exquisite Cadavers (2019). Activism is at the heart of her literary work; she has translated several political texts from Tamil to English, and previously held an editorial role at The Dalit, an alternative magazine documenting caste-related brutality and the anti-caste resistance in India.
After translating political speeches, philosophical texts, and feminist poetry for many years, Kandasamy recently translated a novel for the first time. The novel, Salma’s Manaamiyangal (2016), translated by Kandasamy as Women Dreaming (2020), is a multigenerational narrative set in rural Tamil Nadu. Its opening thrusts readers into a woman’s nightmare, and the narrative goes on to explore the desires of a group of Muslim women and their intersecting lives. While delving into the women’s yearning for freedom, education, and dignity, Salma’s novel also unearths man’s enormous will to control by means of religious extremism, laws, and domestic restrictions. Like Kandasamy’s own novels, Women Dreaming defies the traditions of social realist fiction; if we hope for the novel to “acquaint us with characters” or offer “access to their feelings,” we will be frustrated. But Salma’s aesthetic project is a political one—the novel’s paratactic arrangement of short chapters and shifting perspectives convey the collective and interchangeable experiences of women who dream in the face of extreme adversities.
I recently corresponded with Kandasamy by email. Our conversation touched on her career as writer-translator, literary craft, and the stakes of translation.
—Torsa Ghosal
Torsa Ghosal (TG): You started translating nearly twenty years ago, beginning with the works of Tamil politician Thol. Thirumavalavan. You’ve called translation and writing “twin activities,” though you note that other people—I imagine critics, readers, publishers—saw your background in translation as an impediment to your writing career. In the last twenty years, you have written and published several books, including When I Hit You, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. As you return to translation today, do you find cultural attitudes towards it have changed? Is there more scope for translation now than there was twenty years ago?
Meena Kandasamy (MK): Definitely. I think books of translation are now treated almost on par with books originally written in English, and translators and authors are continuing the fight to get their due. I do not think the landscape was so receptive twenty years ago—political translations from left-leaning marginalized groups would be seen as a curiosity alone and not something worthy of serious reception, engagement, discussion. This change is not an attitudinal change—it is a historical necessity if we want to prevent literature and the public sphere from becoming an echo chamber of posh English-speaking elites.
TG: Do you consider the sidelining of translation within the Indian literary sphere as related to the fraught nationalist project of marginalising the voices of certain communities? I’m thinking of your comment that you “see India as a prison house of nationalities,” given that ‘India’ was constructed for British administrative purposes.
MK: The project of sidelining is not so simple with a clear-cut manifesto: let us sideline all regional languages. Voices in the Indian languages that maintain caste supremacy and Brahminical hegemony have always been translated and rendered into English—in fact, they (dangerously) become the only voices which are heard from these regional languages. This is directly connected to preserving Brahminical hegemony, and because the Indian nationalist project was in many ways only a takeover of the British administrative construct of India and a resultant consolidation of caste-class supremacy at a broader level, we find this gatekeeping rampant in the Indian literary sphere. But that’s only one way of looking at translations, and only looking at translations into the English. Militant, anti-caste thought and revolutionary content has travelled across languages without being hindered by these oppressive gatekeepers; I am thinking of Periyar’s translation and publication of the Communist Manifesto into Tamil, and of him introducing the work of Dr. Ambedkar to Tamil readers.
TG: Can you tell us about your process of translating Women Dreaming? What were some of the most surprising or challenging aspects of the novel to translate?
MK: When I was translating Women Dreaming, I was between countries, having moved to New York from London, then back to London again, and I was pregnant with my second child. I was doing too many things all at once. The fact that the book was made of really short chapters helped me a great deal—I could do one chapter at a time. I translated that book entirely by hand, and that helped me because when I later sat down to type it all out, I could make sure the tone of the book remained constant and consistent.
On the one hand, it is a fairly easy book to translate—the language is simple and lucid; the dialogues and interior monologues are straightforward. On the other hand, the Tamil original is situated in a southern Tamil Muslim village, and everything—the way one addresses parents, grandparents, aunts; the way common food items are referred to; the way the time of day or festivals are mentioned—all of this is very specific to that micro-universe. Thankfully for me, Salma was always at hand to help, responding to me within minutes on WhatsApp.
TG: Women Dreaming is polyphonic, given that it dwells on the plurality of women’s desires, but I hesitate to use the term “polyphony.” It connotes sound and speech, when the most striking feature of Salma’s writing for me was the amount of space she devotes to unuttered, unacted upon thoughts. The sheer multiplicity of perspectives contained in her book may come across as radical to readers whose understanding of narrative follows from Anglophone writings in the West, mostly plot-driven fictions or novels driven by one or two characters. Can you talk a bit about Salma’s aesthetic choices in Women Dreaming? What literary traditions you place her within?
MK: I think the aesthetic choices of Women Dreaming are political choices as well. Lives in India—especially women’s lives—are entangled, enmeshed with each other; the western-style one-two people plot would not do any justice to these layered stories. The reception of Salma’s poetry often places her within the contemporary Tamil feminist canon—the intimacy, the portrayal of female desire, the rejection of patriarchal control—but where her fiction is concerned, Salma has carved a niche for herself; it would be reductive to compare her work and the space she holds with anyone else. We are allowed precious access into the interior world of Tamil Muslim women’s lives through her work.
TG: You leave certain words in the novel untranslated. For instance, the word “kulichiya” baffles one of the main characters, Subaida, and as she tries to understand its meaning, so does the reader. How do you come to the decision of leaving particular expressions untranslated? Can a translator weaponize untranslability for specific ends?
MK: Subaida doesn’t understand the word “kulichiya” in context; she understands it literally and makes a fool of herself. It made a lot of sense to allow the reader to travel with her, for them to be baffled when the implied meaning revealed itself. It brought out her naivete, even as it revealed what was actually wrong with her marriage. I don’t believe in untranslatability as weaponization—I believe in it as a fact of life. Even when two people speak the same language, and are as intimate as intimate can be, we are often misled, translating the other’s content, and missing out on the intent.
TG: You’ve translated a breadth of genres. Prior to translating Salma’s novel, you edited and translated a book of poems which included her work. You’ve also translated political texts by Thanthai Periyar and the aforementioned Thol. Thirumavalavan. What do you look for in a text when you decide to translate it, not only in terms of authors or subjects, but also form? Does your approach to translation vary across genre?
MK: Beyond the author and subject—which are tied up to the politics that they represent—I also look for originality and accessibility. As a translator, you don’t want to reduplicate a work if that sort of work already exists in English. You also don’t want a text to which readers cannot relate. In terms of varying approaches to translation, it’s a bit like writing: one constructs an essay differently than a novel, a poem differently than an op-ed. The same applies to translations—you translate a novel very differently than you would a collection of speeches.
TG: You say that you’ve become “a writer who has at the same time to theorize what she is writing.” I think the self-reflexive styles of your novels like The Gypsy Goddess and Exquisite Cadavers beautifully link theory with practice, interrogating the positions from which theories are written and narratives are constructed. How does the imperative to theorize what you practice materialize in your translations? I understand that you are deeply conscious of not overwhelming or undermining the voice of the author you translate. Even so, to what extent can the translator’s style and approach remain invisible?
MK: Of course, I believe that the translator does not exist to override the author’s voice or rob them of their individuality. However, the translator does have the responsibility to contextualize the work of the author, whom they are introducing to a new audience—and this is not an activity that requires invisibility. In terms of political translations, it is an inevitable necessity to stand up and say why this work is being undertaken, how it speaks to the present times, and why the work—and the ideas within it—require a wider audience, wider implementation. In that sense you are more than a translator—you become a fervent campaigner. The issue at hand isn’t about visibility or invisibility but rather making a political text transparent—providing sociopolitical and historical context, even providing annotations. Some of the political texts I translated, like those by Thirumavalavan or Periyar, will stand as historical chronicles of the political struggles of their times—and a translator cannot remain a shy wordsmith alone.
TG: Do you think the idea of the translator as a kind of “silent medium” risks obscuring her labor? Have you ever wanted to practice more experimental forms of translation in which the translator inserts herself as commentator, approaches translation quite explicitly as opportunity for invention and addition?
MK: I don’t buy into the silent medium theory at all. I think there’s a lot of nuance and distinction between this idea—i.e. don’t write a fresh text, just translate—and doing everything as a translator to make sure that the text is accessible, understood, situated in context. And all of this labor—the introductions and annotations—are credited to the translator. We do not have to glorify self-effacement. These places, where the translator is explicitly adding to the text, may not be within the body of the text, but around it.
Meena’s photo credit: Varun Vasudevan
Meena Kandasamy is a poet, novelist, and anti-caste activist. She has translated the writings and speeches of Tamil leader Dr. Thol. Thirumavalavan (Uproot Hindutva, 2004) and the radical anti-caste ideologue Periyar EV Ramasamy. Her debut novel The Gypsy Goddess fictionalised the Kilvenmani massacre of 1968, highlighting Dalit militancy. Her novel, When I Hit You, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2018). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Guernica and The White Review, among other places. She is a recipient of PEN Translates award for Tamil writer Salma’s novel, Women, Dreaming (Titled Axis Press, 2020).
Torsa Ghosal is the author of an experimental novella, Open Couplets, and a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First Century Narrative. Her short fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Necessary Fiction, Literary Hub, Catapult, Bustle, and elsewhere. Her flash fiction has been nominated for Best of the Net. A writer and professor of English based in California, Torsa grew up in Bengal, India.
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